Month: November 2007

Responding to what Julien wrote:
Anyone is welcome to help improve Mango (system used to create GNOME SVN accounts). Creating an account is much faster currently than before. From request to commit access (including cron) has taken as little as 16min. In general, accounts@gnome.org is no longer the bottleneck for new accounts (except for translator accounts, haven’t finished setting that up in Mango, currently writing the script to handle the modules, will include translations eventually).

Of course, changes to existing accounts still take a lot of time. But ehr, all my requests for people helping to improve Mango are usually responded in two ways: 1) seen as a vacancy 2) nothing. Not talking about the accounts team. That has expanded (much appreciated).

It would be so much easier if I had help or enough time. Or a real understanding of LDAP (see lack of time). Or if I could force everyone in GNOME to just use GPG (I would’ve if it wasn’t for the lack of time). The lack of GPG combined with wanting security makes some things very difficult to solve.

Currently, I get complaints about not being able to reset the password. Yes, that doesn’t work (can’t really be automated ATM.. lack of GPG, time, etc). Oh well, at least the complaints are different.

I’d like to push as much of the stuff elsewhere. E.g., if you’ve been accepted to the GNOME foundation, you should get an LDAP (Mango) account. Currently the foundation members are a record in a database (no connection to the LDAP account.. also not possible due to slightly different names, email addresses that do not match, etc). If at one point every GNOME foundation member would have an LDAP account, requesting the gnome.org alias would take max 21min (cron). This won’t happen any time soon.

Currently there are various sysadmin tickets I haven’t responded to (or looked at). Three membership committee members who need to be able to do their work (RT3, Mango, IIRC some SSH key resetting as well). Bugzilla config for bugs.gnome.org is still broken, Bugzilla itself should be ported to 3.0. Mango needs to be developed further. Foundation members should be migrated somehow. Etc, etc. Like I said often enough, help is welcome (again: to automate stuff; there are only a few things that require something other than SVN commit access, which I’d gladly provide).

I don’t see above as an organisational problem.

Agree with what Luis Villa wrote. Meaning Murray is exactly using this year’s elections to voice his opinion , and any calls for retraction on that grounds are misguided.. This is the time to make such things known. Saying that he should rather only vote than speak up for this reason is not what the intention of an election is. Anyway, Luis Villa has worded it much better than I can, see his post.

I’m fine with people saying it should’ve been worded differently. But don’t tell someone to be quiet. Anyway, I won’t be voting for Og Maciel.

Update: Since this post Og Magiel said he intented that post to have a different meaning. I still have trouble reading the update there in any other way (the part about ‘use this year’s elections to really voice his opinion’), not what the post initially stated. However, as he says he didn’t intend that, then I respect it. Meaning, it is not an no, but a ‘have to check’ (only decided to vote for one person ATM).
I still wouldn’t vote for anyone who wants people to be quiet though (e.g. argue about how it was said, the contents, but not that people argue). The latter is a clear no.

Seems the abuse form on listed for Google mail is useless, never received any action or human response (only the automated ‘ticket received’). Could someone at Google please look at the tickets filed by gnome-sysadmin@gnome.org? Or just to summarize: Please cancel the gmail account of ryanchua82@gmail.com. I’ve filled in enough tickets, it does come from your servers, and I do know how to read mail headers. It really is time to act.

Top committers (by # of commits)

(since 1 Jan 2007)

who	commits	lines added	lines removed
ymarcheg	1428	538669	103168
alexl	1384	268475	223803
neo	1312	153253	148713
jorgegonz	1246	452563	361810
dnylande	1174	493472	455947
jsacco	1062	16676	18785
matthiasc	941	1018629	886572
djihed	903	381529	325918
kmaraas	856	172223	193721
vuntz	763	60436	32399

Views and hits

Live.gnome.org views

7,870,044 since 28 May 2006 (not sure where to see this in the UI)

Library.gnome.org hits

3,059,931 since 21 Oct 2007 (seems high)

Www.gnome.org hits

194,106,454 since 1 Dec 2006

Planet.gnome.org hits

100,426,775 hits since 1 Dec 2006 (actually expected this to be more popular than wgo)

Bugzilla.gnome.org hits

1,664,134 hits since 21 Oct 2007

Svn.gnome.org

107,836,758 hits to /svn/ (anonymous checkouts) and 7,717,665 hits to the rest of the site (images, viewvc) since 1 Jan 2007, this ignoring ssl/ssh/svn traffic

During GUADEC in 2005, Jeff Waugh started 10×10. The one goal is this: “To Own 10 % of the Global Desktop Market by 2010”. This was well announced and it is even linked on the start page of live.gnome.org. However, 10×10 had another goal and that hasn’t been announced up till now. If you’ve been reading Planet GNOME closely, you’ve already seen the first success. Now the other 10×10 goal saw it second success with the creation of SVN account ismaild. Going by the name of İsmail Dönmez (having first name@kde.org) it is the second person to be converted to GNOME. The other 8 persons needed to complete the secondary 10×10 target have already been selected, although they don’t know it yet…

Random bits from the menubar upgrade earlier today:

• Upgrade started at 10:30 UTC when Matthew Galgoci upgraded the machine from RHEL3 to RHEL5. I think it was the middle of the night for him, did not dare to ask though. This took in total about 2 hours. A long part of that was spend on adding SELinux labels.
• Stuff that broke in some way:
  • website (needed to change config to include GNOME bits)
  • postfix (due to: being disabled on purpose, RHEL5 installing sendmail and forced downgrade to the RHEL5 postfix instead of the newer custom postfix rpm it still had from RHEL3)
  • NFS (it didn’t install nfs-utils for some reason)
  • bind (error in a zone file that the previous Bind did not care about)
  • amavisd (due to *much* newer clamav. this used a different config file; that config file didn’t enable the localsocket plus socket location changed)
  • clamav (didn’t have access to /var/spool/amavis)
  • mailgraph (the custom rpm used different file locations than the custom rpm used for RHEL3)
  • script around mhonarc (due to overlooking the perl-Mail-Field-Received custom rpm that needed a rebuild)
  • p0f (worked after I restarted it.. not sure why)
  • mailman (didn’t break, just rebuild it because of the newer Python)
• Menubar sent at one point around 1850 mails/minute
• Menubar received at one point around 2400 mails/minute
  
• Unfortunately, above numbers are much lower than what menubar can really do. This as menubar still had 3 config problems at that time; causing it to be much slower than usual. Problems in short: p0f running at 100%, hung mhonarc process slowing down mailman archive processing and amavis checking every bugmail.
• Found a yum plugin that works like protectbase, but for RHN. This works really nice in combination with custom YUM sources (Dag Wieers). Meaning: Only upgrade stuff from other sources if RHEL5 doesn’t provide it. This as I trust RHEL5 more (purpose of custom yum sources is usually to get the latest version asap.. but those newer versions can have bugs in them.. or work differently than before).
• Changed the timezone of the server to UTC
• Mail server config was tested by: firewalling port 25 externally, binding postfix to localhost and sending test mails to bugmaster until every problem was fixed (except the slow mailman processing.. caused by hung mhonarc process.. I noticed that early on, but overlooked the 2nd mhonarc process). After that I first enabled all interfaces (while still being firewalling port 25 externally) to let menubar process the bugmail queue (plus Wiki mails). This is a good stress test. After that I opened port 25 externally and flushed the mailqueue on socket (causing lots of svn-commits-list emails in a very short time). Only after most of the svn-commits-list queue was processed did I notice the cause of the slow mailman.. and p0f using 100% CPU (oh well).
• Upgrade as good as completed at 16:45 UTC (external mail worked already at ~15:00). The machine still needs a reboot (newer kernel).

and with above another item of the 2.22 RoadMap has been completed.

Sorry for late notice. In about 10 hours or less, we’ll upgrade menubar to RHEL5. Means mail and DNS will be down.

Mohammad DAMT

Mohammad joined the Accounts Team. Welcome aboard! And sorry for delaying your RT3 + Mango setup.

Mango

Accounts team members can now actually reject accounts and see accounts in all statuses. There are loads more things to fix. Some of these have been filed as bugs, see Bugzilla if you want to help (really appreciated). Some just require basic PHP as skill.