Currently Fedora is third at 8% with Ubuntu leading at 35%, and Debian in second at 10%.

Show these people some Fedora pride!

Congrats Fedora developers, users, testers, QA guys, and the many many many other people I’m forgetting. I don’t mind saying that I used to hate Fedora, but I think I was biased with years of Mandriva and just plain old not being used to it. Now that I’ve used Fedora 10, 11, and now 12, I can honestly say that I’m a great big Fedora fan now (and, seriously, if you’re still reading my gushing and haven’t started downloading, get cracking because it’s worth it!)

So I think this might be a good move. rsec is essentially a complete tool, but if we can swap in msec’s plugin functionality for the reports and make it so that is can be a standalone component separate from msec (be it that msec drops the reporting capabilities and adopts a refreshed rsec as a dependency, or whether msec permits building just the reporting capabilities separate from the msec stuff), then I’m definitely game. What might be interesting, however, is to see how msec and rsec can be merged with sectool in some way. To be honest, I’d never heard of sectool until Eugeni mentioned it… it’s a Fedora project so it might have a lot of Red Hat/Fedora-specific stuff in there, but if it is or could be more generalized to do what msec does as well as what rsec does, then maybe there’s a place for one tool to take the place of three tools and have a broader usage base and become a better tool.

The opportunity here to build a better tool out of two, or maybe even three, tools is quite interesting and one of the things I love about open source. Merging msec and rsec should be quite easy I think. Merging with sectool might be more difficult, but I see a lot of crossover in what msec and sectool both do already — there really is no reason to have a Mandriva-specific tool and a Fedora-specific tool that do the same thing. I suspect sectool might be good at creating decent reports which may even obsolete the need for rsec. Taking a closer look at sectool will help me determine if that is the case (and then it remains to be seen if there is a sectool build for EPEL or if it can be done since I’m currently using rsec on some Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and CentOS 5 systems).

Either way, I smell some possibilities here.

I have heard that msec now is much better, but have not had a chance to try it although I do try to keep up with the changes to msec related to reporting and fold those back into rsec.

I’ve made it past my first 90 days at Red Hat and I sure am glad I made the transition. You get wrapped up in one way of doing things, or dealing with people, or whatever, for long enough and when you get out of the comfort zone, things sure change. Red Hat is *way* different from Mandriva, so I’ve had 8 years of one way of working to overcome in the last 3mos. I think I’ve tackled it pretty good, despite some frustrating moments. In terms of infrastructure and how things work, and how people work with each other, it’s so different I don’t really have the words to express it. So it’s been quite the adjustment for me, and long hours, lots of learning, lots of note-taking, more than a few oopses, and a lot of patient people.

I can’t say much about the Fedora side of things as I’ve not really had a chance to step into the Fedora community yet, although I hope to do something there in the next few months. For now, I need to focus on the Red Hat side of things.. and I’m loving it. Especially the people I get to work with… with an organization as large as Red Hat, it’s no surprise that I’m running into new people all the time as my work takes me here, then there, and then waaay over there. =)

Anyways, everyone I’ve encountered has been stellar. Not just in how smart and knowledgeable they are, but also in how they carry themselves and how downright helpful they are. I really appreciate working with the Security Response Team (an absolutely fantastic bunch of guys that made me feel right at home from day one), and the developers I’ve had the occasion to work with, and the Quality Engineering folks are absolutely insane (in a good super-hard-working way!).

To finish it off, thanks all of you for making my first 90 days awesome, and for all the incredible hard work you do. I can’t tell you how much easier it’s made the transition for me, and I appreciate it quite a lot.