cAos and CentOS administration
20 March 2005
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 [ http://www.caosity.org/ ] or
[ http://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:
1. gmk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx - cAos,
2. lance@xxxxxxxxxx - CentOS, or
3. herrold@xxxxxxxxxxxx - either project
- Greg Kurtzer, Lance Davis, Russ Herrold
