Re: Call for contribution to the Guix infrastructure

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi Wilko,

Wilko Meyer <w@wmeyer.eu> skribis:

> Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> writes:
>>       - Improve infra monitoring: set up a dashboard to monitor all the
>>         infrastructure, and an out-of-band channel to communicate about
>>         downtime.
> ...
>>       - Support mirroring: We’d like to make it easy for others to
>>         mirror substitutes from ci.guix and bordeaux.guix, perhaps by
>>         offering public rsync access.
> ...
>>     We’re also looking for people who’d be willing to have SSH access to
>>     some of the infrastructure to help with day-to-day maintenance:
>>     restarting a build, restarting the occasional service that has gone
>>     wild (that can happen :-)), reconfiguring/upgrading a machine,
>>     rebooting, etc.
>
> I think I could spare a couple of hours per week (approx. 4-5h
> most of the time realistically with availability in the earlier morning
> hours and around the evening, my current timezone is CEST) to assist
> with these tasks, especially with maintenance/sysadmin things and with
> uptime/infrastructure monitoring if help's still needed for these things.

Excellent!

To be clear there are really two different kinds of tasks here:

  1. Setting up a dashboard showing the status of all the Guix services
     (ci.guix, bordeaux.guix, guix.gnu.org, etc.)  It’s really about
     setting up whatever service can be used for that and coming up with
     appropriate Guix System config and a plan to deploy it.

  2. Everyday monitoring, which might involve ssh’ing into the machines,
     checking logs, restarting failed services, diagnosing problems,
     etc.

In both cases, we need to subscribe you to the guix-sysadmin mailing
list (low traffic).

For #2, we’ll want to give you SSH access to parts of the infra you’d
like to get involved in.  Please check out maintenance.git and send a
patch to guix-sysadmin adding your SSH key to berlin (ci.guix,
guixwl.org, etc.) or bayfront (bordeaux.guix, guix.gnu.org, etc.).

I’m happy to mentor you and other new volunteers.  Please do ping me on
#guix on Libera.chat (I’m civodul) or ask questions here or on
guix-sysadmin.

>>     Prerequisite: Being a “known” member of the community, familiarity
>>     with Guix System administration, with some of the services/web sites
>>     being run, and with the infrastructure handbook:
>>     
>> <https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix/maintenance.git/tree/doc/infra-handbook.org>.
>
> I've been only around for a bit more than a year in this community, so
> it's up to others to decide wether I already count as a "known" member
> or not.

You’ve been packaging the kernels we run for a while now, so to me
you’re eligible for SSH access to (part of) the infrastructure.

Thanks!

Ludo’.