News

1 Executive Summary

The cAos project, and the CentOS project are being separated into two trees; Changes which facilitate DNS and mirror master administration process for easier load management are already complete.

2 Announcement

In the past two years, the concept of truly community based, locally rebuildable distributions, packaged with full sources and build specifications released using the tool RPM and maintained by YUM, has been adopted and taken off. Recently the cAos-1 and CentOS distributions have become stable, reliable and very usable, and so attracted user communities.

The wide adoption of the more recent CentOS ‘point’ releases has strained the mirror structure, in managing transfer load, in back-end administration of synchronization, in stale mirror element management, and in other ways. With the impending release into general distribution of the final cAos-2 the need for some rework has been clear, and for the several weeks, an ad hoc team has gathered to plan for growth.

With the new domains in effect, Mailing lists, websites and site management and bug reporting methods will be separated.

3 Action required

Explicit instruction for End Users, and Mirror Administrators will be posted to the appropriate Mailing Lists, and on the project websites. Please see either www.caosity.org or www.centos.org in advance of cut-overs; problems reported in Bugzilla, to the mailing lists, or in IRC will be addressed. If you are not subscribed to the cAos or CentOS mailing lists, this would be a good time to do so.

3.1 End Users

The root domain for your ‘yum’ updates in your /etc/yum.conf files may need to be adjusted to reflect mirror.{caosity|centos}.org, and the directory path will likely change, as an intermediate directory is grafted in.

3.2 Mirror Administrators

The rsync configuration of your mirror will probably need to be twinned into two processes, one for each project, pointing to the top of the new directory structure.

4 DNS, Mirrors changes

DNS and mirror structures and mirroring processes will need to be adjusted:

4.1 DNS

The separate dns structures are in place; all CentOS sites will be referenced as .centos.org and cAos sites as .caosity.org. No direct external user action is required.

4.2 Mirror layout and rsync changes

Hardlinks will be used to facilitate splitting mirrors into two separate trees, and subsequently each tree will be mirrored by a separate RSYNC process: ::CentOS and ::cAosity

The current ::cAos will continue to function unchanged until all mirrors are synced to the new trees.

4.2.1 Public Mirrors

Mirror administrators will be contacted individually to ensure that they are aware of the required changes.

4.2.2 Private and Site mirrors

Users with site local private sub-mirrors (largely this is Developers and large corporate users) will need to consider their local setup, and Change Control requirements, and to manually update their yum.conf setups.

5 Acknowledgments

Many volunteers toil in the background to help projects like these grow and remain reliable, secure and available. We wish to recognize the contribution and comment from several members of the community and of the transition planning team members who participated in IRC and back-end administrative brainstorming and planning, including: Donavan Nelson, Michael Jennings, John Newbiggin, Maarten Stolte, Rick Graves, Denis Pilon, Karanbir Singh, Dag Wieers, David Parsley, Jacob Wilkins, Johnny Hughes and more. Some may be surprised to find them-self listed, but each has been a valued sounding board or contributor.

Please direct requests for authoritative clarification to any of the project leads for going forward, or for this transition:

• gmk –AT– runlevelzero.net – cAos,
• lance –AT– centos.org – CentOS, or
• herrold –AT– owlriver.com – either project

-Greg Kurtzer, Lance Davis, Russ Herrold

A tragic event took place in the life of Jason Dale “Rocky” McGaugh. His contributions to the Foundation were instrumental in making Centos what it is today. On behalf of the developers and other contributors of the cAos Foundation, we will sorely miss him and wish the best for his surviving loved ones.

If you would like to send condolences to his family, please do so here.

Thanks to the many users and organizations that have contributed to the Foundation. We have been able to recover the costs that were incurred due to our bandwidth overutilizations and some previous debts of the Foundation.

However, please keep in mind that donations are our primary resource at this point for covering the costs associated with running the Foundation, infrastructure and development. So even though we are out of the immediate need for money, we are still very appreciative of the donations we recieve, and will continue to count on them for our long term success.

We are also evaluating other financial models (ie. Corporate partnerships, and sponsorship of development efforts). These are still being designed, but remember to check out the Contributing pages of the site.

Thank you for your interest and of course donations! 🙂

It turns out that the release of Centos-3.3 was so popular, that it threw us way over the threshold of our ISP’s, and now we are stuck with a _very_ large bill (as in an estimated 6TB of transfers). While in one hand I am ecstatic that we are so successful, but on the other hand, that is coming out of the developers pockets. The developers should be the last ones footing these bills (and this one was very large).

You can help. Please consider a donation for each of the systems that you are using. A reasonable donation we think starts at $12US per system per year.

That money is only spent on infrastructure and development. $12 is much cheaper then a magazine subscription, and if everyone contributes their share, we will be able to grow our infrastructure to better handle our growing user base, and continue to provide software to the community.

Please visit http://www.caosity.org/contributing/ to do your part.

After many complaints about our old site, the new site has finally been launched!!! There are still many features that this site will offer which are being integrated now (ie. forums, FAQ engine, etc…). If for some crazy reasons, you need to jump back to the old site, you can find it at: http://wwwold.caosity.org/