We’ve just started our this years Easter Egg Challenge … We’ve put a couple of patches on to our testserver CACERT1 for you, our fellow and our new Software testers. We’ve put light to heavy patches to the package so everybody is able to walk thru the testserver web pages and search our Easter Egg’s.
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Within the last 2 days, the testserver got the running signer integration into the testserver environment. This was one of the milestones in getting a testing environment as identical as possible to the production system.
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Todays systemlog message marks the quantum leap in our about 10 months project work, to become the Software-Assessment area auditable.
As many Software-Updates are in the queue from the software developers, that needs testing and reviews by Software Assessors, the team started by end of last year with this project,
The systemlog message signals, that the first tested and reviewed patches has received by the critical system webdb and is incorporated into production. A new tarball has been generated to build the next basis for applying the next patches.
So here my thanks goes to all the involved teams,
With all these people assistance, this project hadn’t be pushed to this milestone. Thank you Andreas, to build the project plan and the technical background, and also hosting the current testserver, Thank you Wytze for all your work to build the new testserver from scratch as identical as possible to the production server, to Michael, who assist us in deploying the new git repository and also assistance in deploying the Testserver-Mgmt-System, so everybody can start testing w/o the need of console access, Thank you Markus, for all your time and effort to deploy the repository and testserver environment and also your work together with Philipp as Software-Assessor, to finalyze the Software-Update-Cycle. Thank you Dirk for all your suggestions to move on with this project.
Some more work is todo:
Now the teams have to walk thru the list of open bugs, that needs to be pushed thru … First of all is the “Thawte” bug … to signal all users who’ve got their Thawte points transfered by the old Tverify program if they are effected by the points removal or if they are safe. The CCA-Rollout with a couple of patches, a list of new Policies and Subpolicies related patches (eg. PoJAM, TTP program), a list of Arbitration pushed patches, and so on …
So guys, lets have a party tonight, we’ve wiped out one of the biggest audit blockers!
Back in January 2010 the former Board decided by Board motion m20100117.3 “No new subroots on current root, plan for new root”. In the discussion a date was scheduled by end of Dec 31, 2010. On my 2nd thought, probably nobody did recognize, what that means, 
to finish all the projects from the bottom left corner at beginning of 2010 to the top right corner by end of the year with the “New Roots and Escrow” (
) process running. So this article should bring Audits mistery to light.
Policy Group worked on the last few essential Policies (
), that are essential for the Audit. One essential requirement for Audit is to Rollout the CAcert Community Agreement to all the members, so they can decide to continue or to leave the Community. To become “CCA Rollout Ready” (
), the running Software needs to be updated. This opens the next problem: by starting 2010, there was no Software Update Process defined, nor documented. But we’re on the lucky side, the Software-Assessment-Project started November last year to fulfill this requirement (
). The task was: To get a repository system controlled by Software-Assessment team, a controlled testserver environment and a documentation system. Currently the team tests the transfer of a test patch to the production system. Involved parties: Software-Assessment Project team, Software-Assessment team and the Critical Sysadmins team.
CAcert’s Big Masterplan To become Audit Ready (10/2010)
In the meantime, another issue pop’d up: the “Thawte points removal” with a deadline of Nov 16th, 2010. We’ve allready posted several blog posts on this topic. So also this is related onto the Software-Assessment-Project progress ().
The next topic is running Assurer Training Events (ATE) (
). ATE’s are an essential concept in the Audit over Assurance (RA) business area. To scale a worldwide community, the community has to assist Auditors work in doing Co-Audits over Assurers. The question: How to contact groups of Assurers was answered back in 2009 with the ATE concept. The purpose of ATE is twofolded: first to communicate to the Assurers all the new informations and second to do Co-Audits. As Assurers follows the invitations to the ATEs we can expect, that they are more active in the community. So also from 2009 ATE experiences, we’ve got new resources from the community by contacts on ATEs (). So this was the plan for 2010 ATE season, to find more people, who can help on the several tasks and projects that needs to be finished, before the new Roots and Escrow project and also the Audit can be (re-)started. E.g.
Helping CAcert
). This project is running about 2 years, but currently without progress.
), that was started last year, after Auditors review of the Software that concludes: „Serious difficulties in maintaining, improving and securing.” and „Cannot form conclusion over software.”, so if the plan to start with the Audit over the old Software fails, we’re close to the 2nd path: BirdShack.
), that becomes the ground base for the New Roots and Escrow project () that should be keep tracked by an Auditor, and the re-start of the Audit ( 1) and ( 2).The New Roots and Escrow Project Relation to Audit
As said before, the New Roots and Escrow Project should be keep tracked by an Auditor. From the experiences back in 2008 on creating New Roots but fail on Roots Escrow, we’re warned to separate the Audit steps of the New Roots and Escrow Project () and the Audit over Systems ( 2). Both tasks should be close together.
On the other side, we have to do an Audit over Assurance (Registration Authority, RA) ( 1). There is no requirement on bundling the RA Audit and CA Audit as both business areas have their own Policy sets and can be checked separately. This can make our work presumably easier. Easier to get Audit funding for Audit over RA. As Assurance area is closer to be Audit Ready, we can also signal to the Community Audit is back on track. This will probably push the other tasks. With a small budget we probably can double the result by getting new resources, “Hey, there is progress on the overall Audit task” – CAcert is back!
Within the last week we’ve reached one milestone in our new Software-Assessment-Project.
The team is working since November 2009 on a new Software Repository and a new Testserver.
The Testserver needed a Testserver Mgmt System to set the environment for testing new Software and Patches for the Webdb system.
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The November 2009 blog post Last chance: End of thawte points transfer on 16th november 2009 was the starting point for the moving of Thawte Notarys to CAcert … but this is half of the story. November 16th 2010 ends the verification period of transfered points. So the 150 points transfer will be lost. To prevent the loss of Assurance and Experience Points all members using this program needs to search for assurers to get fully assured and starting also assurances to get the needed experience points. Until now, the addtl. Assurances doesn’t count, but added to the account until the Points Count process will be changed before Nov 16th 2010, so the last assurance points counts.
This will become a big shift in this year until November 2010. Current work is to prepare the building of the Software Assessment Team and the Repository project to make Software updates possible. This project is a not so well noticed project still running in the background. But if someone reads the Software MiniTOP Updates from Dec 2009 and February 2010, those can reads the progress that is made in this area. This is also a requirement for the CCA Rollout plan that needs to be started around mid of this year to succeed before Audit can continue.
If you have further questions regarding the Thawte transfer points removal, please go to the public CAcert Support mailing list.