Category Archives: projects

Upgraded to 3.1 and Migrated to RHEL6

In preparation for the big release next week the GNOME Sysadmin team has been kickin’ ass and taking names! Today (finally, my fault) we have finished the migration and upgrade of the blogs.gnome.org WordPress installation to 3.1. The site has also been moved to a new RHEL 6 virtual machine. Some of you may notice some weirdness as DNS propagates, but it won’t be long before everyone will be using the new site.

When you login I’m sure you’ll be able to tell that the site has been upgraded. The admin UI has been polished quite a bit and you’ll notice a bar at the top of your browser inside and outside of the admin panel if you are logged in, providing added functionality. It reminds me a bit of what you might have seen if you’ve used Blogger.

For those interested in the changes, you can read the WordPress 3.1 release notes here.

In any case, this is one more ticket we’re able to close and I’m happy to finally have this done. It took longer than I had anticipated due to repeated testing (I didn’t want to clobber anything!). It is better to be safe than sorry after all.

As usual, if you run into anything wonky please drop us a line at gnome-sysadmin@ or drop into IRC to .

 

Wanted: Perl Guru

Here at the GNOME Foundation we maintain a large number of mailman-powered mailing lists, which facilitates discussion on development and related projects. The maintenance and moderation (read: spam filtering) of these lists can become a burden on the list maintainer(s), and many of them fall behind.

I have maintained a number of Free Software mailing lists over the years, and the best solution that I’ve found to keep on top of this is a tool called ‘listadmin’. listadmin is a Perl-based command line utility that communicates with the mailman web-interface and handles the moderation of mailing lists. I’ve found this tool to be a huge timesaver with the half-dozen lists that I normally maintain. To be honest, as part of my morning routine I run ‘listadmin’ and I complete the moderation of over a a dozen lists in under a minute. It is really quite nice.

For some reason, listadmin is problematic with our GNOME mailing lists (the lists I mention above are Ubuntu-related lists, which is a different mailman version than we run here at the GNOME Foundation). It’ll work with some lists and not with others, and the reason is unclear. I’ve tried troubleshooting it a bit, but my Perl doesn’t go too far beyond local system administration scripting.

If anyone out there on the internets considers themselves a Perl Guru and would like to donate some time toward this cause, please contact me. It would be a great benefit to the foundation, and a real time saver for list moderators if we could figure out the issue with listadmin (perhaps it just requires a small patch). The ability to maintain one list or a dozen lists becomes simple with this tool, and would really allow us to catch up and get a handle on some of these pending mail queues.

If you are interested, please find me in on irc.gnome.org, or email me at cedwards AT I HATE THE SPAM gnome org.