We’ve added a new member to the GNOME sysadmin team: Andrea Veri.

Andrea has been handling the accounts queue for a very, very long time. Furthermore, he’s involved with the GNOME membership committee (they handle the applications for GNOME foundation membership + elections). And thus now a GNOME sysadmin.

Aside from GNOME, he also does stuff within the Fedora sysadmin/infrastructure team, does some Fedora packaging and is a Debian Developer.

Personally, looking forward to him still handling every single account request. This next to cleaning up our infrastructure and documenting it 😛

Small update regarding sysadmin things:

• Two new machines have been added. This to replace the very old hardware which does not have a support contract anymore (button, menubar, window, container). Stephen Smoogen assisted in getting them racked up and networked
• Our RHEL entitlements expired. Bastien Nocera assisted in extending them. We now also have a procedure to update them.
• Our RHEL5 machines now run RHEL5.7. This was severely needed as the sssd version in 5.6 was really buggy.
• Our mail and DNS server often locks up. Unsure of the cause, seems to happen after heavy spam connections (from loads of IP addresses). The machine is old, but problem does not seem hardware related. Hopefully fixed by RHEL5.7. That said, we’ll anyway to migrate all services on this machine (due to lack of support contract).
• We still lack 3 RHEL entitlements (ETA: next week?). Need those before we can continue moving services off the obsolete hardware.

I don’t even know where to start! There have been a lot of changes and improvements going on within the GNOME Sysadmin Team lately, and I thought I should share a few of the things we’ve been working on, as well as some of the changes we have planned.

First of all, as Olav mentioned in our inaugural post, I’ve been hired as the GNOME part-time Sysadmin. This role includes a number of responsibilities, many of which will be transparent (and or boring) to most of you, but there are a few that will affect the community and that feels like a good place to begin.

First of all, we’re going to be publishing our progress and changes regularly on this blog. This will include scheduled maintenance on services (reboots, downtime, etc). Our plan is to schedule maintenance windows, and give the community adequate notice before we take down any services. We haven’t forgotten that our job is to make sure you can do your job, and improved communication is a key part of that.

Second, we’ve spent the past two weeks focusing on trying to clean up our rough edges and establish our baseline for the future. Part of this is defining where our priorities lie, and which projects are the most important. While we have an existing list of pending tickets in bugzilla, we’d also like to hear from the rest of you on what you’d like to see done. I can’t promise that we’ll be able to please all of you all the time, but we also can’t address your issues if we don’t know what they are! In this regard, if you have any issues we need to know about, please stop by bugzilla and file a ticket.

Beyond that, please feel free to contact me directly with any concerns or ideas you might have. I’m happy to discuss them with you.

Christer

In case you haven’t heard, the GNOME Foundation Hired a System Administrator, Christer Edwards.

Christer was already a volunteer GNOME sysadmin, so he already knows a lot about the GNOME infrastructure. He fixed various things already, but I’ll leave it up to him to blog about that. The one thing I really like is that he cleaned up the Logwatch output for the various hosts that GNOME has. After which I requested he cleaned up the menubar (mail.gnome.org) Logwatch output (was 3.5MB), which he did :).

So now finally we can easily see some data for mail.gnome.org for Monday September 20:

Postfix

      238   *Warning: Connection concurrency limit reached
        1   SASL authentication failed
       29   Miscellaneous warnings

  520.825M  Bytes accepted                       546,124,884
    1.675G  Bytes delivered                    1,798,214,094
 ========   ================================================

    63595   Accepted                                  19.73%
   258725   Rejected                                  80.27%
 --------   ------------------------------------------------
   322320   Total                                    100.00%
 ========   ================================================

      757   Reject relay denied                        0.29%
     7655   Reject HELO/EHLO                           2.96%
   196808   Reject unknown user                       76.07%
    13564   Reject recipient address                   5.24%
     1320   Reject sender address                      0.51%
      318   Reject client host                         0.12%
    37547   Reject RBL                                14.51%
      756   Reject header                              0.29%
 --------   ------------------------------------------------
   258725   Total Rejects                            100.00%
 ========   ================================================

     3690   4xx Reject recipient address              21.26%
    13667   4xx Reject sender address                 78.74%
 --------   ------------------------------------------------
    17357   Total 4xx Rejects                        100.00%
 ========   ================================================

   185662   Connections made
    89877   Connections lost
   185650   Disconnections
    60230   Removed from queue
     1854   Delivered
   135819   Sent via SMTP
     4809   Forwarded
       45   Resent
     4317   Deferred
   140470   Deferrals
     2050   Bounce (local)
     2271   Bounce (remote)
      356   Expired and returned to sender
        1   DSNs delivered
     2622   DSNs undeliverable

     9055   Connection failure (outbound)
     1870   Timeout (inbound)
    11557   Illegal address syntax in SMTP command
       13   Numeric hostname
       45   SMTP commands dialog error
     4629   Excessive errors in SMTP commands dialog
    40629   Hostname verification errors
       27   Hostname validation error
       23   Enabled PIX workaround
        7   SASL authenticated messages

Amavisd-new

    21374   Clean passed                              90.02%
      121   Spam passed                                0.51%
      121   Bad header passed                          0.51%
       16   Malware blocked                            0.07%
     2111   Spam blocked                               8.89%
        1   Banned file name blocked                   0.00%
 --------   ------------------------------------------------
    23744   Total Messages Scanned                   100.00%
 ========   ================================================

    21495   Ham                                       90.53%
     2232   Spam                                       9.40%
 --------   ------------------------------------------------
    23744   Total Messages Scanned                   100.00%
 ========   ================================================

        2   MIME error
     2458   Extra code modules loaded at runtime

Clamav

 Viruses detected:
    HTML.Phishing.Bank-1259: 2 Time(s)
    HTML.Phishing.Bank-593: 1 Time(s)
    W32.Sality.Q-1: 2 Time(s)
    Worm.Mydoom.I: 9 Time(s)
    Worm.Mydoom.M: 5 Time(s)

Note that mail.gnome.org is the mailhub for GNOME. All outgoing (mailing lists, bugmail, etc) and incoming mail (spammers, spammers, spammers and some minor valid mail) for all machines is handled by mail.gnome.org. From the logs you can easily see that we get regular distributed dictionary attacks (high number of unknown users errors), plus Greylisting that was deployed (also done by Crister)

PS: As you noticed, there is now a GNOME sysadmin blog. It is syndicated at http://news.gnome.org/.