Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

This has been a busy week when looking at the snapshots. Tumbleweed has received 6 fully tested snapshots that were published (0110, 0111, 0112, 0113, 0114 and 0115).

The most noteworthy updates there were:

• RPM 4.15.1
• Mozilla Firefox 72.0.1
• Mozilla Thunderbird 68.4.1
• KDE Applications 19.12.1
• KDE Plasma 5.17.5
• KDE Frameworks 5.66.0
• Linux kernel 5.4.10
• Kubernetes 1.17.0

That was quite a bunch of what was on the todo list of last week, but definitively not all of it and a few new things are already incoming again. Things currently being worked on or being shipped in the near future

• systemd 244 (Snapshot 0116+)
• Mesa 19..3.2 (also snapshot 0116+)
• Qt 5.14: we are awaiting some legal reviews. Tests by openQA have all passed
• Python 3.8: Salt seems to be the main blocker here, as it still relies on Tornado 4.x
• Removal of python 2

At the behest of people like Bryan Lunduke and DTLive on YouTube, I have started using LBRY more and last night I even uploaded a few test videos of my own. I would eventually like to put up some of my own tutorial videos.

With that said, LBRY has some serious issues. So, let’s be frank. LBRY has no rules against hardcore porn or if they do, they are not enforced. That’s fine, and I don’t care. It’s not hard to find porn on YouTube also. However if a porn channel doesn’t flag their own content as mature, then it will be in your search results and there’s no way right now to flag it yourself. The suggestions that I got in the help forum (aka the discord server) was to report it to the #report-spam room which I did. Will that result in these channels being told to reflag their content? Who knows. It seems a little iffy.

I realize that this is a startup and there is only so much time and energy to put into such things for a small team. I am rooting for them to make LBRY a great alternative to YouTube.

When you host your own website on a Virtual Private Server or on a DigitalOcean droplet, you want to know if your website is down (and receive a warning when that happens). Plus it’s fun to see the uptime graphs and the performance metrics. Did you know these services are available for free?

I will compare 3 SaaS vendors who offer uptime performance monitoring tools. Of course, you don’t get the full functionality for free. There are always limitations as these vendors like you to upgrade to a premium (paid) account. But for an enthousiast website, having access to these free basic options is already a big win!

I also need to address the elephant in the room: Pingdom. This is the golden standard of uptime performance monitoring tools. However, you will pay at least €440 per year for the privilege. That is a viable option for a small business. Not for an enthousiast like myself.

The chosen free alternatives are StatusCake, Freshping and UptimeRobot. There are many other options, but these ones are mentioned in multiple lists of ‘the best monitoring tools’. They also have user friendly dashboards. So let’s run with it.

StatusCake

The first option that I have tried is StatusCake. This tool not only offers the uptime monitoring, but also offers a free SpeedTest. Of course you can use the free speedtests of Google and Pingdom. But this won’t allow you to see the day-to-day differences.

The images below show the default dashboard for uptime monitoring, the detailed uptime graph for one URL and the webform for creating a new uptime test.

The next images show the default dashboard for speed tests, the detailed speed graph results and the webform for creating a new speed test.

The basic plan is free and this gets you 10 uptime tests and 1 page speed test. A paid superior plan will set you back €200 per year, which is way to much for an enthousiast like myself.

Freshping

Freshping is the second alternative that I tried. This is a Freshworks tool, so that means that it works together with other Freshworks tools such as Freshdesk, Freshsales, Freshmarketeer, Freshchat and Freshstatus. And all of these tools have a free tier. Wow, that is a lot of value for a start-up business. Of course they will like you to upgrade later on and stay with their company.

However, we are now focussing on Freshping. The below images show the default dashboard, the detailed uptime graph for one URL and the webform for creating a new uptime test.

It looks nice, but it gives you much less information than StatusCake. However they do provide value. The sprout plan is free and this gets you 50 uptime tests. A paid blossom account will set you back €119 per year. That looks cheap, but it won’t get you SSL monitoring (which is included in the paid StatusCake plan). So you will need to pay €389 per year to get this functionality. And that is too close to Pingdom, if you are only interested in uptime performance monitoring.

UptimeRobot

The last alternative that I tried is UptimeRobot. The big advantage of this tool is that the paid plan is very cheap. So let’s get to that first. The basic plan is free and this gets you 50 uptime tests. So it does offer value. A paid pro plan costs €49 per year, which is a surmountable ammount for an enthousiast like myself. This will include SSL monitoring.

So what do you get? The images below show the default dashboard for uptime monitoring, the detailed uptime graph for one URL and the webform for creating a new uptime test.

The user interface of UptimeRobot is fairly minimalistic. And you need to like the gray/green color combination (I am looking at you openSUSE and Linux Mint users). But the interface is easy enough to use. I find the graphs lacking in detail.

Conclusion

When comparing the free plans of StatusCake, Freshping and UptimeRobot the winner is StatusCake by a sizable margin. It not only offers uptime monitoring, but also 1 speed test. It provides detailed information on the graphs and you also see the information in tables that can be easily sorted.

When comparing the paid plans from the viewpoint of an enthousiast website owner, the winner is UptimeRobot. They offer both uptime testing and SSL monitoring for €49 per year. Which is a surmountable price.

Looking at these altenatives from the perspective of a startup business, Freshping starts to look more interesting. But a startup business would be better off by using the other Freshworks products and either pay less for UptimeRobot or pay a little bit more for a Pingdom standard plan.

Published on: 17 January 2020

Our openSUSE Chairman has some questions for the candidates for the openSUSE Board. My answers are here:

1. What do you see as three, four strengths of openSUSE that we should cultivate and build upon?
1) Fantastic coherence in the community
2) Great products with collaboration all over the world
3) Quality

2. What are the top three risks you see for openSUSE? (And maybe ideas how to tackle them?)
1) Dependency on SUSE (humans and financials)
Background: I was asked really often at open source events how another company can sponsor openSUSE. We had to say that it would not possible because all of our money is going via a SUSE credit card and the money would be lost (same with the GSoC money, which has to be transferred to other organizations because of this issue). No company wants to pay Open Source Developers with such a background of an open-source project. Therefore, most openSUSE Contributors are working for SUSE or SUSE Business Partners. This topic popped up more than 3 times during my last Board Membership (really created by SUSE employees each time!).
Solution: Creation of the foundation! I had to suggest this solution more than 3 times before that was accepted by SUSE employees in the Board. I told about all the benefits how we can manage our own money then, receive new sponsors, SUSE can use more money for their own, SUSE can sponsor us continuously and we would be able to receive more Contributors.

2) openSUSE infrastructure in Provo
Background: I am one of the Founders of the openSUSE Heroes Team and was allowed to coordinate our first wiki project between Germany and Provo. The openSUSE infrastructure is in Microfocus hands and they need very long to respond on issues and we are not allowed to receive access as a community. Additionally, SUSE is not part of Microfocus any more which makes it more difficult to receive good support in the future.
Solution 1: Migration of all openSUSE systems from Provo to Nuremberg / Prague (perhaps missing space?)
Solution 2: Migration of all openSUSE systems from Provo to any German hosting data centre with access for openSUSE Heroes

3) Bad reputation of openSUSE Leap & openSUSE Tumbleweed
Background: We are the openSUSE project with many different sub-projects. We don’t offer only Linux distributions, but we are well known for that and most people are associating us with that. I had given many presentations about openSUSE during my last Board Membership and represented us at different open source events. The existing openSUSE Board does not do that very much. They have another focus at the moment.
Solution: We need more openSUSE Contributors representing openSUSE and I can do that as an openSUSE Board Member again. After that, we can be one of the top Linux distributions again.

3. What should the board do differently / more of?
The existing openSUSE Board is working mostly on the topic with the foundation. That is good. Thank you! But the role of a Board Member contains the representation of the community, too. We would have one less risk with that.

4. If you had a blank voucher from the SUSE CEO for one wish, what would that be?
I wish the start financing of the foundation for openSUSE. Both sides will profit from that.

5. What is your take on the Foundation? What do you consider a realistic outcome of that endeavour? (And if different, what outcome would you like to see?)

The Foundation is a benefit for SUSE and openSUSE (see risk 1). SUSE can support and contribute to us continuously. The difference is that we are open for other sponsoring companies then. Google Summer of Code money can be used for Travel Support. We can say how much money can be used for every openSUSE event/ Summit (without any eye on the situation of SUSE). We can manage that all for our own. If we can accept more companies as sponsors, SUSE can invest the saved money into the own company or in other open-source projects. We become more open and that is a reason for companies to invest money into jobs as Open Source Developers for us. So the community can grow with more companies as sponsoring partners.

Being a performance engineer (or an engineer who’s mainly concerned with software performance) is a lot like being any other kind of software engineer, both in terms of skill set and the methods you use to do your work.

However, there’s one area that I think is sufficiently different to trip up a lot of good engineers that haven’t spent much time investigating performance problems: analysing performance data.

The way most people get this wrong is by analysing numbers manually instead of using statistical methods to compare them. I’ve written before about how humans are bad at objectively comparing numbers because they see patterns in data where none exist.

I watched two talks recently (thanks for the recommendation Franklin!) that riffed on this theme of “don’t compare results by hand”. Emery Berger spends a good chunk of his talk, “Performance matters” explaining why it’s bad idea to use “eyeball statistics” (note eyeball statistics is not actually a thing) to analyse numbers, and Alex Kehlenbeck’s talk “Performance is a shape, not a number” really goes into detail on how you should be using statistical methods to compare latencies in your app. Here’s my favourite quote from his talk (around the 19:21 mark):

The ops person that’s responding to a page at two in the morning really has no idea how to compare these things. You’ve gotta let a machine do it.

And here’s the accompanying slide that shows some methods you can use.

"Did behavior change?" slide from Alex Kehlenbeck's talk

Yet despite knowing these things I stil have a bad habit of eyeballing perf.data files when comparing profiles from multiple runs. And as we’ve established now, that’s extremely dumb and error prone. What I really should be doing is using perf-diff.

Here’s a gist for random-syscall.c, a small program that runs for some duration in seconds and randomly calls nanosleep(2) or spins in userspace for 3 milliseconds. To generate some profile data, I ran it 5 times and recorded a profile with perf-record like this:

$ gcc -Wall random-syscall.c -o random-syscall
$ for i in $(seq 1 5); do sudo perf record -o perf.data.$i -g ./random-syscall 10; done
Executing for 10 secs
Loop count: 253404
[ perf record: Woken up 14 times to write data ]
[ perf record: Captured and wrote 3.577 MB perf.data.1 (31446 samples) ]
Executing for 10 secs
Loop count: 248593
[ perf record: Woken up 12 times to write data ]
[ perf record: Captured and wrote 3.185 MB perf.data.2 (28252 samples) ]
Executing for 10 secs
Loop count: 271920
[ perf record: Woken up 12 times to write data ]
[ perf record: Captured and wrote 3.573 MB perf.data.3 (31587 samples) ]
Executing for 10 secs
Loop count: 263291
[ perf record: Woken up 13 times to write data ]
[ perf record: Captured and wrote 3.641 MB perf.data.4 (32152 samples) ]
Executing for 10 secs
Loop count: 259927
[ perf record: Woken up 13 times to write data ]
[ perf record: Captured and wrote 3.507 MB perf.data.5 (30898 samples) ]
$ perf diff perf.data.[1-5]

The output of $ perf-diff perf.data.[1-5] looks like this:

$ perf diff perf.data.[1-5]

Much better! No more eyeball statistics. As you’d expect, perf-diff comes with the usual assortment of command-line options including --comms (narrow the displayed results to specific programs), --sort (order the displayed results by a given key), and --symbols (only display provided symbols).

Bereits Anfang 2019 habe ich für das Board von openSUSE kandidiert. Nachdem inzwischen wieder zwei Plätze offen sind, stehe ich auch diesmal wieder für die Aufgabe zur Verfügung und stelle mich zur Wahl.

Einen allgemeinen Überblick über meine Vorstellungen und Ziele gibt es hier.

Im Vorfeld zur Wahl stehen alle Kandidaten der Community natürlich für Fragen offen. Einen Katalog aus 5 Fragen von Gerald Pfeifer, derzeit Chairman des Boards, habe ich beantwortet und möchte diesen auch hier bereitstellen.

Ein Hinweis: Fragen und Antworten sind ursprünglich auf Englisch. Dies ist nur eine Übersetzung.

1. Was sind deiner Meinung nach die drei, vier Stärken von openSUSE, die wir kultivieren und auf denen wir aufbauen sollten?

1) Vielfalt der Features
OpenSUSE ist vor allem für die Distributionen Leap und Tumbleweed bekannt. Die große Bandbreite der verschiedenen Teilprojekte und wie sie zusammenpassen, ist eine große Stärke. Wir sollten einen Weg finden, oS mit den ganzen Projektteilen wie YaST, OBS, openQA etc. in Verbindung zu bringen.

2) „Erbe“
Linux-Distributionen kommen und gehen, manche bleiben jahrelang, andere verschwinden in den Tiefen des Internets. OpenSUSE gibt es nun schon seit Jahrzehnten und es muss diese Tatsache in Richtung einer Anerkennung als zuverlässiger Freund für den Betrieb von Computern verändern.

3) Genehmigungsfreie Gemeinschaft
Die openSUSE-Community lebt von Menschen, die einfach Dinge tun und versuchen, andere durch Ergebnisse zu überzeugen. Das ist nicht überall bei FOSS üblich. Einige andere Gemeinschaften versuchen, die Dinge über Komitees und Oberbosse zu vereinheitlichen.

2. Was sind die drei größten Risiken, die du für openSUSE siehst? (Und vielleicht Ideen, wie man sie angehen kann?)

1) Vergessen werden
2) Teilweise unbekannt bleiben
3) Im eigenen Saft schmoren

Es könnte auch andere Risiken geben, aber diese drei passen alle zu einem großen Thema: Kommunikation – oder eher dem Fehlen einer solchen.

Meine Idee, dies anzugehen, ist es, das Marketingteam (irgendwie) wiederzubeleben und als treibende Kraft für alles, was von openSUSE in Richtung des Restes der Welt geht, zu pushen. Es gibt bereits Initiativen, Artikel zu schreiben, mit Community-Leuten in Interviews zu sprechen und neues Marketingmaterial zu erstellen. Dies erfordert natürlich Koordination und Manpower, aber es läuft bereits recht gut.

Das Marketing-Team, das ich im Sinn habe, ist eine Initiative, die in zwei Richtungen arbeitet: Neben der Arbeit in Eigenregie möchte ich es offen haben für Menschen, die Ideen, Wünsche und Projekte einbringen. Mitglieder können Tickets öffnen, Nichtmitglieder können E-Mails senden oder in Chatrooms erklären, was sie wollen oder brauchen. Die Marketingleute erledigen dann entweder die Anfrage selbst oder versuchen, jemanden zu finden, der bereit ist, dies zu tun, z.B. in Artwork, l10n oder einem anderen geeigneten Team.

Das Hauptziel ist es, einen konstanten Fluss interessanter Inhalte für den Rest der Gemeinschaft und für jeden außerhalb von openSUSE aufrechtzuerhalten.

Die Antwort auf die folgende Frage erweitert diesen Punkt noch ein wenig.

3. Was sollte der Vorstand anders / mehr tun?

Kommunizieren. Obwohl die meisten Leute hier (einschließlich mir) die Sache mit der Hierarchie nicht mögen, ist es etwas, das nicht ungenutzt bleiben sollte. Kurz gesagt: Wenn das Board etwas sagt, wird es weithin als etwas Wichtiges und Offizielles angesehen.
Obwohl das nur teilweise wahr ist und diametral zu dem steht, was der Vorstand wirklich ist (ein „Diener“ der Gemeinschaft), ist es sicherlich ein Weg, um Aufmerksamkeit für das gesamte Projekt zu gewinnen.

Ein Beispiel: Wählt relevante Dinge aus den Meetingnotizen aus, macht einen monatlichen Beitrag auf news-o-o, fügt ein nettes „Board News“ Emblem hinzu.

4. Wenn du einen Blanko-Gutschein vom SUSE-CEO für einen Wunsch hättest, welcher wäre das?

Ich würde ihn dafür verwenden, die Prozesse mit Heroes und der technischen Infrastruktur zu vereinfachen. Obwohl ich nicht so sehr Details kenne, höre ich oft, dass die Dinge langsam laufen und viel nachgebohrt werden muss. Und ich gehe davon aus, dass das, was dort öffentlich sichtbar ist, nur die Spitze des Eisbergs ist.

5. Was hältst du von der Stiftung? Was hältst du für ein realistisches Ergebnis dieses Unterfangens? (Und falls anders, welches Ergebnis würdest du gerne sehen?)

SUSE ist in rechtliche und finanzielle Angelegenheiten der Community involviert und wird sich höchstwahrscheinlich niemals zurückziehen. Und es würde sich falsch anfühlen, wenn man versuchen würde, alle Verbindungen dort zu kappen. Aber meine Vermutung und Hoffnung für die Stiftung ist, dass sie die Dinge klarer und getrennter gestalten wird.

Du hast weitere Fragen? Schreib mir!

(Quelle der Fragen ist hier.)

Already in the beginning of 2019 I have been a candidate for the board of openSUSE. Since there are now two places open again, I am again available for the task and run for election.

A general overview of my ideas and goals can be found here.

In the run-up to the election all candidates of the community are of course open for questions. I have answered a catalogue of 5 questions from Gerald Pfeifer, currently chairman of the board, and would like to make it available here.

1. What do you see as three, four strenghts of openSUSE that we should cultivate and build upon?

1) Variety of features
OpenSUSE is mostly recognized for the distributions Leap and Tumbleweed. The broad scale of different sub-projects and them fitting together is a big strength. We should find a way to get oS associated with the whole project bits like YaST, OBS, openQA etc.

2) “Heritage”
Linux distributions come and go, some stay for years, others vanish in the depths of the internet. OpenSUSE has been around for decades now and needs to plot twist that fact towards a recognition as reliable friend for running computers.

3) Permission-free community
The openSUSE community lives from people that just do things and try to convince others by results. That is not usual everywhere in FOSS. Some other communities try to streamline things into committees and head honchos.

2. What are the top three risks you see for openSUSE? (And maybe ideas how to tackle them?)

1) Getting forgotten
2) Staying unknown in some parts
3) Stewing in our own juice

There might be other risks as well but these three all fit into one major topic: communication – or more the lack of it.

My idea to tackle this is to revive (somehow) and to push the marketing team as a driving spot for everything going from openSUSE towards the rest of the world. There are already initiatives to write articles, talk to community people in interviews and to create new marketing material. This of course needs coordination and manpower, but is already taking off quite good.

The marketing team I have in mind is an initiative working in two directions: Besides doing things on our own I want to have it open for people dropping ideas, wishes and projects. Members can open tickets, non-Members can send emails or join chat rooms to explain what they want or need. Marketing people then either fulfill the request by themselves or try to find someone willing to do that, e.g. in artwork, l10n or any other appropriate team.

The main goal is to keep a constant stream of interesting content towards the rest of the community and to anyone outside openSUSE.

The answer to the following question extends this point a bit more.

3. What should the board do differently / more of?

Communicate. Though most people here (including me) don’t like the hierarchy thing it’s something that should not be left unused. In short: if the board says something, it is widely recognized as something important and official.
Being that only partly true and diametrically positioned against of what the board really is (a “servant” to the community), it sure is a way to gain attention for the whole project.

As a quick shot example: pick relevant stuff from the board meeting notes, make a monthly posting on news-o-o, add a nice “board news” badge.

4. If you had a blank voucher from the SUSE CEO for one wish, what would that be?

I’d go for easing up processes with Heroes and tech infrastructure. Though being not into the details anyhow I often hear about things going slowly and needing lots of poking. And I assume what’s visible public there is only the tip of the iceberg.

5. What is your take on the Foundation? What do you consider a realistic outcome of that endeavour? (And if different, what outcome would you like to see?)

Having SUSE involved with community stuff like legal and budget issues will most likely never been gone. And it would feel wrong to try to cut all connections there. But my guess and hope for the foundation is that it will make things more clear and separated.

Do you have further questions? Drop me a line!

(Source of these questions is here.)

Plusieurs paquets ont été mis à jour cette semaine dans openSUSE Tumbleweed comme prévu après la saison des vacances. Cinq instantanés de cette version évolutive ont été livrés cette dernière semaine après avoir passé les tests rigoureux appliqués par openQA.

Ces versions sont incroyablement stables avec des notes enregistrées au-dessus 95, selon le Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer.

L'instantané le plus récent, 20200112, a mis à jour Xfce avec une mise à jour pour xfce4-session 4.14.1 et xfce4-settings 4.14.2.

Divers changements visibles pour les développeurs ont été apportés dans l'instantané 20200101 dont re2 de Google une bibliothèque pour expressions régulières . frogr, l'application GNOME pour la gestion des images avec un compte Flickr, a été mis à jour en 1.6 et a supprimé l'usage obsolète de GTimeVal. La plate-forme open source pour le scale-out du stockage cloud public et privé, glusterfs 7.1, a corrigé le rééquilibrage du stockage provoqué par une erreur d'entrée et une fuite de mémoire dans glusterfsd.

La version 7.0.9.14 de ImageMagick a optimisé les performances des effets spéciaux de Fx et de virglrenderer 0.8.1, qui est un projet visant à étudier la possibilité de créer un GPU 3D virtuel pour une utilisation à l'intérieur des machines virtuelles qemu afin accélérer le rendu 3D.

L'instantané a continué de mettre à jour les paquets pour KDE Applications 19.12.1 qui avaient été intégré dans l'instantané 20200111 . Des améliorations ont été apportées à la vitesse de la molette de défilement pour Dolphin de KDE et le logiciel de montage vidéo Kdenlive avait plusieurs correctifs et un ajustement pour un rendu plus rapide, du code obsolète a aussi été supprimé du paquet de diagramme des applications parapluie. La plupart des paquets Applications KDE ont également mis à jour l'année du copyright à 2020.

En plus des paquets KDE Applications 19.12.1 qui ont commencés à arriver dans l'instantané 20200111, Plasma 5.17.5 de KDE est également arrivé dans l'instantané. Cette mise à jour de Plasma a corrigé une régression intervenue dans la transition l'applet de pageur hors de QtWidgets et a corrigé le glisser-déposer de fichiers depuis Dolphin vers un widget de bureau virtuel. Le Plasma NetworkManager avait également un correctif pour un crash lors du changement de configuration IPv4.

Le correctif très attendu de la vulnérabilité de sécurité dans Firefox a été effectué avec la mise à jour de Mozilla vers Firefox 72.0.1; il y avait huit Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) traitées dans la mise à jour de la version précédente 71 incluse dans Tumbleweed, mais la version 72.0.1 a corrigé le bogue que des pirates pouvaient utiliser pour accéder à un ordinateur de toute personne utilisant le navigateur en raison d'informations d'alias incorrectes dans le compilateur JIT IonMonkey.

LibreOffice 6.4.0.1 a ajouté un correctif pour corriger un bouton qui permettait le mauvais ordre d'une interface Qt et curl 7.68.0 comportait un grand nombre de correctifs et de modifications pour inclure l'ajout d'une implémentation de BearSSL vtls pour la Transport Layer...