= 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 [[https://app.dashlane.com/|Dashlane service]]
 * nielx will do some investigating and make a proposal about the best solution on haiku-sysadmin
 
=== Containers
 * `kallisti5` has an overview of how infrastructure should use in his opinion https://github.com/haiku/infrastructure/blob/master/docs/haiku-infrastructure.png
 * Advantages of containers: all the benefits of VMs, none of the performance hits
 * Fewer/none VMs also mean less maintenance
 * Docker will be used, the configuration will be stored, shared and maintained on https://github.com/haiku/infrastructure
 * `kallisti5` and `jessicah` are the resident Docker experts

'''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'''
 * `nielx` wonders about the state of Haikudepot
 * `waddlesplash` notes that it goes out of memory often
 * Can be found on github: https://github.com/aplgithub/haikudepotserver
 * `nielx` will contact the maintainer Andrew Lindesay

'''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