Hello all, This past weekend, several DSA (Stephen Gran, Peter Palfrader and Martin Zobel-Helas) met in Munich to talk about some of the issues facing DSA.
We discussed the following issues: - userdir-ldap (the Debian account management system): Most of the changes needed here are programmatic ones, rather than admin as such, but streamlining this code base would help to eliminate some of the slow downs in handling less common requests. - configuration management system: This is currently provided by puppet. It is largely working, but we need to resurrect our development environment to make it less painful to test intrusive changes. - mail setup: This is also largely working. There may be some user-invisible changes coming (moving which hosts provide front-end MX services and the like) as well as some user-visible changes. We are considering moving information about team aliases (specifically spam scanning) into LDAP so that we can more easily export the information to front end MX relays. This would allow us to simplify mail handling by concentrating the complicated parts onto fewer machines, and would potentially allow for using CPU cycles for things like spamassassin instead of pesky things like user processes. - monitoring: The DSA monitoring environment currently is reasonably successful. However, it only monitors hosts on their IPv4 addresses. Now that IPv6 is fairly widely deployed, we need to begin monitoring hosts on their IPv6 addresses as well. We discussed how to implement this as well as other small improvements to the management of our monitoring in general. - hardware: There was a long and fruitful discussion about the state of DSA maintained hardware. We have a large number of machines approaching end of vendor support for the hardware, and we have begun planning the migration of affected services to newer hardware or virtual machines, as well as beginning plans to extend warranties and so on for important services that can not or do not need to be migrated at present. - DMUP (Debian Machine Usage Policy): We agreed that the DMUP should itself be simplified to contain only the intent, moving the guidelines to a seperate file that can more easily be kept up to date as technologies and perceptions of acceptable netizen behavior change over time. - accounts: There were several discussions around various aspects of account handling, from how to handle guest accounts (that is, people who are not DDs or DMs, but need access to things like porter machines for Debian work they are doing) as well as DM access to project resources. This has resulted in a draft policy for arranging access to project resources for non-DDs. - automation: Several fairly esoteric issues centered around resource management and automation of time-wasting activities were discussed, most of which will be user invisible. Where cooperation with team activity will be required for automation, most of the discussions have begun already. We also began discussions of our strategy for upgrading the estate to Squeeze. Finally, and most importantly, we went for drinks and dinner with local Debian folk. Thank you very much to all for your hospitality! -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- | ,''`. Stephen Gran | | : :' : sg...@debian.org | | `. `' Debian user, admin, and developer | | `- http://www.debian.org | -----------------------------------------------------------------
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