The Fedora Project is looking for a new Fedora Project Leader. Skill set includes being able to juggle a community of around 1500 members, mostly volunteers with the needs of the Fedora Projects flagship product: Fedora the operating system. Must be smart, calm, cool and collected under stress and have an attention span that can be spread in many directions at once. Must have vision of the current landscape of Linux and Open Source in general as well as where it can / should be headed.

After two replacement chassis in quick succession (timekeeping problems, followed by blown power supply), one of my machines was showing its two ethernet ports as eth4 and eth5. This probably isn’t an issue in and of itself^*, but if I ever have to do stuff manually with the ethernet ports I don’t want to have to remember that they’re nonstandard.

A little digging (specifically, grep -R eth /etc/*) revealed that this gets set in /etc/udev/rules.d/z25_persistent-net.rules, so I edited it to take out the old eth* MAC addresses and relabel the new ones. Unfortunately, restarting udev didn’t make the change happen, so I had to reboot.

* I thought it was, because I couldn’t get either port to come up, hence discovering the above. However, after fixing that it still wouldn’t work — turned out that the cable was out at the other end. Always check the obvious stuff first! At least I learnt something.

As of this last Friday, December 7th Fedora Core 6 is no more. With it goes the last release the Fedora Project had seen the split between “Community” (Extras) and Red Hat sponsored (Core). Those not intimately involved in Fedora might be interested to learn that when the merge happened it was the core packages that ended up having to follow the former “Extras” packaging guidelines and not the other way around. Yet another testament to the power of community.

I apologize for going off on a half-baked rant at Ubuntu. Ubuntu is not perfect, but these kinds of flames generate more heat than light. I know better, and I’m sorry.

What I wish I had done was post something like this:

For all of the cool things that Ubuntu has done, their lack of quality control is astonishing and baffling. They’re better at innovating excuses than actually responding to bug reports. This is the latest fun example, “Bug #145805 in aumix, https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/aumix/+bug/145805 “. The binary Aumix package was built incorrectly for Gutsy, so it doesn’t work. Rebuilding it from sources fixes it. So does the crack Ubuntu team leap into action? Yes, but not to fix it….

**update**
Read here for an update:
http://www.oreillynet.com/linux/blog/2007/12/ubuntu_linux_users_bugs_1.html
***

From Enough With The Rainbow Tables: What You Need To Know About Secure Password Schemes:

“Most of the industry’s worst security problems (like the famously bad LANMAN hash) happened because smart developers approached security code the same way they did the rest of their code. The difference between security code and application code is, when application code fails, you find out right away. When security code fails, you find out 4 years from now, when a DVD with all your customer’s credit card and CVV2 information starts circulating in Estonia.”

This post was written in response to an alarmist post that had been highly reddit’d (aren’t all highly reddit’d posts alarmist?). Besides being an effective smackdown, this post is also a good survey of approaches to password hashing. There is a good pointer to SRP.