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DSA meeting (Munich 3/9/10)



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!
-- 
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|   ,''`.                                            Stephen Gran |
|  : :' :                                        sgran@debian.org |
|  `. `'                        Debian user, admin, and developer |
|    `-                                     http://www.debian.org |
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