Fedora and Red Hat: New F30 Builds, Flock Report, Servers and Package Management Domain Model

• Ben Williams: F30-20190818 updated isos released.

  The Fedora Respins SIG is pleased to announce the latest release of Updated F30-20190816 Live ISOs, carrying the 5.2.8-200 kernel. This set of updated isos will save considerable amounts of updates after install. ((for new installs.)(New installs of Workstation have 1.2GB of updates)). A huge thank you goes out to irc nicks dowdle, satellite,Southern-Gentlem for testing these iso.

• Flock to Fedora 2019 Conference report

  Last week I attended “Flock to Fedora” conference in Budapest, Hungary. It was a Fedora contributors conference where I met some developers, project leaders, GSoC interns. Below is a brief report of my attendance.

• What salary can a sysadmin expect to earn?

  The path to reliable salary data sometimes is sometimes paved with frustration. That’s because the honest answer to a reasonable question—what should I be paid for this job?—is usually: "It depends." Location, experience, skill set, industry, and other factors all impact someone’s actual compensation. For example, there’s rarely a single, agreed-upon salary for a particular job title or role. All of the above applies to system administrators. It’s a common, long-established IT job that spans many industries, company sizes, and other variables. While sysadmins may share some common fundamentals, it’s certainly not a one-size-fits-all position, and it’s all the truer as some sysadmin roles evolve to take on cloud, DevOps, and other responsibilities. What salary can you expect to earn as a sysadmin? Yeah, it depends. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t get a clear picture of what sysadmin compensation looks like, including specific numbers. This is information worth having handy if you’re a sysadmin on the job market or seeking a promotion. Let’s start with some good news from a compensation standpoint. Sysadmins—like other IT pros these days—are in demand. "In today’s business environment, companies are innovating and moving faster than ever before, and they need systems that can keep up with the pace of their projects and communications, as well as help everything run smoothly," says Robert Sutton, district president for the recruiting firm Robert Half Technology. "That’s why systems administrators are among the IT professionals who can expect to see a growing salary over the next year or so."

• Run Mixed IT Efficiently, The Adient – SUSE Way.

  When you have multiple distributions, such as Red Hat and SUSE, you can reduce administration complexity and save administration time and resources with a common management tool. Adient had applications running on both SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Adient deployed SUSE Manager to manage their Mixed IT environment involving both distributions.

• Package Management Domain Model

  When I wrote this model, we were trying to unify a few different sorts of packages. Coming from SpaceWalk, part of the team was used to wokring on RPMS with the RPM Database for storage, and Yum as the mechanism for fetching them. The other part of the team was coming from the JBoss side, working with JAR, WAR, EAR and associated files, and the Ivy or Maven building and fetching the files. We were working within the context of the Red Hat Network (as it was then called) for delivering content to subscribers. Thus, we had the concept of Errata, Channels, and Entitlements which are somewhat different from what other organizations call these things, but the concepts should be general enough to cover a range of systems. There are many gaps in this diagram. It does not discuss the building of packages, nor the relationship between source and binary packages. It also does not provide a way to distinguish between the package storage system and the package fetch mechanism. But the bones are solid. I’ve used this diagram for a few years, and it is useful.

Review: AcademiX GNU/Linux 2.2

What sets AcademiX apart from other distributions is the EDU software manager. This package manager provides curated lists of educational software, which are grouped by subject and by age range. This package manager makes finding educational software really easy. There is software for astronomy, biology, geography, foreign languages, and many other subjects. While there are gaps in the availability of applications covering various subjects, that is a gap in the broader open source application ecosystem, not something specific to AcademiX. While some of the rough edges I noted with the installation process and the desktop customization make me a hesitant to recommend AcademiX to new Linux users, Educational Technology professionals should perhaps try out AcademiX just to use the EDU package manager to explore various open source applications. While installing and updating software was easy and basically the same experience as any other modern, Debian-based distribution, the fact that some of the packages come from servers in Romania means that some package downloads can be much slower than downloading from the world-wide network of Debian mirrors. For individual packages and small collections of packages this is not too noticeable, but it is still an issue. The frustrating part is the fact that the speeds are not consistent. Sometimes I was downloading at only 40kbps, but other times it was much faster. I experienced the same issue when trying to download the ISO. One download took about 20 minutes for the 1.7GB image but some other attempts took 4 hours. Final thoughts AcademiX GNU/Linux is an interesting distribution, but it has some rough edges that need to be cleaned up. Honestly, I really, really wanted to like this distribution (good distributions aimed at the educational market are always needed), but found it to be merely okay. AcademiX has a lot of potential, but it is just not there yet. DebianEdu/Skolelinux is far more polished while serving almost the exact same niche. However, if the AcademiX team cleans up some of the issues I noted above, especially the installer issues, I think future versions of AcademiX might turn out to be worthwhile. The EDU software installer is well organized and aids in discovering educational software, so that is one solid advantage AcademiX offers, but overall the distribution needs more work and polish before I could move it from "this distribution is okay" to "you should give this distribution a try".

Security: ECB, Bluetooth and AppArmor Crash Course

• ECB server hacked – Data disclosure of the European Central Bank – Bank hacks from Mexico to Bangladesh

  The Europeans probably do not even know about „what is going on“ and according to ex finance minister of Greece – finance ministers do not have a lot to say in the ECB – the IMF has – there are no recordings of the meetings of „The Eurogroup“ – so transparency over decision making processes is rather bad. After all just like the (more or less ideal) „big brother“ the FED it is not under direct democratic influence – does what it wants – every word the FED CEO says is analyzed and influences financial market decisions. „One of the sites of the European Central Bank (ECB) has been hacked. The attackers gained access to sensitive users ‚ information, however, the internal system of the Bank has not been compromised.

• Specification vulnerability in devices that speak Bluetooth is addressed

  The discovery of a flaw in Bluetooth specification that could enable an attack to spy on your information made news this week; the attacker could be able to weaken the encryption of Bluetooth devices and snoop on communications or send falsified ones to take over a device, said The Verge.

• FrOSCon 2019 - openSUSE booth & AppArmor Crash Course

  Last weekend, I was at FrOSCon - a great Open Source conference in Sankt Augustin, Germany. We (Sarah, Marcel and I) ran the openSUSE booth, answered lots of questions about openSUSE and gave the visitors some goodies - serious and funny (hi OBS team!) stickers, openSUSE hats, backpacks and magazines featuring openSUSE Leap. We also had a big plush geeko, but instead of doing a boring raffle, we played openSUSE Jeopardy where the candidates had to ask the right questions about Linux and openSUSE for the answers I provided.