wiki:Infrastructure/MeetingMinutes/2017-10-08

Sysadmin Meeting Minutes

Participants
kallisti5, waddlesplash, nielx
Date
8 October 2017

Decisions

The following decisions were made:

  • All essential services will be moved to maui
  • Baron will be decommissioned when that process has finished
  • The team will first focus on moving/retiring the services on vmrepo. With those lessons learned the rest of the plan can be made.

Action Points

The following tasks were created and assigned:

  • nielx: Investigate the best way to share critical passwords
  • kallisti5: Investigate moving git and cgit to maui, in combination with gerrit
  • nielx: Investigate haikudepot and work on moving it
  • nielx: investigate the svn and hg repositories on vmrepo and see if they need to move

Minutes

Current plans

  • Move essential services to the new maui server
  • Decommission baron and return the server to Hertzner
  • The new server will primarily use Docker containers to host the services

Maui

  • This is a beefy new server to replace baron.

Server Specs

  • Hosted by Hetzner (like baron)
  • 64 GB of RAM (was 16 GB)
  • 4 TiB in a RAID 1 mirror
  • More CPUs than baron
  • Runs on Fedora server
  • Setup with SELinux in enforcing mode

Documentation

  • kallisti5 did the initial configuration

Access to maui

  • Current access is for axeld, jessicah, pulkomandy, kallisti5, waddlesplash, nielx
  • Though pulkomandy has indicated that after initial setup he does not want to be a permanent member of the system administration team

Server configuration: Puppet

  • User administration is done using Puppet https://www.lennu.net/puppet-manifest-examples
  • In the future it could also be used for firewall rules, config files, etc.
  • Puppet serves both as configurator, and as documentation (for when a server needs to be rebuild)

Security/Sysadmin team

  • Question is how do we share critical and sensitive information
  • The approach was to store them on baron for root users
  • Major downside: what do you do when baron is down
  • Alternatives:
    • Share this data in the haiku-sysadmin team on Keybase (decentralized encrypted communication and fileshare)
    • Use the Dashlane service
  • nielx will do some investigating and make a proposal about the best solution on haiku-sysadmin

Containers

Challenges of using Docker for packaging infrastructure

  • The largest challenges are with the whole package building infrastructure, because:
    • It has several ties with git hooks and git repositories and it relies on 'internal' communication
    • By nature of that it relies on external processes it is quite something to 'contain' in one container
  • kallisti5 has taken some steps to look into it, but the difficulty is that the setup is still a moving target

Why Docker?

  • Docker is a tool that helps to create, maintain and deploy containers.
  • They are exactly exactly that: a contained set of software, that is connected to contained data volumes.
  • In theory they are highly portable, one might just pick a container and its data up and deploy elsewhere.
  • It also means that the actual software deployments are documented in the Docker scripts
  • Docker-compose will be used to deploy containers to maui. Example for gerrit: https://github.com/haiku/infrastructure/blob/master/docker/gerrit/docker-compose.yml
    • Docker-compose runs all the docker commands on the server to deploy
  • nielx informed about the relation with the Dockerfile: kallisti5 explains that this is the blueprint to build an image, and docker-compose is about deploying that image
  • More on Docker: https://docs.docker.com/engine/docker-overview/

Migration Timeline

  • It seems that vmrepo is ready to migrate within weeks
  • The most important services are git and cgit
    • kallisti5 has been working on those, in combination with Gerrit
    • nielx asks if it is an option to first move over the git and cgit services as is, and later add/attach gerrit
    • kallisti5` will investigate that

Haikudepot on vmrepo

SVN repositories on vmrepo

  • There are still two repositories hosted on http://svn.haiku-os.org/
  • Both are out of use
  • nielx will have a look to see whether they need to be transferred over, or if they are somewhere permanently stored
  • nielx will also look at the mercurial repositories hosted there.

Maintaining Baron

  • The maui maintainers will do essential maintenance on baron
  • It has been decided that there will be no major changes to baron, but instead to focus on moving services
Last modified 6 years ago Last modified on Jun 13, 2018, 1:32:35 AM
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