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November 26, 2008

Red Hat has officially released its version 10 of the Fedora Linux distribution, promising new open source security, virtualization and appliance-building technologies, this despite a security breach encountered about four weeks ago.

Codenamed Cambridge, Red Hat's new release of Fedora 10 has been delayed following the above-mentioned security breach in the Red Hat Fedora infrastructure.

The launch also comes as Fedora is in the spotlight after Red Hat claimed that this distribution has over 9.5 million servers running its software, a number that it would make it the most widely installed Linux distribution.

Fedora insiders say the delay caused by the security breach didn't dramatically upset the distribution's launch timing, as it was still slated for mid-November.

Red Hat hasn't yet issued the full details on the root cause of its security breach, and whether or not it involved malicious hacker activity. Nevertheless, Red Hat's Fedora development team does plan to issue a final report on the breach in the future, once it has fully detailed the problem.

Producing a complete and accurate report is a priority for both Red Hat and for the Fedora community.

"If you look at our original schedule we were supposed to release it around Oct. 28 and here we are, about four weeks later than what we expected," said Paul Frields, Fedora's project leader. The outage itself lasted about three weeks, he added, "and during that time, our infrastructure team nuked our infrastructure and rebuilt the entire thing."

Frields explained that during the outage, the Fedora project ceased producing its so-called Rawhide daily builds, which help to push development of the mainline release, ultimately impacting the release date.

Frields also argued that the infrastructure shutdown enabled Fedora to make some improvements to its back-end infrastructure that otherwise might not have been possible. "We reconstructed just about everything from scratch and after those three weeks, we really only lost a week on top of that compared to our original schedule," Frields said.

He added "so we look at it as a fairly successful release overall, given the circumstances that we had to work with."

A new security audit tool, called Sec-Tool enables users to verify if a system configuration has any potential security flaws. Sec-Tool is also a Red Hat framework that can be leveraged by users to build their own security tests.

Overall, Fedora version 10 will help to expand appliance options with Red Hat's Appliance Tools technology, a feature that's intended to make it easier for Linux and open source developers and also independent software vendors to build Fedora-based appliances.

Appliance Tools include the ACT (Appliance Creation Tool) and the AOS (The Appliance Operating System), which is a stripped down version of Fedora. While the overall security for Fedora's own internal infrastructure has always been a key concern for the whole team in the past, security also still is a key theme in the Fedora 10 release as well.

Fedora also is launching a new branding effort, with a Fedora Remix logo that can be used by developers to identify their Fedora-based appliances, similar to Intel's "Intel Inside" logo program. Frields noted that Fedora's inclusion of Appliance Tools is part of a larger open source effort to develop Linux-based appliances, which Red Hat is sponsoring with its new Thincrust.net project.

The hope is that open source developers will use the tools to build virtual software appliance, Live CD based appliances or even bare-metal hardware Linux appliances.

Beyond appliances, virtualization also gets a boost in Fedora 10 with the new Virt-Remote-Install tool.

Frields explained that the tool greatly extends the capabilities of server virtualization on Fedora, making it easier for system administrators to create VMs (virtual machines) on remote Linux hosts.

Virt-Remote-Install is an extension of the Fedora-developed Libvert technology, which is an open source wrapper for better managing server virtualization.

Source: Red Hat.

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