Weekly Report : Week of 2010-11-14

This week has been yet another adventure in my little part of the world. I’ve primarily only been able to do regular maintenance on the GNOME Infrastructure, not having been able to make time for any of the larger projects or tasks on my list. I’ve got a few that I’m going to try and find time to tackle today, but currently my schedule is not entirely up to me.

For those that don’t know (which is very likely all but one or two of you), my wife and I are expecting our third child any day now. The actual due date isn’t until December, but she’s been put on strict bed-rest for the past two weeks to try and prolong the pregnancy as long as possible. We doubt very much we’ll make it until December, and we’ve already been to labor and delivery at the hospital twice now. Luckily they’ve been able to calm things down and send us home. Any any case, we’ve had a few scares that the baby will come too early, so I’ve needed to take on a lot more responsibilities at home.

As I mentioned, primarily I’ve only been able to tackle everyday maintenance tickets. Account creations, mailing list management, and other low-hanging fruit. To my count I have closed about a half-dozen RT tickets (accounts requests and updates). I’ve also worked recently with the marketing team to put something in place for a yet-to-be-announced GNOME 3.x related project. Stay tuned for those details this next week.

If I’m able to get some backup (read: a babysitter) for a few hours I’ve got a few projects I think I can tackle. I hope to be able to get them finished today or tomorrow. We’ll see.

Could be that the next time I report I’ll have a new addition. Here’s hoping that isn’t the case.. yet.

Christer

Maintenance Schedule : 2010-11-15 16:00 UTC

The GNOME master LDAP server has had a failing drive in its RAID set for some time now. This last week we were able to replace the failing drive and re-sync. So far this has not caused any service interruption, but we want to verify the update by rebooting the server. We plan on doing this on 2010-11-15 16:00 UTC. We do not expect this to interrupt service for more than a few minutes, but would like to schedule a one-hour window to allow for any unexpected errors or problems.

Please make a note of this downtime in your schedule as this will disrupt access to most other servers, including the use of git.

Please let the GNOME Sysadmin Team know if you have any questions or concerns about this maintenance.

An Interesting Week…

This week has been an interesting one for me with a lot going on personally. This has, unfortunately, kept me from some of my duties as a Sysadmin, but not completely. Below is a report of what I’ve been working on over the past week.

This week we saw the release (finally!) of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. We’ve started discussing a migration plan for the GNOME Red Hat servers, but this’ll still take some time. We’ll eventually need some help in testing GNOME services as they are migrated, so stay tuned here.

In addition I’ve spent some time this last week working with the moderators team. This is the (small) group of contributors that handles the mailman mailing list queue moderation. We’ve made some nice improvements to our procedures, but there are still only a few contributors on the team. If you’re interested in contributing to GNOME in a non-technical way, this might be a good place for you. Please let us know. Send an email to moderators@ or see the Moderators Wiki Page.

This also applies to any current list owner that would like to delegate their list management to the team.

Beyond that I’ve only been able to manage time for normal daily maintenance. RT tasks (accounts), minor user updates (ssh keys, etc), and server monitoring.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, my schedule has been a bit random so the next few weeks may a bit unpredictable. If you have any questions or concerns I should still be available via normal channels during the week.