Penguin

Who are the WlugServer sysadmins?

Are they a group of benevolent ServerGnomes? No, they are:

$ getent group sysadmins
sysadmins:*:301:perry,jamie,daniel,crb,jrm,matt,gnubie

Who does what

This is the list of who set up what - however, in general, anyone should be able to do anything, and lean on the subject matter expert if required.

Committee members who want to change e-mail aliases can contact anyone in the Sysadmins group. They will go edit /etc/aliases on mail.wlug.org.nz. This mostly applies to WLUG officers and administrative roles, not people with shell accounts.

There is no reason for people to leave the WlugSysadmins group after they have left the area or left the country. Through the magic of the Internet they are still able to help out, and their help is appreciated. Also hopefully it will give them incentive to keep paying their dues (if they're reminded!).

New Admins Wanted!

As announced at a recent meeting, we would like to revitalize administration and development of the server and various software projects people involved with WLUG have started. Below you'll find some more information about ideas and goals we will be working toward.

If you would like to become an admin, first you'll need an account on hoiho, so contact the Secretary about that. After that you will need to talk to another admin, via email why you would like to be an admin, what skills and experience you have, then we will take it to the committee and approve your request and get whatever admin access you need sorted.

Being an Admin

Need something like an AUP for admins. Must agree to respect privacy of others. Can be removed at discretion of the Committee. Please let us know if you're finished so we can remove your access, and tell us what you did.

Going Forward

The WLUG wiki, and other services have become important resources. This is really cool. They should be treated as production systems, and the admins take care in the maintenance of this system. We should not forget the point though, the people who initiated this project were engaged in self directed learning. A LUG has a number of purposes, and one of them is education. New people should be encouraged to get involved, as users, or as admins of this system if they have some skills, and an idea how to contribute.

That being said, new admins should always look at how they can build on past work, rather then initiating some new project, working on it for a while, getting bored with it, and sodding off. If you're not going to take the time to learn how the system was engineered in the first place and what its intent was, then we really can't use your contribution. There is still room for new development projects, but not if a system we have in place already just needs to be improved.

Setting Goals

WlugSysadmins need to be on board and support the WlugCommittee, who of course serve the WlugCommunity. Our new focus is making Software Freedom Day our signature event, (not like installfests and stuff in the past) and to continue to provide a good educational resource to the local community with our presentations, and to a larger audience via the WlugWiki. The work we do on our infrastructure should support this effort.

Some ideas:

  • Reorganise the server so that continued operation and access to files relies as little as possible on the availability of any single blade. Ideally it should be possible to connect to the iLO and completely reconfigure (via serial console) or rebuild (via pxe boot and network install) all other blades as long as any one blade is still accessable via the internet.
  • maintain a recent mirror of the wiki on a completely independent virtual server (thanks Rimu!) so that we can quickly restore the WLUG wiki even in a worst-case catastrophic failure of the WLUG server.
  • Formalize this group and have a process for new admins to join, basically a screening process.
  • An exit strategy if people don’t want to be involved anymore. (Please let us know where you left off, links to docs, remove access, etc...)
  • Install a ticket system
  • Monthly meetings in #WLUG to get things done
  • create a dev site/source repo for the wiki, so people caThe officers of the society shall consist of a president, vice-president, secretary, and treasurer. The committee of the society shall include the above named officers, as well as 3 (three) extra members. The electronic mailing list is the primary means of communication and activity within the society. As the mailing list requires some administration, an ex-officio position of 'list administrator' will be appointed by the committee.

The officers and committee members shall be elected at an AGM or at a special meeting called for this purpose.

Temporary replacements can be appointed at the discretion of the committee.

The standard term of appointment is one year, or until the next AGM, whichever is shorter. If a temporary position is appointed it will arise for reappointment with the other positions at the next AGM.n work on improvements (please pick git)

  • An elected SysAdmin role for WLUG, a member of the committee who's role is to coordinate work on the WLUG infrastructure

More NewIdeas

Things we are serious about doing are here: CommitteeToDo

See also

History of the WlugSysadmins

Timeline: WikiHistory

Perry has always been the UberAdmin. Generally building of the system happened at DaHoose. Craig set up the mail, Daniel handled LDAP, John, Perry and Matt, the wiki (and Matt, Planet WLUG). John wrote the user admin scripts and WlugLibrary. Jamie was our hardware/networking point guy. As of Feb 2009, Daniel did the most recent physical maintenance since he lived in Auckland, but there are countless people who have helped out with the machine/s over time, and no discussion would be complete without a special thank you to Sahil Gupta and his amazing falling-on-Ctrl-Alt-Del keyboard.

Charter Proposal

Since the WlugCharter was written before the WlugServer was installed, (Nov. 2005) it needs to be ratified to reflect the responsibility of maintaining this significant club resource.

The old Section 7:

The officers of the society shall consist of a president, vice-president, secretary, and treasurer. The committee of the society shall include the above named officers, as well as 3 (three) extra members. The electronic mailing list is the primary means of communication and activity within the society. As the mailing list requires some administration, an ex-officio position of 'list administrator' will be appointed by the committee.

The officers and committee members shall be elected at an AGM or at a special meeting called for this purpose.

Temporary replacements can be appointed at the discretion of the committee.

The standard term of appointment is one year, or until the next AGM, whichever is shorter. If a temporary position is appointed it will arise for reappointment with the other positions at the next AGM.

Proposed changes:

The officers of the society shall consist of a president, vice-president, secretary, and treasurer. The committee of the society shall include the above named officers, as well as 3 (three) extra members.

The officers and committee members shall be elected at an AGM or at a special meeting called for this purpose.

Temporary replacements can be appointed at the discretion of the committee.

The standard term of appointment is one year, or until the next AGM, whichever is shorter. If a temporary position is appointed it will arise for reappointment with the other positions at the next AGM.

Other roles:

The electronic mailing list is the primary means of communication and activity within the society. As the mailing list requires some administration, an ex-officio position of 'list administrator' will be appointed by the committee.

WLUG hosts a server which runs the website and hosts other important services for the organization. A WlugSysAdmin? should be elected at the AGM or appointed by the committee each year to oversee maintenance and development on the server, and see that all users observe the HoihoAcceptableUsePolicy. The WlugSysAdmin? will make regular reports to the committee, and serve as liaison between the committee and the WlugSysadmins team.