In the last 45 days, Vault.centos.org's 2 public facing machines delivered just under 66 TiB of data. So while we try and spread this load a bit ( its growing at 25 - 35% month on month ), we've had to make a few changes.

Firstly, isos are no longer directly downloadable from vault.centos.org, you will need to go the torrent route if you want older, deprecated release isos

Secondly, we've turned off multi range requests ( httpd will still accept upto 5 range's, and then block after that )

Over the next few days, we are going to recycle some of the larger disk mirror.centos.org nodes into vault.centos.org; If someone wants to contribute to this effort, please come find us on irc.freenode.net in channel #centos-devel or #centos-mirror or tweet us @centos or email us the address mentioned at http://wiki.centos.org/Donate - but keep in mind that need machines with more than 1 TiB of usable space, and more than 300mbps of network capacity, and since we will consume that bandwidth high density hosting facilities with high contention on the links wont work.

- KB

The first ever CentOS Dojo, a one day training and socalising day dedicated to CentOS and how people use it, will be held at Antwerp, Belgium on the 8th of Apr.

You can see the great speaker lineup on the events page at : http://wiki.centos.org/Events/Dojo/Antwerp2013 - we have tried to cover all the major conversation areas around CentOS these days. Ranging from provisioning, management, app deployments, system and virtualisation tuning, virtual infrastructure and more.

Its going to be a great day, register up, and see you all there. And remember, there is an exclusive CentOS Dojo Tshirt for everyone who attends ( plus, there might be more goddies too ).

Jump directly to the registration page : http://centosdojoantwerp2013.eventbrite.com/

- KB

And I think we can do this better. We can create a better end user experience that gives them direct access, easily, to the state of play within the testing. And we should be able to automate more to get better coverage.

To that aim, qaweb.dev.centos.org is now going away. And we are working on some alternatives. Starting with having a nightly QA cycle, that considers point releases and all updates upto that point. And adding more external tests as well, like the ltp content ( http://ltp.sourceforge.net/ ). If you wish to join in that effort, drop in on the centos-devel list ( http://lists.centos.org/ ) and jump right in. Ref threads: http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-devel/2013-March/009098.html and http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-devel/2013-March/009099.html

Here is a link to the official announcement that just went out : http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2013-March/019649.html

See you there,

- KB

Over the last couple of weeks, I've spent quite a lot of time online talking with people about various things. Either using software voice over IP or google-hangout or Skype or whatever. I've noticed recently there seems to be a growing trend for people to have more and more expensive and professional Microphones for these conversations.

Awesome.

Except, get a grip. There is a limit to what and how these Mic's are meant to be used. The point at which I can hear a cat crossing the road two blocks away from your house - too much. Either get a proper sound / recording room setup, or just use that mic on the webcam or laptop. Really, its good enough for these chats.

A £250 Sennheiser Mic for this sort of a thing, not needed. Talking about the mic setup and getting the wind-blow from when you mention P, not needed. You neither sound better not look prettier. Stick to that 1bit laptop mic. We'll all be happier for it.

- KB

https://nazar.karan.org/ services are going to be partially down as I migrate services over to a faster, more memory, lesser power consuming, many more cores machine. Everything should be back to production by midday Mar 12th, 2013. Services impacted include:

• git repos
• Reimzul's irc interface
• Alt.Bsys triggers

There is a backup instance running, so if anyone needs to get to some specific data in a rush, ping me on irc and we can get access setup.

- KB

One of the key barriers to entry into a cloud or virtualised environment : setting up and maintaining a piece of infrastructure that builds disk images. Its also a colossal waste of time and involves needing a complete instance of the environment one is going to deploy the image in. Wouldn't it be nice if there was a service that allowed you to drop in a kickstart file, write up a config to go with that kickstart and just build the image for you ?

Now there is. Its called ProjectRaindrops and its live, in beta mode, at http://projectraindrops.net/ ; As an initial kick off we are doing builds for HVM ( ie. any fully virtualised environment, be it KVM, Xen, VirtualBox or VMware ); With more HyperVisors and more disk formats coming soon.

Getting started is easy, goto the Raindrops website; sign in using either github or twitter credentials ( we don't store any personal details, but if your account does not have an email address, we won't be able to send out email notifications ). There are two key components:

• A config file: that contains metadata about what you want the build to do
• A kickstart file: that has the actual details on what the build should contain

Example pre-populated templates are available, just click on the new button and the template will be injected in. And there is some validation rules that track the config and kickstart file, so if you make mistakes or lose format validation, you will find out right away. And we have versioning for each file built in too. Finally, there is no real correlation between a config file and a kickstart file, when you create a new job you can pick an arbitrary kickstart and any config file in your account to match it with.

So, now that you have a config and a kickstart file, click on new job, give it a name, select which config you want to use and what kickstart file, click on 'Submit' and in a few minutes your build should be done. You can even track the job as it works its way through various stages.

Lots of interesting things in planning and development stages, stay tuned for more news in the coming weeks. For now, go ahead and drop in on http://projectraindrops.net/ and give it a shot. Just consider it to be a Beta release, so send us lots of feedback.

- KB

• AMD FX-6 6100 AM3+ cpu
• Motherboard to go with it
• 32 GB of ram
• 180 watt PSU
• 32GB SSD for local storage

I can get one of those 'sets' for just under £190.00 ; For Network, a HP ProCurve J9028A / their 1800-24G should do, and available cheaply off ebay. For Storage, I am thinking of repurposing my HP MicroServer with 4x500GB SATA's.

So four 'compute nodes' + switch + cables and disks for the MicroServer should clock in at £1,000.00 still need some sort of a case or rails ( intend to host this at home ).

What am I missing ? What might I be better off with ? £1k for 24 cores, 128gb of ram and 4 physical nodes seems like a good deal to me, but could I do better ?

- KB

Why ? Just down to the fact that I have no less than 9 projects on the go at the same time and I want to make sure that I do whatever is needed to bring as many of them towards completion by early Jan as possible. Social media is one of the bunch of things I'm cutting back on - but perhaps the most visible to people.

- KB