I’ve been using pandoc to convert stuff - mostly Restructured Text - to Markdown as part of a wiki migration. The pandoc site has instructions for installing on a bunch of operating systems but none RHEL/CentOS/Fedora- like. This is a quick set of instructions for Fedora that should work for similar distros. First, install the Haskell compiler and Cabal (yet another pear/cpan/rubygems like plug-in loader/manager): $ sudo yum install ghc cabal-install Update the Cabal data store and install the plug-ins pandoc requires, utf8-string and zip-archive.

The linux.conf.au (LCA) 2010 call for papers is now open! Woot! Woot! etc, etc. Next year’s LCA is on from Monday 18 January 2010 to Saturday 23 January 2010 in sunny downtown Wellington, New Zealand. Speaking as a former organiser (AKA LCA Ghost) I think, in an entirely unbiased way, that it is the best Linux/FOSS conference in the world. It covers everything from hardcore kernel hacking to community discussions and legal issues.

A while back I talked about getting Hudson running with EC2-based build nodes. I had some issues - some self-inflicted like forgetting to add the IP address of the Hudson server to the appropriate EC2 Security Group to allow access on port 22 - and some Hudson idiosyncrasies. Now, however, I’ve got things running and am building Hudson jobs for Facter and Puppet. One of the ironic key issues for us is that we’re testing a configuration management system but we can’t use that system because RUBYLIB issues mean that there is some bleed through between the installed Puppet version and the version being tested.

The CIS has released a collection of metrics - CIS Security Metrics Guide (v. 1.0.0). The project goal is to develop a balanced combination of unambiguous and logically defensible outcome and practice metrics measuring and to utilize data commonly available in most enterprises. The following metrics are proposed and documented: Application Security Number of Applications Percentage of Critical Applications Risk Assessment Coverage Security Testing Coverage Configuration Change Management Mean-Time to Complete Changes Percent of Changes with Security Review Percent of Changes with Security Exceptions Financial

Now this is not a secret… :) Reductive Labs scores $2M for Puppet IT automation tool | VentureBeat. Congratulations to Luke, Andrew, Teyo and everyone involved. Well deserved!