Because I work on Jenkins day in day out, it's easy for me to forget that most people don't pay /that/ much attention to Jenkins. If you fit that category, and if you want to stay on top of the latest happenings in Jenkins, don’t miss Volume 2 of Continuous Information, the CloudBees Newsletter for Jenkins.

This issue...

• Features details about the 6 upcoming Jenkins User Conferences (don’t miss these)
• Announces the new Jenkins CIA Program (join us to promote Jenkins around the globe)
• Shows you where to find in-depth information about the latest Jenkins UI improvements and featured plugins (cool stuff)
• Highlights the importance of Jenkins Security Advisories (install these regularly)
• Tells you why Jenkins has blue balls instead of green ones (seriously)
• Shows you the latest Jenkins Usage Stats (still growing super-fast)
• … and more great stuff, including a bit of Jenkins humor (courtesy of our friends at Geek and Poke)

(Editor's note: Apologies for the delay in getting this wrap-up out, it's been quite a busy month!)

This year has already been full of milestones, the first of which being our first birthday as an open source project. The second major milestone for the project was that we went to FOSDEM 2012, arguably the largest volunteer-organized and operated open source conference on the planet.

We had a couple of things going on at FOSDEM that merit a mention:

• The Jenkins project had a stand in the K building, the same building where the Free Java, Config and Systems Management, and a few other pertinent dev rooms were located
• The Jenkins project gave away 2 free copies of John Smart's book: "Jenkins: The Definitive Guide" (thanks to O'Reilly!)
• Community member R. Tyler Croy gave a talk on running the Jenkins project infrastructure with Puppet
• The O'Reilly folks brought 10+ Jenkins books to sell at their stand.
• Project founder Kohsuke Kawaguchi and a number of project members held a constructive UI Enhancements discussion.

We were very fortunate to have so many Jenkins contributors in attendance, who all helped with the Jenkins stand, introducing people to Jenkins and much more.

FOSDEM in their own words

Our earlier appeal for donation was a drastic boost to our fund-raising drive, (and looking at the twitter reactions, it feels like the Wikipedia parody we put on Jenkins on Jenkins helped spread the words — I guess jokes do work!

And I'm happy to report that we've successfully raised over $12000 as of today. That's more than enough to pay off all the current balance and it should keep the project going for quite a while. I've assembled the donor list in appreciation.

So once again, thanks everyone for their generous support!

Since the end of April, Jenkins has been officially part of the SPI (Software in the Public Interest), an umbrella organization which offers a useful level of legal status for the project.

Up until recently we had not taken proper advantage of this new legal umbrella, thankfully that's changed as we're now capable of accepting donations!

For the project this is a big step forward as it will allow us to offset the cost of servers for the project, bandwidth, SSL certificates and other costs incurred as part of running such a large open source project.

Trivia: The machine that this page is being served from originally started out as "hudson labs", purchased and colocated by abayer, kohsuke and myself.

Since we're now able to accept donations, we're kicking off a donation drive to help recover some of the costs incurred this summer (which I've discussed previously). Our immediate goal is to raise $5130 to recoup bandwidth costs, if you can spare some change, head on over to the SPI online donation page and help us out :)

Let me preface this entire post with this: I love Contegix.

While working on some infrastructure tasks I had long-since put-off for the Jenkins project, I noticed something this weekend that scared the hell out of me.

At some undetermined time, our MirrorBrain installation stopped redirecting to our mirror network. Absolutely zero downloads were being redirected, meaning that cucumber, the 1U machine graciously colocated by Contegix had served up far more bits than I ever wanted it to.

As such, I would like to publicly apologize to Contegix on behalf of the Jenkins project. Their support for the project has been tremendous but this glitch caused such an incredible amount of traffic to be pushed through their network that I feel exceptionally bad about it (turns out, Jenkins is pretty popular!)

Now, for the good news. In diagnosing and debugging this issue (in a caffeine-fueled frenzy I might add) I managed to do a couple things:

• I corrected the redirection relatively easily
• I fixed our long-standing geo-location issue, finally enabling redirection to our european and asian mirrors!

Within 30 minutes of correcting the error, I was able to add two mirrors in Germany, re-enable one from Taiwan and add a new mirror in Japan!