Resetting expectations: Fedora Infrastructure Changes
by Stephen John Smoogen
Over many years, I have found that Infrastructure is very much like a
rose garden. Roses grow fairly well by themselves, but soon can
entangle up with each other into quite a knotted patch (judging from
the garden I have left to its own devices for the last 4 years). I
have very pretty flowers all spring, summer and fall long, but every
now and then you have to do a large amount of pruning or it all falls
apart as things age out. The amazing thing with roses is you can prune
them down to the bare essentials and in a season they will be
producing flowers again.
To continue the analogy, my current job is to be the temporary head
gardener while we look for someone who can do the job as well as the
last fellow. The garden has grown from having good volunteer gardeners
come in and put in various plants. Now sometimes the gardener then has
to go somewhere else, and sometimes the plant gets away from them. In
either case, we have a bunch of plants that look pretty but are taking
too much time in how they are currently planted. And so its time to
prune them so that they can either grow anew or something better can
be planted in its place.
In order to prune stuff, I have looked at the following:
1. Do we currently have experts inside of the project working on
the software to make it better.
2. Is there someone doing this better than we can do on our own
using the same criteria we use (FLOSS software, open development,
etc).
3. Is keeping it in-house pulling away from core Fedora services
and tasks we would like to accomplish.
4. There is nothing wrong with paying others who do great stuff
with FLOSS software especially when paying supports those projects.
This came up with a list of items that we have but aren't getting much
love, require a lot of work (eg volunteer help has to be supplemented
by full-time people), and could be better housed somewhere else:
1. translate.fedoraproject.org. Transifex software is what is used
there, and has a very active upstream at transifex.net. Currently the
version we are using is considered dead-software and the version we
have slowly gotten onto our staging servers is soon to be dead soon.
With many other projects already moving their documents to the
upstream servers, transifex.net, this looks to be a good candidate to
move out of our infrastructure.
2. blogs.fedoraproject.org. The blogging software we are using is
Wordpress-MU which again has an active upstream that we are multiple
versions behind (Ricky Z spends his time back-porting security fixes).
The service also does not get that much use and the blogs there would
be better off at WordPress.
3. talk.fedoraproject.org. The asterisk server gets about 8 phone
calls a month. It is a very ancient version and it seems a continual
effort to keep up with the upstream.
4. zarafa. While housing email and calendering for various
sub-projects does have value... it also brings up all kinds of
security and compliance issues (compared to dealing with email lists).
5. various mailing lists. There have been a lot of projects with a
lot of mailing lists opened. But they haven't taken off and are just
waiting for some sort of spam agent to sign up and use us to drop
links. This one is easy for us to deal with. We can contact owners and
close off lists that aren't in use anymore.
6. cleaning out old system administrators. We have had a lot of
good people come into infrastructure and then that cruel mistress,
Real Life, has at some point taken them away again. Removing people
from system administration groups who have not logged in for 60 days
is a way to make sure we lower security risks.
Now usually after a post like this occurs, we get a bunch of
volunteers who will say "We can take this over." I am asking people
not to do this, because frankly volunteering under pressure usually
means leaving when the pressure is gone. We have gone this route
several times before, and its not something I think is sustainable.
We will look for volunteers who can replant the services, document
them, build out a staging and production service and train OTHER
volunteers on them so that any replacement service has a chance of
lasting.
--
Stephen J Smoogen.
"The core skill of innovators is error recovery, not failure avoidance."
Randy Nelson, President of Pixar University.
"Let us be kind, one to another, for most of us are fighting a hard
battle." -- Ian MacLaren
12 years, 1 month
Insight meeting recap 2011-02-17 UTC 1900
by Paul W. Frields
Minutes:
http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting/2011-02-17/insight.2011-0...
Minutes (text):
http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting/2011-02-17/insight.2011-0...
Log:
http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting/2011-02-17/insight.2011-0...
Meeting summary
---------------
* Roll call! (stickster, 19:01:01)
* Meeting time adjustment? (stickster, 19:03:27)
* Development (stickster, 19:06:26)
* ACTION: stickster raise meeting time issue & matrix on list
(stickster, 19:07:02)
* ACTION: stickster talk to smooge about the module he checked in (for
puppet?) and then help him flesh it out (stickster, 19:10:43)
* AGREED: asrob will research community i18n/l10n module choices and
write to the list with results and recommendation (stickster,
19:22:47)
* Theme (stickster, 19:24:25)
* schendje_ is hard at work, and other people have expressed interest
in helping! (stickster, 19:25:04)
* IDEA: stickster could add a cron job to do this regularly, but he is
not sure if smooge and the Infra team want any cron jobs running as
root on a publictest host. (stickster, 19:27:39)
* AGREED: tatica and schendje_ (and hopefully stickster) will meet
after this meeting to make sure tatica has the info she needs to
help (stickster, 19:28:56)
* More on development/puppet (stickster, 19:29:28)
* ACTION: stickster make a cron job to run every half hour to pull
theme (stickster, 19:30:21)
* ACTION: stickster Package ninesixty base theme
(drupal6-theme-ninesixty) to make puppet's job easier (stickster,
19:34:33)
* AGREED: While theme is in development, we won't package it, but when
it's done, we'll package it for the infrastructure repo only, since
(for example) it contains logos. (stickster, 19:36:53)
* LINK: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Orientation_Infrastructure_SOP
<-- orientation URL (stickster, 19:39:54)
* ACTION: asrob stickster complete the orientation at the URL above
(stickster, 19:40:23)
* ACTION: averi to help asrob get added to sysadmin-test so he can
help manage the test server now (stickster, 19:44:53)
* ACTION: stickster compile list of files that aren't packaged so they
can be added to the puppet module (stickster, 19:45:26)
* Planet JustFedora and Insight (pcalarco's idea) (averi, 19:48:40)
* IDEA: Let's revisit the idea of which source feed we use at a later
meeting (stickster, 19:58:01)
Meeting ended at 19:58:46 UTC.
Action Items
------------
* stickster raise meeting time issue & matrix on list
* stickster talk to smooge about the module he checked in (for puppet?)
and then help him flesh it out
* stickster make a cron job to run every half hour to pull theme
* stickster Package ninesixty base theme (drupal6-theme-ninesixty) to
make puppet's job easier
* asrob stickster complete the orientation at the URL above
* averi to help asrob get added to sysadmin-test so he can help manage
the test server now
* stickster compile list of files that aren't packaged so they can be
added to the puppet module
Action Items, by person
-----------------------
* asrob
* asrob stickster complete the orientation at the URL above
* averi to help asrob get added to sysadmin-test so he can help manage
the test server now
* averi
* averi to help asrob get added to sysadmin-test so he can help manage
the test server now
* smooge
* stickster talk to smooge about the module he checked in (for
puppet?) and then help him flesh it out
* stickster
* stickster raise meeting time issue & matrix on list
* stickster talk to smooge about the module he checked in (for
puppet?) and then help him flesh it out
* stickster make a cron job to run every half hour to pull theme
* stickster Package ninesixty base theme (drupal6-theme-ninesixty) to
make puppet's job easier
* asrob stickster complete the orientation at the URL above
* stickster compile list of files that aren't packaged so they can be
added to the puppet module
* **UNASSIGNED**
* (none)
People Present (lines said)
---------------------------
* stickster (109)
* averi (50)
* asrob (25)
* smooge (20)
* schendje_ (12)
* tatica (8)
* zodbot (7)
* glezos (5)
* CodeBlock (3)
* gomix-fricky (1)
Generated by `MeetBot`_ 0.1.4
.. _`MeetBot`: http://wiki.debian.org/MeetBot
--
Paul W. Frields http://paul.frields.org/
gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233 5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717
http://redhat.com/ - - - - http://pfrields.fedorapeople.org/
Where open source multiplies: http://opensource.com
12 years, 1 month
Fedora Activity Day at Indiana Linux Festival March 25-27, 2011
by Pascal Calarco
Hi Fedora Community Team and Fedora Insight Logistics folk--
I have been working on preparation for the Indiana Linux Fest at the end of March, in Indianapolis. I'm excited that we have great response, with at least six people from the Fedora community expected to attend!
I would like your input and thoughts in regard to the Fedora Activity Day we would like to have at ILF.
Initially, I was thinking that we would have a FAD around Fedora Insight. This would dovetail nicely with the DrupalCon that is being held at ILF on Sunday, March 27 after the main conference day on Saturday. I have confirmed with the conference organizers that we can have room either on Friday, March 25 or Sunday, March 27 for the FAD. Great!
The thing I am worried about is the fact that I am perhaps going to be the only person on-site who is involved with Fedora Insight right now, and so am rethinking the benefit of having a FAD around that when everyone else will be remote.
So, I wanted all of your feedback on another possibility: have a FAD around The Open Source Way.
At FUDCon Tempe, I talked to Mark Terranova at some length on this project, kind of as a follow up to Karsten's interest in perhaps having a hackathon on TOSW at Tempe, but events transpired such that he wasn't able to join us there.
I think a FAD around TOSW would have broader interest and draw those in from outside the Fedora Project, and we could either run this on the Friday or on Sunday. Mark intends to attend ILF as an Ambassador, and so I wanted to throw this out to the Community Architecture team to see if any of Karsten/Mel/Max/Paul/Jared intent to be at ILF and if any of you think we'd get more value out of a TOSW FAD than a Fedora Insight FAD.
Comments and feedback very welcome! Thanks!
- pascal
12 years, 1 month
Willing to help Fedora Insight project
by Danny Stieben
Hello Logistics people :)
I just wanted to announce that I'm willing to help out the Fedora
Insight project however I can. I'm ready to have someone assign me a
task (or however you guys do it).
Some skills I can give:
* Translation to German
* Help with Drupal (I actually have Joomla experience, but I assume I
could apply some concepts to Drupal)
* Design/Graphics
* Author for Articles
I'm also a student, so I have a pretty full schedule and therefore
cannot guarantee timely contributions, but I'll make sure to provide my
fair share.
Thanks!
--
Danny Stieben
Fedora Ambassador | Design | Docs | Marketing | Translation
http://www.fedoraproject.org
dmaxel(a)fedoraproject.org
http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/user:dmaxel
12 years, 1 month
