CentOS Community newsletter, August 2020 (#2008)

Dear CentOS enthusiasts,

Here's what's been happening over the past month.

News:

Boothole

Last week we were made aware of a security hole in grub2, and released a fix for that. You can see the details about this on the centos-announce mailing list. Unfortunately, the fix itself had problems that caused a small percentage of systems to be unbootable. We have since released fixes for that situation, too, which you can read about in the resolution of this bug - https://bugs.centos.org/view.php?id=17631 - and additional information may be found in the RHEL ticket, here: https://access.redhat.com/solutions/5272311

Further discussion of the issue may be found in recent threads on the centos@centos.org mailing list.

User Survey

Over the past 3 or 4 months, we have been running a survey about how you use CentOS. Many thanks to those who participated in this, to help us better understand how we can give you what you need.

I've written up the results of the survey here - https://blog.centos.org/2020/07/centos-community-user-survey/

While some of the results were expected - most of you use CentOS in small to medium shops, running services either for work or personal use - there were some eye-opening things in this. To me personally, the volunteerism question shows that a lot of you are looking for places to get involved, and that we haven't done a great job telling you where and how. We'll be working to fix that.

For those of you who missed the survey, we intend to do this again, perhaps as often as twice a year, and also provide opportunities to give more feedback beyond the simple 5-minute questionnaire.

Thank you all for participating, and for being part of our community.

New website: Contribution information

By now you've noticed the fresh look on the centos.org website. But it's not just a new look. It's also a new back-end, which, among other things, makes it easier for you to contribute changes and updates to the content. Please see this blog post for information about how you can help us improve the CentOS website.

CPE Updates

The Community Platform Engineering group is the Red Hat team combining IT and release engineering from Fedora and CentOS. Our goal is to keep core servers and services running and maintained, build releases, and other strategic tasks that need more dedicated time than volunteers can give.

July 5th - https://blog.centos.org/2020/07/cpe-weekly-2020-06-218/
July 25th - https://blog.centos.org/2020/07/cpe-weekly-2020-07-25/

Events:

Nest

This weekend is Nest - the Fedora conference. This conference is usually known as Flock, or "Flock To Fedora", but this year, since we cannot flock, we're going to nest at home.

DevConf.US

DevConf is next month, and is another free, online event. DevConf targets developers - especially those developing on Linux. Event details and registration are available on the event website.

SIG reports:

Storage SIG:

NFS-Ganesha and libntirpc were updated to 2.8.4/1.8.1 and 3.3/3.3 respectively.

To help gfidente out and get Ceph back on track, I migrated the Ceph dist-git repos to git.centos.org from the old repos on github and converted them to the new format. I went ahead and built ceph-14.2.9 (el7, el8) and 15.2.3 (el8 only because python3) — which were the current versions at the time. But since then 14.2.10 and 15.2.4 have been released, and the release of 14.2.11 is imminent.

It's a bit beyond the quarter time frame, but glusterfs-coreutils was updated finally after many years to version 0.3.1 and built for el7 and el8; gluster-block was updated to version 0.4 and built for el8. The previous version (0.3) remains in place for el7.

Updates

Errata and Enhancements Advisories

We issued the following CEEA (CentOS Errata and Enhancements Advisories) during July:

Errata and Security Advisories

We issued the following CESA (CentOS Errata and Security Advisories) during July:

Wed Jul 8 2020: CESA-2020:2827 Important CentOS 7 firefox Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2020-July/035774.html
Wed Jul 8 2020: CESA-2020:2824 Important CentOS 6 firefox Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2020-July/035776.html
Tue Jul 14 2020: CESA-2020:2894 Important CentOS 7 dbus Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2020-July/035777.html
Thu Jul 30 2020: CESA-2020:3220 Important CentOS 7 kernel Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2020-July/035780.html
Thu Jul 30 2020: CESA-2020:3217 Moderate CentOS 7 shim Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2020-July/035781.html
Thu Jul 30 2020: CESA-2018:3140 Moderate CentOS 7 fwupdate Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2020-July/035782.html
Thu Jul 30 2020: CESA-2020:3217 Moderate CentOS 7 shim-signed Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2020-July/035783.html
Thu Jul 30 2020: CESA-2020:3217 Moderate CentOS 7 grub2 Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2020-July/035784.html

Errata and Bugfix Advisories

We issued the following CEBA (CentOS Errata and Bugfix Advisories) during July:

Wed Jul 8 2020: CEBA-2020:2661 CentOS 7 389-ds-base BugFix - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2020-July/035775.html

Other releases

The following releases/updates also happened during July:

Wed Jul 29 2020: CentOS Linux, CentOS Stream and the Boot Hole vulnerability - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2020-July/035778.html
Wed Jul 29 2020: [Correction/Additions] CentOS Linux, CentOS Stream and the Boot Hole vulnerability - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2020-July/035779.html

One thought on "CentOS Community newsletter, August 2020 (#2008)"

Jim Heifetz says:

August 10, 2020 at 12:31 am

My system that could not boot after applying the faulty boothole fix was somewhat traumatic. I was able to boot into rescue mode, but could not use yum because name resolution was not working. I could not find any information on how to get it working; I did not some link that appeared as if they might be useful, but they required a Red Hat subscription. As someone who uses Centos and not RHEL, I have no access. Instructions on how to make it work on centos.org would be very useful.

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