About the GNOME Sysadmin Team and Systems
History
GNOME got its first server soon after the project started - a converted desktop machine in a closet in the Red Hat offices that acted as a CVS server. Since then, the number of services provided, the number of the servers, and the quality of hosting has increased significantly. Over the years, the team composition has gone through many iterations with different people taking an informal lead role (Elliot Lee, Owen Taylor, Ross Golder, Olav Vitters.)
Current Composition
The team is very inactive at the moment. ChristianRose is doing the best job handling routine requests, GuilhermePastore has also been somewhat active recently. OwenTaylor is working on git.gnome.org and a few other things. (OlavVitters was doing an amazing job with most of the major work until recently, but has moved on to other things.)
Responsibilities
The team is has three basic responsibilities. First, it handles many routine requests such as creating accounts and mailing lists and importing modules into gnome SVN. Second, it is responsible for system maintenance both on a routine basis (package upgrades) and on a emergency basis (servers running out of memory, services throwing exceptions). Finally, in combination with assistance from other GNOME community members, it is responsible for creating new services and customizing 3rd party services to serve the GNOME community.
Services
A partial list of services handled by the sysadmin team (or partially by, in the case of ftp.gnome.org)
- Web sites: www.gnome.org, foundation.gnome.org, library.gnome.org, pango.org, gtkmm.org, etc.
- Bugzilla: bugzilla.gnome.org
- Subversion: svn.gnome.org
- Mailing lists and foundation member aliases: mail.gnome.org
- Wiki: live.gnome.org
- Testing builds: build.gnome.org
- Translation statitics: l10.gnome.org
- Web interface to LDAP account database: mango.gnome.org
- Source downloads: ftp.gnome.org (hosted by Umeå university in Sweden and separate from the sysadmin team)
Servers
A list of the primary servers hosting GNOME services:
name |
memory |
cores |
disk space |
in service |
Donated/Owned |
Hosted |
Usage |
container |
6GB |
2 |
5OOGB (raid5) |
2003 |
HP |
Red Hat |
NFS |
menubar |
2GB |
2 |
72GB (raid1) |
2004 |
Red Hat |
Red Hat |
|
window |
2GB |
2 |
72GB (raid1) |
2004 |
Red Hat |
Red Hat |
web sites, user login |
button |
2GB |
2 |
72GB (raid1) |
2004 |
Red Hat |
Red Hat |
Database |
label |
2GB |
2 |
36GB (raid1) |
2006 |
Red Hat |
Red Hat |
LDAP, Wiki, bugzilla |
fixed |
4GB |
2 |
146GB (raid1) |
2006 |
Sun |
Red Hat |
build.gnome.org |
progress |
4GB |
2 |
146GB (raid10) |
2006 |
Canonical |
Canonical |
l10n.gnome.org |
socket |
8GB |
4 |
450GB (raid10) |
2006 |
Canonical |
Canonical |
SVN |
vbox |
32GB |
8 |
500GB (raid1) |
2008 |
Red Hat |
Red Hat |
online.gnome.org [1] |
drawable |
32GB |
8 |
280GB (raid10) |
2008 |
Red Hat |
Red Hat |
online.gnome.org [1] |
[1] vbox and drawable were acquired by Red Hat initially to host online.gnome.org and mugshot.org; but they are installed with virtualization and have some extra capacity beyond the needs of those services. The prototype git.gnome.org is running as a VM on online.gnome.org, for example.
(The above skips VM at OSU used for monitoring, and an unused server at OSU donated by Intel.)