[Systems] Upcoming sysadmin tasks (Was: My Sugar Labs Membership)

[Bernie Innocenti]

[cc += systems@]

El Tue, 06-10-2009 a las 14:21 -0500, Sebastian Silva escribió:
> 
> Very well i'm ready to start working on these. I'd also be able to
> offer help in the infrastructure team, if it helps, I'm quite the
> orderly sysadmin.

Great, I need more help actually.  I don't even have the time to compile
a decent list of the tasks that need to be done! :-)

The highest priority now is completing beamrider, a twin VM of
sunjammer, then move all the high-profile, high-traffic services there:
pootle, trac and remora (aka aslo).

Ideally, these two VMs would maintain a similar configuration so it
would be easy to start working on new bits of infrastructure on
sunjammer and then migrate everything to beamrider for production.

This week I need to finish setting up the KVM host (treehouse), which is
currently running the old versions of qemu and libvirtd from Ubuntu
Jaunty which were very fragile and barely manageable.  I can only
perform such a disruptive change now that treehouse is not yet hosting
any production VM.

Provisioning is starting to become a problem: creating accounts on
multiple machines and distributing ssh keys does not scale well.  I
think we should investigate a centralized solution such as ssh+lpk or a
distrib

Finally, I'd like to move the master nameserver and LDAP 


> Do you think its a good idea to have a new instance of medawiki for
> each local lab?

It depends.  I leave this decision to the individual Lab Leaders.  The
Washington DC Local Lab asked for a redirection to a page in the main
wiki.  Chile and Colombia are using independent wikis.

It may make more sense to group the wikis by language rather than by
nation (like the Wikipedia).  Even if each lab has its own independent
front page, connectivity between other pages tends to be very high
between if language is the same.  But it may also create problems of
"jurisdiction" between Local Labs that may evolve in nasty ways.  This
is why I think sharing infrastructure should be a free choice of the
Local Labs.

>From a technical PoV, managing a dozen of Mediawiki instances can be
reasonably straightforward as long as you don't let them drift apart.  I
already use a method based on symlinks, so I only need to upgrade a
master instance.

For now, I keep the LocalConfig.php files in sync with vimdiff.  When it
starts to become unfeasible, we could split the common part to a
CommonConfig.php file included by all the LocalConfig.php instances.


> I'm copying rafael on this - i'm ready to begin gardening and the wiki
> is a good place to start.

That would be great, thank you.  Please, meet me on #sugar for the
provisioning ritual.


>  Also "somosazucar" is generic enough to, for instance, carry
> a spanish version of the landing site at plain "sugarlabs.org"
> sometime.
>  
>         ...these are the nameservers you should
>         configure:
> 
> I thank you for the offer, I managed to point the domains
> (somosazucar.org+.com+.net)
> to SL nameservers.
> 
> 
>         Besides your own domain, I'd suggest setting up the two-letter
>         ISO code
>         pe.sugarlabs.org for uniformity with the other Local Labs.
> 
> What I'd like to do is have a wiki at pe.sugarlabs and point the new
> domains
> there to begin with. Let me know how I can help with this. Also,
> should I go register a
> new google apps account for emails, or do we add the new domains to
> the sugarlabs
> google apps account? Let me know whatever is less work for you.
> 
> I'll start pointing the MX records to mail.google whatever the case. 
> 
> 
> > I'll begin using my @sugarlabs.org email account for sugar-related
> > stuff, if that is ok with you.
> >
> 
>         Thanks!
>         
>         
>         --
>           // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/
>          \X/  Sugar Labs       - http://sugarlabs.org/
>         
> 


-- 
   // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/
 \X/  Sugar Labs       - http://sugarlabs.org/