CentOS - Oct 2008 - RHEL 5.3 Beta released, beta-testers needed

Hi all,

The CentOS community is pretty limited in what we can do to the core 
distribution. Since our mantra is "aiming to be 100% compatible with Red 
Hat Enterprise Linux" we cannot fix bugs or improve the CentOS core 
without waiting for Red Hat to make those modifications first. We have 
limited leverage and a 6-month release cycle against us.

But that is not the complete truth, Red Hat usually has an internal, a 
vendor and a public beta period and everything that is found within that 
time-frame might get fixed before it is being shipped (and frozen) for the 
next 6 months.

Today RHEL 5.3 Beta was announced with a lot of interesting improvements.

     https://www.redhat.com/archives/rhelv5-announce/2008-October/msg00000.html

So if we can improve the testing during the RHEL Beta program, everyone in 
the CentOS community directly benefits from that as well. Therefor it 
makes a lot of sense to encourage the large CentOS community to take part 
in the RHEL Beta program and help with improving the next CentOS releases. 
(You don't need my back patting, start already !)

If you are looking for the RHEL 5.3 Beta ISO images, go to Red Hat 
Network, log in, click on Download Software, expand the RHEL5 channel for 
your architecture and go to the Beta channel. There you can find the RHEL 
5.3 Beta ISO images for your architecture.

     https://rhn.redhat.com/rhn/software/channel/downloads/Download.do?cid=6002
     https://rhn.redhat.com/rhn/software/channel/downloads/Download.do?cid=6007

And please, if you find anything that is worth to fix, report your 
findings to Red Hat's bugzilla.

Thanks in advance,
-- 
--   dag wieers,  dag at wieers.com,  http://dag.wieers.com/   --
[Any errors in spelling, tact or fact are transmission errors]

Dag Wieers wrote:
> https://rhn.redhat.com/rhn/software/channel/downloads/Download.do?cid=6002
> https://rhn.redhat.com/rhn/software/channel/downloads/Download.do?cid=6007
Would be so much nicer if Red Hat also realised this [1] and made some 
of those beta isos public.

- KB

[1]: Some RH people clearly have, and they have made public access to 
their own package sets available at various points.

Dag Wieers wrote:
 
> So if we can improve the testing during the RHEL Beta
> program, everyone in the CentOS community directly benefits
> from that as well. Therefor it makes a lot of sense to
> encourage the large CentOS community to take part in the
> RHEL Beta program and help with improving the next CentOS
> releases. (You don't need my back patting, start already
> !)
> 
These are the release notes 
http://www.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/5.3/html/Release_Notes/index.html

One commentary on RHEL 5.3 beta states "Support for Windows 
Vista and 2008 is provided by Red Hat's rebased Samba 3.0.32."
I would have like to have seen Red Hat release a rebased Samba 
3.0.32  through fastrack for 4.7 and 5.2

Spike.

I don't think a login can be registered unless you buy and activate a
subscription
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Dag Wieers wrote:
> On Wed, 29 Oct 2008, Michael Simpson wrote:
>
>> On 10/29/08, Dag Wieers <dag at centos.org> wrote:
>>> On Wed, 29 Oct 2008, Mikael Fridh wrote:
>>>> On Wed, Oct 29, 2008 at 10:36:35AM +0000, Karanbir Singh wrote:
>>>>> Dag Wieers wrote:
>>>>>>
https://rhn.redhat.com/rhn/software/channel/downloads/Download.do?cid=6002
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
https://rhn.redhat.com/rhn/software/channel/downloads/Download.do?cid=6007
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Would be so much nicer if Red Hat also realised this [1]
and made
>>>>> some
>>>>> of those beta isos public.
>>>>
>>>> I was really looking forward to testing this but when my
download
>>>> completes in 3 hours I might have forgotten about it
completely.
>>>>
>>>> I'm too used to 10MB/s local mirror speeds :/
>>>
>>> Bringing down the barrier for people to test and report problems
for
>>> RHEL
>>> Betas is something we have to discuss together with Red Hat. I 
>>> discussed
>>> some of my wishes in an earlier blog post:
>>>
>>> http://dag.wieers.com/blog/rhel-beta-test-sig
>>>
>>> but the dialogue has not taken place yet.
>>>
>>> I think this is one of those very profound win-win situations that 
>>> we have
>>> to take advantage of.
>>
>> As per the suggestion on Dag's blog i would be very happy to
>> participate in any sort of beta for 5.3. I don't have a RHN
>> subscription so my ability to get hold of the iso is limited but there
>> are a couple of features in 5.3 that would be of use for my
company's
>> current projects
>> - so much so that we may be delaying a proposed roll out for them
>
> Ok, what may not have been obvious from my mail (and I will make sure 
> I fix that next announcement) is that anyone should be able to 
> register on RHN for downloading these Betas.
>
> So you do not have to be a customer to get an RHN account.
>
>
>> If there was to be any sort of CentOS based testing effort then i
>> would like to throw my hat (and a dell 2950III) into the ring
>
> Well, you could become part of this effort. I would like to create one 
> or more pages on the Wiki just for this purpose. We could allow people 
> to write down what they tested, on what hardware and the items that 
> failed. And in case they made any bugreports, we could link them on 
> the same wiki-page.
>
> The aim obviously is to report as much to Red Hat as possible, but 
> also to record what problems others could verify in helping those 
> reports. The other aim is to make sure we have a good idea of what 
> problems we can expect in the upcoming CentOS 5.3 for the release notes.
What kernel version is in 5.3? Still 2.6.18?

there is an IPsec patch now in 2.6.27, BEET mode for ESP.

I need this mode for HIP in kernel mode, and have yet to successfully 
patch the kernel myself (the HIPL team does supply a BEET patch for the 
2.6.18 kernel, but...).

So I do not have a RH account. I suspect corporate does, but I am too 
distant from them to get access.

how might I go about getting attention on the BEET ESP mode?

Mogens Kjaer wrote:
> Dag Wieers wrote:
> ...
>   
>> Ok, what may not have been obvious from my mail (and I will make sure I
>> fix that next announcement) is that anyone should be able to register
on
>> RHN for downloading these Betas.
>>
>> So you do not have to be a customer to get an RHN account.
>>     
>
> You can download and install, however, in order to
> do:
>
> yum update
>
> or even:
>
> yum install something
>
> you have to register the system on one of your available
> subscriptions.
>
> That's how I experience it - I could be wrong?
>   
Can you create a local repo that you keep current with rsync?