On 03/11/2013 05:14 AM, Petr Bena wrote:
the lack of sysadmins was one of biggest problems of toolserver - just creation of account took ages and there was nearly no support at all - that's what I am afraid your project is heading to. It will be perfectly designed cluster maintained by 1 person.
I think you're missing the point that part of the reason why it's advantageous to move to WMF hosting is exactly the opposite; this means that ultimately, you get the weight of ops behind the infrastructure rather than just isolated sysadmins (volunteer or not). Add to that that we get to leverage the technical resources already in place and we end up with an infrastructure that is much /less/ dependent on sysadmin intervention to run.
I'm a good sysadmin, which means I am a *lazy* sysadmin. I can guarantee you that one of my primary objectives is that nobody needs to wait on me to do anything for normal tool writing and maintenance! :-) What isn't currently automated will be configured to be self-serve -- as long as it does not impact reliability of other tools. If I do my job right, all of my time will be spent sharing knowledge with maintainers and coping with hardware failures, not doing gruntwork.
That said, I don't believe there is anything wrong with volunteer sysadmins, and my understandting is that this is indeed something which we may look forward to in the future (although, admitedly, not this early in the Tool Labs life cycle). But it's important that you also understand that objectives of reliability are best served by limiting the number of people who can be root, and to "formalize" a bit the way things are done. Yes, this /does/ have the downside that some things are going to be a bit slower to do; but I want to be able to tell maintainers that "if your tool works now, it's not going to break tomorrow" and that means being a bit more disciplined and, yes, a bit more restrictive in how we do things.
In the meantime, part of the reason the WMF pays me is to make sure that there /is/ someone available to help. Even when I'm not "on the clock", you'll find me easy to reach and responsive; when I'm not near IRC, I'm still reachable by email; and once the tools project is well on its way the other members of the ops team will also be able to react in case of emergencies.
-- Marc _______________________________________________ Labs-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/labs-l
