GNOME Infrastructure Apprentice Program

[Andrea Veri <av gnome org>]

Hi,

we are so glad to announce the GNOME Sysadmin Team just launched the
"GNOME Infrastructure Apprentice Program".

The Program will allow apprentices to join the Sysadmin Team with a
limited set of privileges which mainly consist in being able to access
the Puppet repository and all the stored configuration files that run
the machines powering the GNOME Infrastructure every day. Once
approved to the Program apprentices will be able to submit patches for
review to the team and finally see their work merged on the production
environment if the proposed changes matched the expectations and
addressed comments.

I spent some time explaining what the problems were and why we never
could have launched this Program before today at [1], quoting:

"""One of the main obstacles we always had with the SysadminTeam has
always been the lack of man power. Welcoming someone into the team
meant trusting someone well enough to grant administrative privileges
with all the consequences that takes in. Additionally even in the case
we trusted the person who was applying for the role the training
period was going to cost more time to an existing team member than it
could afford in terms of time and things that could have been
accomplished while at it with a direct benefit of the GNOME Project
and Community.

Another problem that arose in the past has been our Puppet repository
being completely private as it was storing certificates, passwords and
other sensitive information we wouldn't want to make public.

With the advent of FreeIPA and more fine-grained permissions and the
deployment of hiera-eyaml-gpg (and the migration of other sensitive
information away from the Puppet repository itself) for external
lookups of passwords, salts and other keys we are glad to announce the
GNOME Infrastructure Apprentice Group."""

More details about the Program, how can you join, what skills we would
love our apprentices to have, what tasks will await you after joining
the apprentices ranks and more are available at [1].

[1] https://wiki.gnome.org/Sysadmin/Apprentices

-- 
Cheers,

Andrea

Debian Developer,
Fedora / EPEL packager,
GNOME Infrastructure Team Coordinator,
GNOME Foundation Board of Directors Secretary,
GNOME Foundation Membership & Elections Committee Chairman

Homepage: http://www.gnome.org/~av