Thanks to a generous donation by Bytemark Hosting, Debian started deploying machines for its core infrastructure services in a new data center in York, UK.

This hardware and hosting donation will allow the Debian Systems Administration (DSA) team to distribute Debian's core services across a greater number of geographically diverse locations, and improve, in particular, the fault-tolerance and availability of end-user facing services. Additionally, the storage component of this donation will dramatically reduce the storage challenges that Debian currently faces.

The hardware provided by Bytemark Hosting consists of a fully-populated HP C7000 BladeSystem chassis containing 16 server blades:

• 12 BL495cG5 blades with 2x Opteron 2347 and 64GB RAM each
• 4 BL465cG7 blades with 2x Opteron 6100 series and 128GB RAM each

and several HP Modular Storage Arrays:

• 3 MSA2012sa
• 6 MSA2000 expansion shelves

with 108 drive bays in total, mostly 500GB SATA drives, some 2TB, some 600GB 15kRPM SAS, providing a total of 57 TB.

57 TB today could host roughly 80 times the current Debian archive or 3 times the Debian Snapshot archive. But remember both archives are constantly growing!

It's the time of the year when Debian Developers vote for a new Debian Project Leader (DPL). After 3 years as DPL, Stefano Zacchiroli is not running again but we have 3 brave candidates to be his successor:

• Gergely Nagy
• Moray Allan
• Lucas Nussbaum

You can find more information about the candidates by following the link on their names to read their platforms, or in the ongoing discussion in the debian-vote mailing list.

The campaigning period ends next Saturday, March 30th. Debian Developers will vote from March 31st to April 13th. The new term for the project leader will start on April 17th, 2013.

All the information about this vote and the final results will be published at the Debian Project Leader Elections 2013 voting page.

As we did in previous years, the Debian Project is applying to become a mentoring organization during the 2013 edition of the Google Summer of Code program. We're now looking for projects and mentors. If you have an idea for a project, please publish it on the wiki page, filling out the template, and send us an email on the coordination mailing-list.

Google Summer of Code is a program that allows students to work over the summer on free software projects, paid supported financially by Google. In order to be accepted as a mentoring organization, Debian needs to present a good list of projects to be proposed to the students.

If you need help with an idea in drafting a project proposal, or on anything else related to GSoC, feel free to contact us by email at the coordination mailing-list, or on our IRC channel #debian-soc (on irc.debian.org). You can also browse the list of project with confirmed mentors for inspiration.

This post is a brief version of this email from GSoC Admins in Debian

This is a repost from Gerfried Fuchs's post

Dear users and supporters of the backports service!

The Backports Team is pleased to announce the next important step on getting backports more integrated. People who are reading debian-infrastructure- announce will have seen that there was an archive maintenance last weekend: starting with wheezy- backports the packages will be accessible from the regular pool instead of a separate one, and all backports uploads will be processed through the regular upload queue (including those for squeeze-backports and squeeze-backports- sloppy).

For Users

What exactly does that mean for you? For users of wheezy, the sources.list entry will be different, a simple substitute of squeeze for wheezy won't work. The new format is:

deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ wheezy-backports main

So it is debian instead of debian-backports, and offered through the regular mirror network. Feel invited to check your regular mirror if it carries backports and pull from there.

For Contributers

What does it mean for contributing developers? Uploads for backports are no longer to be pushed to backports-master but to ftp.upload.debian.org, like any other regular package. Also, given that the packages are served from the same archive install there is no need to include the original tarball in the upload any longer because the archive knows it (Squeeze and beyond).

Also, given that the upload goes to the same upload queue, there is only one keyring used anymore, so no more pain with expired or replaced keys. We though still keep the rule of adding your UID to an ACL list (this also includes DM additions). This is mostly only to give us the chance to remind you that uploads to backports are directly available for installation onto stable systems and you thus should take special care there. We carefully tried to take over the old ACLs, in case you can't upload anymore, please tell us so we can look into the issue.

I've mentioned wheezy-backports (and squeeze-backports-sloppy) a few times here already, and you might wonder when it will be available. Technically, it is available from now on. Practically, while you could already upload to it, the set up of the buildd network is more painful than expected, so please allow the Buildd Team some days for setting them up.

The upload rules for wheezy-backports are the same: packages that are in the next suite are accepted. Given that Jessie isn't created yet, we want you to think about whether the package you want to upload will go into Jessie final, and that you are taking a closer look once Jessie is created and the package entered there about the upgradeability. For the time until the suite is available, you can see this as relaxed upload rule.

The same goes for squeeze-backports-sloppy: packages from two suites after Squeeze are acceptable, which turns it into the same relaxed rule as wheezy- backports above. Please also keep in mind that uploads to squeeze-backports- sloppy usually should be accompanied by uploads to wheezy-backports so people are able to upgrade from squeeze-backports-sloppy to wheezy with wheezy- backports.

Thanks

Finally, we want to thank the FTP-Master Team for their fine work on making this happen.

The documentation on backports-master has been updated, and in case of any doubt or question, feel free to ask them on either the debian-backports mailinglist, or in case of sensitive topics ask us directly.

Enjoy!

Rhonda for the Backports Team

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