News

The cAos Foundation will have a booth at Linux World Expo in San Francisco, California August 9th through the 11th. We are in the Dot-Org pavilion in booth 2042 and we will be demoing cAos Linux 2 and Linux Clustering using Warewulf. Please stop by the booth and say hello to the Volunteers that are hosting the booth.

cPanel is a web-based system control panel application which allows one to maintain most aspects of their system with a web browser. It is designed for the end users of your system and allows them to control everything from adding / removing email accounts to administering MySQL databases. And Now, cPanel is available for cAos Linux!
www.cpanel.net

The cAos Foundation and the cAos Linux development team are proud to announce the public release of cAos Linux version 2. This version is scheduled to be maintained for the next 3-5 years and also offer updated packages when possible. cAos Linux is a general purpose Linux distribution that is lightweight, scalable and fast. It is suitable for not only high performance servers and workstations, but also older more challenged hardware. Please read the full announcement at: http://lists.caosity.org/pipermail/caos/2005-May/001851.html

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.