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One of our newest servers, with a hefty 256GB of RAM, recently began killing processes via the oomkiller.

According to free, only half of the RAM was in use (125GB). About 4GB was free, with the remainer used by the file cache.

I’m used to seeing unexpected “free RAM” numbers like this and have been assured that the kernel is simply not wasting RAM. If it’s not needed, use it to cache files to save on disk I/O. That make sense.

However… why is the oomkiller being called instead of flushing the file cache?

I came up with all kinds of amazing and wrong theories: maybe the RAM is fragmented (is that even a thing?!?), maybe there is a spike in RAM and the kernel can’t flush the cache quickly enough (I really don’t think that’s a thing). Maybe our kvm-manager has a weird bug (nope, but that didn’t stop me from opening a spurious bug report).

I learned lots of cool things, like the oomkiller report includes a table of the memory in use by each process (via the rss column) - and you have to muliply that number by 4096 because it’s in 4K pages.

That’s how I discovered that the oomkiller was killing off processes with only half the memory in use.

I also learned that lsof sometimes lists the same open file multiple times, which made me think a bunch of files were being opened repeatedly causing a memory problem, but really it amounted to nothing.

That last thing I learned, courtesy of an askubuntu post is that the /dev filesystem is allocated by default exactly half the RAM on the system. What a coincidence! That is exactly how much RAM is useable on the server.

And, on the server in question, that filesystem is full. What?!? Normally, that filesystem should be using 0 bytes because it’s not a real filesystem. But in our case a process created a 127GB file there - it was only stopped because the file system filled up.

I have a small window of time available if you'd like to get credits for sponsoring Drupal contributions.

With all the news and activities happening around Starshot, you may have missed this, but the Drupal Association has launched the Starshot Contribution Credits. This consists of credits granted to a series contributions, in particular:

• contributions to any modules, themes, etc that are designated as part of Starshot, 

• 50 credits per week for each FTE (full time employee) equivalent dedicated to starshot, 

• 1 credit per $100 invested for financial contributions and finally,

• Special credit bounties for individual issues of exceptional importance.

You can read more about the contribution bonuses https://www.drupal.org/about/starshot/contribution-credit

The last point, special credit bounties, opens the door to a contribution coming from the Bounty Program.

Given the success of the previous phase, we thought it was the moment to announce a few new issues that would carry extra credits, supporting the Starshot initiative. These issues are targeted at improvements to Drupal core that would reduce the number of contrib modules required in Starshot.

These are the issues that the period involved have identified:

• Improve the linking experience in CKEditor 5. Why? Because this integration provides a critical site feature and improves the editorial experience in a significant way.

  • https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/issues/3317769

• Fixed maximum number of field values, but use «add more» similar to when cardinality «unlimited» is used. This is a great UX improvement for Drupal that makes forms much more usable where fields have a set cardinality.

  • https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/issues/1156338

• Views handler loading should respect configuration. Fixing this bug will enable more flexible configuration of Views.

  • https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/issues/3458099

• Configurable views filters to allow for different widgets. Once the bug above is fixed, we can provide a UI for selecting the views handler, supporting more robust filtering options.

  • https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/issues/3438054

And, as in the previous edition, the reward will be 50 credits for contributing to resolving these issues (5x the standard credit amount). Sounds good?

While these issues are not good candidates for a user or organization's first time contribution, they are a great opportunity for more senior contributors to have an impact.

Special thanks to: Tim Lehnen, Pamela Barone, Gábor Hojtsy, Nathaniel Catchpole and everyone that I am missing in and out of the core team for their help and support in identifying candidate issues for these bounties.
 

The Bounty program started as a proof of concept to validate that we can help align the goals of the Drupal Association and Drupal itself, with the goals of individuals, companies, and the rest of the community, and hence, accelerate Drupal Innovation.

You may remember that this started during my tenure with the Drupal Association, and although my contract and direct involvement reached to an end at the beginning of the year, I committed myself, even before I left, to continuing the work I started with the Drupal Association, but especially with Drupal as a project, and the community. That’s why I’m still committed to helping run and coordinating this and other innovation programs, and that’s why I’m running as well for the Board of Directors (more on this soon).

It's just a very tiny difference, but hopefully a big step forward for our users. Our main download web page (which still uses the URL https://www.debian.org/distrib/) now has the title "Download Debian". Hopefully this will improve the results in the search engines.

• 1998: The title "Distribution" was added
• 2002: Title changed to "Getting Debian"
• 2024: Finally changed to "Download Debian"

Here are the screenshots of these three versions.

I like that we had a selection menu on the top right corner to select a mirror for downloading in the past.

A few days ago I've also removed the info "Internal ISDN cards are unfortunately not supported." from the netinst subpage. Things are moving forward, but slowly.

Most banks are behind CDNs and DDoS mitigation providers nowadays, though they still hold their own IP space. Was interested in this, so compiled a list from BGP.Tools and Hurricane Electric BGP Toolkit.

• AS24055 Deutsche Bank AG-India Internet AS
• AS38468 ASN for Yes Bank
• AS45644 SBI-EMS-NET-IN
• AS59194 Central Bank of India
• AS17436 ICICIBANK Ltd, Banking, Mumbai
• AS131283 HDFC Bank House
• AS132440 Unity Small Finance Bank Pvt. Ltd.
• AS132946 Ujjivan Small Finance Bank Ltd
• AS132989 Sangli Urban Co-operative Bank Ltd
• AS133640 Indian Overseas Bank
• AS133657 IndusInd Bank Ltd
• AS134909 The South Indian Bank Ltd
• AS135086 Axis Bank Limited
• AS135745 UCO Bank
• AS135819 Chaitanya Godavari Grameena Bank
• AS136252 The Bank of Baroda Limited
• AS136324 IDBI Bank Ltd
• AS136622 Equitas Small Finance Bank Ltd
• AS136707 The Kalupur Commercial Co-operative Bank Limited
• AS136680 Bank of Maharashtra
• AS137104 India Post Payments Bank Limited
• AS137108 Bank of India
• AS137130 Punjab National Bank
• AS137662 IDFC Bank Ltd
• AS137670 Canara Bank
• AS138318 The Visakhapatnam Cooperative Bank Ltd
• AS140156 Karnataka Gramin Bank
• AS141222 Telangana State Coorperative Apex Bank Ltd
• AS141561 Punjab and Sind Bank
• AS146870 TJSB Sahakari Bank Ltd
• AS149202 The Jammu And Kashmir Bank Pvt Ltd
• AS149528 Indian Bank
• AS149603 Suryoday Small Finance Bank Limited
• AS150029 The Karnataka Bank Ltd
• AS151172 CSB Bank Ltd
• AS151692 Small Industries Development Bank of India

Other noteable mentions:

• AS141857 National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development
• AS151773 Reserve Bank Information Technology Pvt Ltd

Let me know if I’m missing someone. Many thanks to Saswata Sarkar for helping with the list.

The Drupal Association engineering team is preparing to switch over to our new single sign-on solution for user login. This is an important step in our work to upgrade Drupal.org, and in the future will give you the ability to use your Drupal.org identity in new ways. 

This switchover was previously scheduled for Thursday, 25 July, but unfortunately we had to roll-back that attempt. After pausing for a week to avoid disrupting the Drupal 11 release window, we are ready to try again.

The switch-over is scheduled for:

• Thursday 8 August - from 9am to 1pm Pacific (16:00-20:00 UTC).

During this window you will not be able to update your Drupal.org profile, and during portions of this window you may not be able to login to Drupal.org, and may not be able to access related services which use your Drupal identity, such as git.drupalcode.org.

Below you'll find the details from our original blog post about how the login experience will look different: 

When you click to login or create an account you will be redirected to: accounts.drupal.org 

You will log in with your existing Drupal.org username or email and your current password, and your two factor authentication code if you have TFA enabled.

Once you log in, you will have to change your password.

If you have Two Factor Authentication enabled, you will also have to set up a new seed.

After that, you'll be taken back to Drupal.org as normal. You should be directed back to the path you came from.

When you click 'create account' on Drupal.org you will be taken to the new account creation page: 

After you complete the basic information,  you will be taken to the Drupal.org welcome page to fill out the rest of your user profile.

The majority of your account information will continue to live in your Drupal.org profile, however, some basic account information will now be stored and updated in the Drupal.org SSO system.

When you click to edit your first and last name, username, password, email address, or enable two factor authentication you'll be taken to the account page:

This account settings page is also where you can change your Two Factor Authentication settings. You can use the 'Account Security' tab in the sidebar to navigate to the Two Factor setup process:

If you have forgotten your password, you can reset your password from the login page:

You will receive a password reset email from noreply@drupal.org allowing you to change your password.

If you encounter any issues with your account, please contact us at help@drupal.org

We want to thank two of our partners for supporting this project.

Cloud-IAM is our SSO partner. Cloud-IAM is a privacy centric provider of hosted solutions for Keycloak, an open source identity management service. They are enthusiastic supporters of the Drupal community, and would like to offer any site owners and agencies who are looking for their own identity and access management service 10% off, with promo code: DRUPAL10.

Our implementation partner on this project was Tag1Consulting. Tag1Consulting is a global team of Drupal experts working with clients from non-profits to the Fortune 500, and is one of the top contributors to Drupal. They have been the Drupal Association's infrastructure partner for many years. 

Authored by Nadiia Nykolaichuk.

Drupal 11.0.0 has been successfully released as a new major Drupal version which is very exciting news for everyone using Drupal or thinking about making the switch! This flexible, accessible, powerful, integration-ready, and secure CMS has transformed even more on the way from Drupal 10 to Drupal 11. 

I'm excited to share the first version of Drupal Starshot's product strategy, a document that aims to guide the development and marketing of Drupal Starshot. To read it, download the full Drupal Starshot strategy document as a PDF (8 MB).

This strategy document is the result of a collaborative effort among the Drupal Starshot leadership team, the Drupal Starshot Advisory Council, and the Drupal Core Committers. We also tested it with marketers who provided feedback and validation.

Drupal Starshot is the temporary codename for an initiative that extends the capabilities of Drupal Core. Drupal Starshot aims to broaden Drupal's appeal to marketers and a wider range of project budgets. Our ultimate goal is to increase Drupal's adoption, solidify Drupal's position as a leading CMS, and champion an Open Web.

For more context, please watch my DrupalCon Portland keynote.

It's important to note that Drupal Starshot and Drupal Core will have separate yet complementary product strategies. Drupal Starshot will focus on empowering marketers and expanding Drupal's presence in the mid-market, while Drupal Core will prioritize the needs of developers and more technical users. I'll write more about the Drupal Core product strategy in a future blog post once we have finalized it. Together, these two strategies will form a comprehensive vision for Drupal as a product.

By defining our goals, target audience and necessary features, we can more effectively guide contributors and ensure that everyone is working towards a common vision. This product strategy will serve as a foundation for our development roadmap, our marketing efforts, enabling Drupal Certified Partners, and more.

For the detailed product strategy, please read the full Drupal Starshot strategy document (8 MB, PDF). Below is just a summary.

Drupal Starshot aims to be the gold standard for marketers that want to build great digital experiences.

We'd like to expand Drupal's reach by focusing on two strategic shifts:

1. Prioritizing Drupal for content creators, marketers, web managers, and web designers so they can independently build websites. A key goal is to empower these marketing professionals to build and manage their websites independently without relying on developers or having to use the command line or an IDE.
2. Extending Drupal's presence in the mid-market segment, targeting projects with total budgets between $30,000 and $120,000 USD (€25,000 to €100,000).

Drupal Starshot will differentiate itself from competitors by providing:

1. A thoughtfully designed platform for marketers, balancing ease of use with flexibility. It includes smart defaults, best practices for common marketing tasks, marketing-focused editorial tools, and helpful learning resources.
2. A growth-oriented approach. Start simple with Drupal Starshot's user-friendly tools, and unlock advanced features as your site grows or you gain expertise. With sophisticated content modeling, efficient content reuse across channels, and robust integrations with other leading marketing technologies, ambitious marketers won't face the limitations of other CMSs and will have the flexibility to scale their site as needed.
3. AI-assisted site building tools to simplify complex tasks, making Drupal accessible to a wider range of users.
4. Drupal's existing competitive advantages such as extensibility, scalability, security, accessibility, multilingual support, and more.

The product strategy is a living document, and we value input. We invite you to share your thoughts, suggestions, and questions in the product strategy feedback issue within the Drupal Starshot issue queue.

There are many opportunities to get involved with Drupal Starshot, whether you're a marketer, developer, designer, writer, project manager, or simply passionate about the future of Drupal. To learn more about how you can contribute to Drupal Starshot, visit https://drupal.org/starshot.

I'd like to thank the Drupal Starshot leadership team, the Drupal Starshot Advisory Council, and the Drupal Core Committers for their input on the strategy. I'm also grateful for the marketers who provided feedback on our strategy, helping us refine our approach.

So you’ve decided to change to Drupal, or maybe you are making a major upgrade from a really old version of Drupal to a more modern one and you are concerned about your SEO.

Changing content management systems will impact your search engine optimization (SEO), but with careful consideration and planning this can be a positive change rather than a negative one.

There are many misconceptions about search engine optimization, and part of that is because the industry has often been cast in a negative light. Really SEO is the process of making sure your website meets certain guidelines and standards so search engines can understand its content, relevance, and value to users.