Phase 0

wiki page

Meeting page

Meeting page

Do you know openSUSE’s MirrorBrain?  I have been working on it for over a year now. It is a mirror framework which is open source and can be used by anyone.

The other day, I received the following sentiment:

I fully appreciate your work. In my view openSUSE has the best managed download mirroring in place! Only few come close!

It was the admin of one our our mirrors who wrote this. A large one, which does mirror more than 100 projects other than openSUSE.

It is nice to see (and important for us) if mirror admins are happy. Mirrors are crucial to get openSUSE out to you. Without mirrors, we are nothing. Our little download server could not serve you on its own. download.opensuse.org receives 15.000.000 to 40.000.000 requests on a normal day. But together with the friendly organizations that mirror us, we have been serving at least 25-30 gigabytes per second (!) to you at peak times.

A lot happens behind the scene to make sure that openSUSE is continuously and easily available. If you never actually notice anything about it, then it only means we are doing well!

For instance, I am always searching new mirrors. One of the biggest recent achievements was that Coly Li, our Chinese friend, installed the first “real openSUSE” mirror in China: http://www.lizardsource.cn/. In China mainland, there are already several sites that mirror opensuse, now lizardsource.cn is the first opensuse specific mirror and the largest openSUSE mirror so far.

When talking to Coly about the situation in China, he provided the following insight:
(explanatory comment: GFW refers to the censorship system, nicknamed Great Firewall of China)

Our motivation is:

1) international internet connection is slow from China mainland, no matter GFW exists
2) Most of universities and institutes use CERNET, they can not connect to international internet directly.
3) South China and North China use different public internet networks, inter-connections is very slow.

There are several opensuse mirrors in China already, but they are 1) limited to a small group of people, or 2) slow for non-charge users, or 3) out of maintenance.

lizardsource.cn can be accessed from both universities, institutes, south China, north China. The download speed within China mainland is much faster, people from universities observed 200KBytes persec. That’s the advantage and importance of lizardsource.cn.

Some other mirrors I could acquire last month (good ones) were in Nicaragua, South Africa, Indonesia, Poland, Latvia and other countries.

On the more invisible side, last week I have extended the mirror framework so that it can run in multiple instances on one machine; this may open up some interesting applications later, because we could run a separate redirector for separate file trees, with a different set of mirrors.

Gerard Fàrras, one of our GSoC students, is working on incorporation of a metalink client into YaST/zypper. Once that is implemented, it will make our package installer much much more robust against all sorts of network issues. A working prototype exists!

Currently, I am researching on a somewhat complicated idea to achieve a more fine-grained mirror selection scheme. More on that later maybe.

The outdated wiki pages that list mirrors need to be replaced by real-time lists generated from the mirror database. I don’t know when I/we get around to do this. If anyone would like to hack on a web frontend for the mirror database (I am picturing a TurboGears app that integrates with the existing Python mirror toolbox), contribution would be most welcome; let me know if you are interested!

See http://mirrorbrain.org for more info about the framework we use. Info for site operators interested in mirroring us is to be found here.

    Issue #36 of openSUSE Weekly News is now out!
In this week’s issue:

• Hack Week III
• openSUSE Election Committee Founded
• openSUSE at Utah Open Source Conference
• T&T: Accelerate your build speed with Icecream
• linux.com: A video tour of openSUSE 11 (with KDE 4 desktop)

See the openSUSE Project at the Utah Open Source Conference this week!

The Utah Open Source Conference is going on August 28 through August 30 at the Salt Lake Community College. The openSUSE Project will be hosting a table to show off the latest and greatest in openSUSE, and Novell and openSUSE also will have several speakers/talks on the agenda including:

• Aaron Bockover: Banshee Media Player
• Brian Merrel, Sanford Armstrong: Linux accessibility efforts at Novell
• Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier: How to bootstrap a community
• Andrew Jorgensen: openSUSE Build Service

As part of Hack Week, we’ll also have a room set aside for Hack Week III participants, so you can watch the hacking in real time.

The schedule runs from 8:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. local time Thursday and Friday, and from 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. on Saturday. See the full schedule on the UTOSC Web site: http://2008.utosc.com/speaker/schedule/, and the events and activities here: http://2008.utosc.com/pages/events/.

We’re also looking for more volunteers for the openSUSE booth at the show. Please contact Zonker if you’re interested.

Hi all Education fans!

The next openSUSE-Education meeting will take place at the official #opensuse-edu IRC channel on freenode  (irc://irc.freenode.net/opensuse-edu) on Tuesday

2008/09/02  17:00 UTC/GMT

This meeting is meant to discuss the latest developments in and around openSUSE-Education. Please add your topics to the meeting wiki page at:

http://en.opensuse.org/Education/Meetings/Education_Meeting_2008-09-02

Also, if you cannot attend the meeting, but have questions you want to see discussed, please add them to the meeting wiki page as well.

For general info about our IRC meetings read:

http://en.opensuse.org/Meetings/About
http://en.opensuse.org/Education/Meetings

For a general technical introduction to IRC (Internet Relay Chat) see http://www.irchelp.org/ ;(not affiliated with openSUSE) or enter “IRC help” into your preferred search engine.

The network we use is freenode – for more information on this, including how to find a server, visit http://freenode.net/ ;(not affiliated with openSUSE either).

Have a lot of fun …

Lars (on behalf of the openSUSE-Education Team)

We now have founded an openSUSE Election Committee consisting of:

• Claes Backstrom (Community)
• Andrew Wafaa (Community)
• Marko Jung (Novell)
• Vincent Untz (Novell, deputy)

The openSUSE election committee will organize and oversee the first openSUSE Board election, the board has authorized it to decide any open questions on the elections. Members of the committee have agreed to refrain from standing for the election to ensure a fair and impartial process.

The openSUSE board consists of four selected members (two Novell employees, two non-Novell employees) and the Novell appointed chairperson.

For details of the Board election, see http://en.opensuse.org/Board_Election/2008.

The Election Committee will soon write their own announcements about the elections.  You can reach them via election-officials@opensuse.org.

If you like to vote for the new board, please apply as member, details are available in the wiki.

On behalf of the current board, I’d like to thank the committee members for stepping up and look forward to a good election,

Andreas

Homepage

Issue #35 of openSUSE Weekly News is now out!

In this week’s issue:

• openSUSE 11.1 Alpha2 is available
• Hack Week III is almost here!
• openSUSE to add SELinux Basic Enablement in 11.1
• Masim Sugianto: Linux Distribution Popularity Across the Globe