As you probably know, there is annual convention called Flock. This year’s is happening in Cape Cod, Hyannis, MA and will begin the morning of Tuesday, August 29. Sessions will continue each day until midday on Friday, September 1.

I have asked all of the session leaders from Flock some questions.

And now you are about to read one of the responses.

Fedora Security Lab by Fabian Affolter

What is the goal of your session at Flock?

To improve the Fedora Security Lab for the next release and ensure that it will be around for the next couple of years.

Without giving too much away, what can attendees expect to learn or do in your session?

A big topic is packaging. The Fedora Security Lab depends on a set of tools and people usually like to have up-to-date tools or new stuff. Hopefully we can get rid of our biggest headache, the Security Menu, or at least find a bunch of aspirins. Improve the available installation options. The focus are the livemedia, the comps group, and Ansible playbooks. Quality assurance and quality engineering are still blind spots and we want to implement a work flow which helps to ensure that we don’t ship faulty Labs in the future.

Who should attend?

Everybody who cares about a project beyond containers, cloud, and other buzzwords. Especially package maintainer because we want to bring packages which are shipped with the Fedora Security Lab to EPEL. Artists as it’s not a good idea to let engineers do graphical work. Also, marketing gurus and people who are familiar with configuration management could help to improve the Fedora Security Lab eco-system.

What does it affect in the project?

I assume that you mean “Fedora Project” with “project”. Labs are shipping a fixed set of packages. While using a Labs the tools are instantly available, no installation needed. Labs works offline and gives you an operating system you can put in your pocket like the Spins.

What does your talk focus on?

This a workshop/hackfest. It’s focusing on getting work done.

What do you do in Fedora/how long have you been involved in the project?

Most of my time I spend maintaining packages lately. For the last 10 years I did various stuff, for details please check my Fedora Wiki page.

What attracts you to this type of work or part of the project?

The Labs can be used to tell a story. It’s the story about products that are ready-to-use and an alternative to commercial solutions.