• AGM2009
• Reports
• SysAdmin

Systems Report

Caliburn

  Before my major involvement with the HUMBUG systems, our server at the time had been compromised.  This increased the urgency of migrating to a new system.

  Matthew Franlkin and Mark Ellem removed caliburn from the rack at UQ and brought the machine to the following HUMBUG meeting, where we were able to retrieve a more recent snapshot of the data to use for the move to our new server.

Excalibur

    I should start by thanking Robert Brockway for providing the VM in the first place - I don't know what the long-term plans for the HUMBUG server is, but getting everything running as a virtual machine gives us a lot of flexibility to move our services around if needed.

    I've been given a lot of help and ideas from Mark Ellem, Matthew Franklin, Q and Daniel Devine on what was needed, and how to set up services on excalibur.

    Russel Stuart has been our main helper for any scritps or development work that's been needed.

• DNS
  • HUMBUG and HUMBUG-hosted zones were migrated from Caliburn to Excalibur, all of the records pointing to caliburn were moved to where they were appropriate.
• Mail
  • Migrated the virtual mail setup from exim on caliburn to postfix on excalibur.
• Mailing Lists
  • Mailman lists were migrated to exalibur and the archives of previous posts were imported. 'sysadmin' and 'exec' aliases were changed to lists for ease of management and tracking.
• Web
  • Wiki

    • Russell Stuart helped with the initial installation of the wiki and got his EmailActivation plugin working with the newer version of moinmon.

    • Matthew Franklin must be thanked for the sheer number of pages he's added to the wiki.
  • planet
    • The old source install of the planetplanet blog aggregator was replaced with the debian package and the config was updated to match. (Some sources that we look for may no longer exist or be out of date though, these will have to be checked manually and either updated or removed.)

Other services are planned and/or in progress (see below)

Amazon s3

• Backups are running thanks to Russel's scripts.

Tarball and chroot script

• A snapshot tarball of excalibur's filesystem (minus sensitive data) and a script to let you interact with it as a chroot environment are both available to members interested in helping with HUMBUG systems or just curious as to how they are set up. This makes change requests and discussions easier too, as anyone can read how services are configured, and can submit patches against the real files. The chroot script is again thanks to Russell Stuart.

What still needs to be done

• Proper distributed revision control for humbug configs and source, this will be done with mercurial.
• Proper Packaging of HUMBUG-developed scripts/programs, excalibur has it's own apt-repository, and I will be building .debs of our programs.
• Moving to use trac as a ticketing system to keep what we do, and further help collaboration.

• Documenting procedures for all of the above so that others know what's going on

Stephen Thomas