Re: Sysadmin wiki pages

[Ross Golder <ross golder org>]

On Sat, 2005-06-04 at 10:36 -0400, Jonathan Blandford wrote:
> Ross Golder <ross golder org> writes:
> 
> > Yesterday morning I finished writing up the pages I'd outlined here some
> > time ago:
> > 
> > http://live.gnome.org/Infrastructure
> > 
> > There's still a lot more detail that could be added, but it's coming
> > along. Please check it over and correct or comment where necessary.
> 
> This is pretty cool, Ross.  How does it relate to the pages at
> sysadmin.gnome.org, though?  What's the criteria for putting stuff on
> the page?
> 

I was thinking along the lines that we should move as much content from
the sysadmin.gnome.org team pages to the wiki as possible. The wiki
would be the place where we set out what we've got, how it all works
etc, our practices and procedures, notes and todos etc. all in a public
place, where people can see how everything works, what plans we've got
etc, and chip in any relevant comments, links, suggestions etc.

I can't actually see anything on the private team pages that I would
consider unsuitable for public discussion/consumption, or knowledge that
could be abused or that would represent a particular security risk
(iyswim). Unless we were daft enough to include all our passwords too!
The 'sysadmin.gnome.org' site isn't encrypted, and the password access
to the team pages isn't all that secure either, so any passwords that we
need to keep (e.g. mirror rsync passwords etc) should be kept in files
under /home/admin/secret accessible only to wheel members (unless anyone
has any better ideas).

This approach might even lead to us getting some useful feedback that
allows us to do things better (or more securely), and lets other people
get involved in GNOME sysadmin without us having to dish out root access
all over the place. Kind of open sourcing the sysadmin knowledge a bit,
I suppose. We can use the public wiki for our team pages (we have a
private wiki area too, but to be honest I haven't thought of a good use
for it yet) and for any other public information, and we slowly clear
out the 'sysadmin.gnome.org' site (for fear of it becoming stale).

Eventually, I expect 'sysadmin.gnome.org' could host some kind of
interface for managing LDAP accounts and/or database tables (e.g.
mirrors). I've recently resurrected the one I wrote for Christian last
year, which I'll be fixing up for hosting on a secure GNOME website some
time soon.

If any of this scares anyone, please let me know ;)

--
Ross