# November 2021 Newsletter

Dear CentOS enthusiast,

It's been another busy month in the CentOS project. Here's some of the highlights from around the community.

## Project News

### Karanbir 'KB' Singh

On October 18th, we had the historic news that project lead and long-term Board of Directors member Karanbir "KB" Singh [will resign from the Board](https://karan.org/posts/stepping-down/), effective immediately.

If you've been around CentOS for any time at all, you've heard of KB, and his work with the community. It's safe to say that without KB, the project would not be where it is now. He's been a voice of leadership in the project since the very beginning, and has always been a presence on our lists, at our events, and in our governance.

We [wish KB well in his future endeavors](https://blog.centos.org/2021/10/karanbir-singh-stepping-down-from-the-centos-board/) and hope to still see him around CentOS, and the larger Linux ecosystem, for years to come.

KB's departure is also a vote of confidence in the recently added directors, and faith that they will continue to lead the project in the right direction, even as we shift focus to Stream and stronger SIGs.

Watch the centos-devel mailing list over the coming week for information about how, and when, we will select the replacement director for the seat that KB is vacating.

### Fedora 35 release!

Our friends at Fedora will release Fedora Linux 35 today, November 2nd. We encourage you to [download it](https://getfedora.org) and try it out. Fedora is the upstream of CentOS, and a great choice for your daily Linux needs.

### CentOS Stream Updates

CentOS Stream keeps getting more useful all the time.

On Friday, Fabian [announced the availability of the centos plus repository for 8-stream](https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-devel/2021-October/077405.html), which returns to a feature that we used to have, but had become unmaintained over the past years. You can enable it with `sudo dnf install centos-release-plus -y`. More details are in the mailing list post linked above.

### October Board of Director Minutes

The October Board of Directors meeting was held on October 13th. As usual, the [minutes of that meeting are published on the CentOS blog](https://blog.centos.org/2021/11/october-2021-board-meeting-minutes/).

The next meeting will be held on November 10th. Watch the centos-devel mailing list for your invitation to attend that meeting.

## Events

### October Dojo

On October 7th and 8th, we ran our the final CentOS Dojo of 2021, which was held online. We had good turnout, and great presentations. All the videos, and most of the slides, are now available on the [event wiki page](https://wiki.centos.org/Events/Dojo/October2021).

We started with an [AMA (Ask Me Anything) with the Board of Directors](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BULvfaOvc-M&list=PLuRtbOXpVDjCSvlyrEtctWVeXTNWilmOH&index=1), with topics ranging across many topics, and about half of our directors able to participate.

EMBED https://youtu.be/BULvfaOvc-M HERE

### SC21

Come see us at the Red Hat booth at [SuperComputing 21](https://sc21.supercomputing.org/) in St. Louis, November 14th - 19th.

## SIG reports

[Special Interest Groups](https://wiki.centos.org/SpecialInterestGroup) (SIGs) are smaller groups within the CentOS community that focus on a small set of issues, in order to either create awareness or to focus on development along a specific topic.

Each month, several of our SIGs report about what they've been working in the past quarter.

### Cloud SIG

#### Purpose

The CentOS Cloud SIG is a group of people coming together to focus on packaging and maintaining different FOSS based Private cloud infrastructure applications that one can install and run natively on CentOS

https://wiki.centos.org/SpecialInterestGroup/Cloud

#### Releases and packages

##### New OpenStack release Xena

During this period, RDO Xena was released in the Cloud SIG based on a new version of OpenStack. This version is currently available for CentOS Stream 8. More details can be found in the [announcement post](https://blogs.rdoproject.org/2021/10/rdo-xena-released/).

##### Support for CentOS Stream 9

During this quarter, Cloud SIG has made good progress to get OpenStack running on CentOS Stream 9:
* The SIG has built all the required requirements for CentOS Stream 9 in CBS and has delivered a RDO Trunk repository following master branch (https://trunk.rdoproject.org/centos9-master/report.html)
* We are actively working with the OpenStack upstream project to get all the required changes in code and to make this OS available for upstream testing.
* We've also worked with other SIGs such as Storage, Opstools, NFV and Messaging to build and test all the required software stack on CS9.

#### Continuous Integration

Cloud SIG has finished migrating all their jobs from the shared jenkins instance (ci.centos.org) to a new private instance running in the CentOS CI OpenShift environment.
#### Health and membership

Unfortunately, the former co-chair Paul Isaacs has ceased his activity in the SIG. Candidacies for replacement are welcome!

### NFV

The NFV SIG has [published their report](https://blog.centos.org/2021/10/nfv-sig-quarterly-report-2/) to the CentOS blog.

### Promo

The Promo SIG also [published their report](https://blog.centos.org/2021/11/centos-promo-sig-quarterly-report-november-2021/) to the CentOS blog.

### Storage

Package updates:
+ Glusterfs updated to glusterfs-8.6 and glusterfs-9.4. GlusterFS-10 is coming soon. glusterfs-8 will reach EOL upstream when glusterfs-10 is released.
+ Ceph updated to ceph-16.2.6. Ceph-15.2.15 will land by the time people are reading this. (It seems ceph-15.2.14 was missed somehow.) Ceph-14 has reached EOL upstream
+ NFS-ganesha-4 is coming soon.

CentOS Stream 9:
+ ceph-16 (nautilus), nfs-ganesha-3, glusterfs-9, glusterfs-coreutils, and glusterfs-block have all been built. Ceph and glusterfs are tagged for -testing and I believe that some people — e.g. OpenShift (ceph) and libvirt (glusterfs) — are already using them for their upstream testing.

For the OpenStack use-case:

1. cephadm 16.2.6 is now available on c8s, [builds for c9s](https://cbs.centos.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=35305) exist as well in -candidate to enable preliminary testing in TripleO.
2. There's [an effort from the TripleO community](https://review.opendev.org/q/topic:%22cs9%22+(status:open%20OR%20status:merged)) to align the code base and the CI to c9s.

From Samba side:

Packages updated:
* 4.13 version series has reached EOL and latest version 4.13.12 is now available with CentOS 8 Linux and CentOS 8 Stream
* Latest version 4.14.8 from 4.14 series is now available with CentOS 8 Linux and CentOS 8 Stream

New version series:
* Latest and greatest version of Samba(4.15.0) from 4.15 series is now available with CentOS 8 Linux and CentOS 8 Stream

CentOS Stream 9:
* Recent updates to 4.14(4.14.8) and 4.15(4.15.0) series are available

### Messaging

#### Purpose

Provide a unique source for messaging related packages. These packages
are consumed e.g by the Cloud SIG or the OpsTools SIG.

#### Activity

The nature of this SIG is to provide packages for other SIGs. The churn is not as big as in other SIGs. We have rebuilt packages for CentOS9 stream. A rebuild of erlang and rabbit packages is planned or already underway. The packages for CentOS 9 Stream are currently used and tested by the Cloud SIG.

## Other news

If you prefer your news in video format, we continue to publish a monthly video summary. The [October edition](https://youtu.be/RD8ikDwS6yo) is on our YouTube channel.

We've also posted two videos that help visualize the relationship between Fedora, CentOS Stream, and RHEL. The first video discusses [what CentOS Stream is](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_tV0UJAqXM) and the second talks about [how contributions flow through CentOS Stream to RHEL](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dkQ-WjHnew). There's also a [diagram](https://centos.org/assets/img/path_to_rhel.png) that discusses how it all fits together.

[](https://centos.org/assets/img/path_to_rhel.png)

From the larger EL (Enterprise Linux) ecosystem, you'll no doubt be interested to see the AlmaLinux project's [announcement of the ELevate tool](https://almalinux.org/elevate) which allows an in-place upgrade from any EL7 distribution to EL8 distributions.

###### tags: `newsletter`