One Identity Cloud PAM Essentials is the latest security product by One Identity. It provides asset management as well as secure and monitored remote access for One Identity Cloud users to hosts on their local network. I had a chance to test PAM Essentials while still in development. While there, I also integrated it with syslog-ng.

From this blog, you can learn what PAM Essentials is, and how you can collect its logs using syslog-ng. My next blog will show you how to work with the collected log messages and create alerts when somebody connects to a host on your local network using PAM Essentials.

https://www.syslog-ng.com/community/b/blog/posts/collecting-one-identity-cloud-pam-essentials-logs-using-syslog-ng

I suddenly had a sound issue on my openSUSE machine. There were no sound output devices available to the system to play anything. My laptop was mute. I had never seen this. EVERYTHING was gone. Rebooting didn’t fix it, rolling back to a previous snapshot didn’t fix it, I had no idea what I had […]

Like it or not, this web technology thing is not a fad and is going to be sticking around for the time being. I think this is great and terrible all at the same time. The great thing is, this means that I am free to use my preferred operating system for which I do […]

In the wide, wide world of desktop Linux, there is a lot of buzz and excitement over the release of Plasma 6 and for good reason, it is a fantastic upgrade from 5.27. The world of Plasma isn’t perfect but when put into perspective, this is getting real close. I was rather concerned about this […]

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

“Ask, and it will be given to you” – if you believe KDE Plasma 6 happened this week because many users asked for it, you are mistaken. Things don’t happen in Tumbleweed because some/many ask for it – but because some/few WORK on it (most do so in their spare time). As a community project, the devs don’t need more people asking ‘When is it done’, but rather ‘Here, this is my contribution; or ‘Can I help out’.

Despite all the questions asked and repeated, the package maintainers and developers still found sufficient time to deliver content. This week we have published 6 snapshots (0307…0311, 0313). As usual, the next snapshot is in openQA and may or may not be published later today.

The most relevant changes of the past week were:

• LibreOffice 24.2.1.2
• libvirt 10.1.0
• Mozilla Firefox 123.0.1
• gpg 2.4.5
• Poppler 24.03.0
• KDE Plasma 6.0.1 See https://lists.opensuse.org/archives/list/factory@lists.opensuse.org/thread/FZ7OPVGZS3IIJKTQSB5JIGAFPIU466R3/
• KDE Frameworks 6.0.0
• KDE Gear 24.02.0
• Linux kernel 6.7.9

The future holds more updates. Currently, the teams are working on:

• KDE Plasma 6.0.2 (addressing a bunch of issues found in the last days)
• Systemd 255.3
• linux-glibc-devel 6.8 (kernel 6.8 headers)
• LLVM 18
• Shadow 4.15.0
• Linux kernel 6.8.0 (or later): dpdk needs attention
• Cleanup of KDE/Plasma 5 packages
• Removal of Python 3.9 modules: in order to be able to successfully perform this, most – if not all – python-* packages should be fixed. Counterintuitively, removing a python flavor means we need to successfully rebuild the packages (python-singlespec)
• dbus-broker: no progress this week
• libxml 2.12.x: slow/no progress
• GCC 14: phase 2: use gcc14 as the default compiler

The March syslog-ng newsletter is now on-line:

• Native MacOS source in syslog-ng
• Using OpenTelemetry between syslog-ng instances
• Collecting even more logs on MacOS using syslog-ng

It is available at https://www.syslog-ng.com/community/b/blog/posts/the-syslog-ng-insider-2024-03-macos-opentelemetry

The Download Redirector received a few minor quality of life improvements, which are discussed below.

Projects

The main menu on the downloads site now has a Projects item. This table defines how additional statistics are gathered and visible in various reports, such as the mirrors report and downloads report.

Mirror propagation

Timing of mirror propagation is collected for the projects mentioned above. To access it, click on the corresponding project in the table mentioned earlier, e.g. Tumbleweed ISO. The view will show the discovery of usable mirrors over time.

Furthermore, clicking on the value in column ‘version’ will show detailed information about when the update was discovered on a specific mirror, e.g. Version 20240310.

Slowroll on the mirrors report

Slowroll was added as projects: ISO and repo, so it is now visible on mirrors report. Mirror propagation will be collected as well.

sypper: a tool for downloading packages

As part of benchmarking and prototyping for mirror infrastructure, a new tool was developed, sypper. While its intended purpose is a little bit different, it can be used for pre-downloading packages for zypper. Benchmarking shows that it downloads 4-5 times faster by using concurrent downloads and skipping some advanced checks, which zypper does. So check the readme if you want to experiment with the download speed.

• github
• software.opensuse.org

Feedback

For eventual feedback, please open an issue in corresponding github projects or use any openSUSE heroes channel.

The Download Redirector received a few minor quality of life improvements, which are discussed below.

Projects

The main menu on the downloads site now has a Projects item. This table defines how additional statistics are gathered and visible in various reports, such as the mirrors report and downloads report.

Mirror propagation

Timing of mirror propagation is collected for the projects mentioned above. To access it, click on the corresponding project in the table mentioned earlier, e.g. Tumbleweed ISO. The view will show the discovery of usable mirrors over time.

Furthermore, clicking on the value in column ‘version’ will show detailed information about when the update was discovered on a specific mirror, e.g. Version 20240310.

Slowroll on the mirrors report

Slowroll was added as projects: ISO and repo, so it is now visible on mirrors report. Mirror propagation will be collected as well.

sypper: a tool for downloading packages

As part of benchmarking and prototyping for mirror infrastructure, a new tool was developed, sypper. While its intended purpose is a little bit different, it can be used for pre-downloading packages for zypper. Benchmarking shows that it downloads 4-5 times faster by using concurrent downloads and skipping some advanced checks, which zypper does. So check the readme if you want to experiment with the download speed.

• github
• software.opensuse.org

Feedback

For eventual feedback, please open an issue in corresponding github projects or use any openSUSE heroes channel.

I had stepped away from using Kmail as my mail client on Linux for almost a year. I moved to Thunderbird for a few months, tweaking a lot of the usability issues with it to make it work better for me. I can say that I almost have it the way I want it but […]

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

We have officially reached ‘spring’ (according to some calendars/regions). We cleaned up the staging projects: we accepted all the good things you submitted that passed staging. Neat, eh? That’s what we do all the time anyway, so it’s not that special. The progress on RPM 4.20 fixes in the spec files has been slowing down a bit, but we’re nearing the end. This morning, there were 235 spec files left in Factory that needed touching – and many submit requests are still pending.

In sum, we have released again 6 snapshots this week (0301…0306), containing these changes:

• ImageMagick 7.1.1.29
• Python 3.x fixes for CVE-2023-6597 (TmpDir cleaning)
• Linux kernel 6.7.7
• kernel-firmware 20240229
• openblas 0.3.26
• Tcl 8.6.14
• RPM: patches to better support reproducible builds. Factory will test-enable this feature on Monday (March 11)
• Shadow 4.14.6
• openjpeg 2.5.2
• GStreamer 1.24.0: We have heard of some users having issues with their local caches.If you experience issues, try “rm ~/.cache/gstreamer-1.0/registry.x86_64.bin”
• postfix 3.8.6
• wireplumber 0.4.90

Staging projects are mainly busy with the same things that take some more time to prepare. Luckily, this does not stop progress at all and we have sufficient capacity to test things in parallel. The current list here is:

• libvirt 10.1.0
• Mozilla Firefox 123.0.1
• Poppler 24.03.0
• KDE Frameworks and Plasma 6: Lots of progress since last week. By now we reached the QA phase. Optimistic souls bet on next week (no promises though!)
• KDE Gear 24.02.0 – Requires KDE Frameworks 6 and will land at the same time
• Systemd 255.3: issues with OBS/build and transactional-update were identified. Once addressed, this should move forward soon too.
• python 3.9 deprecation: we decided to postpone this a little bit due to the still large fallout from Python 3.12 addition. Removing a Python flavor will require us to rebuild all the Python packages for the new builds to drop the python39 flavor. Too many packages fail to build at this moment.
• dbus-broker: no progress this week
• libxml 2.12.x: slow/no progress
• GCC 14: phase 2: use gcc14 as the default compiler