[OSM-dev] The future of sysadmin

[Barnett, Phillip]

Well, I work shifts in Central London, half a mile or so from UCL, so I
guess I'm available for any emergency repowering, given access to the
server room.
I'm also reasonably competent with Linux, servers etc...




 
 



PHILLIP BARNETT
SERVER MANAGER

200 GRAY'S INN ROAD
LONDON
WC1X 8XZ
UNITED KINGDOM
T +44 (0)20 7430 4474
F 
E PHILLIP.BARNETT at ITN.CO.UK
WWW.ITN.CO.UK

-----Original Message-----

From: dev-bounces at openstreetmap.org
[mailto:dev-bounces at openstreetmap.org] On Behalf Of Steve Coast
Sent: 18 July 2007 23:38
To: dev Openstreetmap
Cc: Tom Hughes
Subject: [OSM-dev] The future of sysadmin

All

Despite handing off tile to jburgess and www to TomH, and sysadmin in  
general to NickH I'm still accused of centralising control and being  
evil (I'm looking at you Lars). I don't think I'll ever stop being  
accused of being evil but I will admit to the frailty of not having  
infinite hours in the day.

We need to fix the sysadmin situation.

I'm really sorry if you think I got it wrong, but I did the best I  
could.

When OSM started it ran on my desktop machine at UCL where I was a  
sysadmin. I used to love tuning MySQL and setting up mail servers for  
the little corner of a department I occupied. That was 3 years ago.  
Today, unless I'm much mistaken, my old desktop is still sitting in  
the rack unused. That, or it was sold off.

I somehow managed to convince a very competent sysadmin, Nick Hill,  
to be our sysadmin. He really helped us in setting up the racks we  
got. You may remember that we (Nick Black too) salvaged these from a  
storage depot in the middle of nowhere, arranged hosting (which we  
have till this day) and installed a bunch of machines which NickH  
built. He built them from parts he spent time buying after selling  
off donated old machines we got. He did some really innovative things  
to make this all happen, but I'm not going to tell you about that.  
Suffice to say we owe him a debt of gratitude for all this. Never  
mind that he mapped a significant section of London.

I became aware that I wasn't getting the time to load up planet every  
week to tile and so I handed that off to jburgess and he's done great  
work there. It now works. www similarly with TomH. 80n and ojw have  
requested handing root on dev to spaetz which I'm doing now. That  
just leaves wiki - a VM machine hosted at bytemark for free very  
kindly. So the current set up looks like this for root accesS:

all machines: nick hill, steve coast

additionally:

www: tomh
tile: jburgess
dev: spaetz, nick black (for stateofthemap hosting stuff)
wiki: none

I've shared root with people before on a machine, and it's always  
ended in tears. Someone installs a cpan module, and then someone else  
the same thing as a debian package. Things break. Communications  
fail. So, I've been reluctant to hand off root control simply because  
of the organisational hassles and innevitable failures. It makes it  
simple to hand off machines to those that not only want to sysadmin  
but are deeply involved in the aspects. That is, jburgess does just  
sysadmin tile, hes also fixed lots of cool stuff with the tile  
software itself. Same applies to the others.

This would all be wonderful, but we now have the unfortunate problem  
that Nick Hill has other priorities right now and can't devote as  
much time and energy to OSM.

Even if Nick had infinite time, we're growing at such a rate that we  
need to distribute control of this stuff _anyway_.

While I'd love to give you all root access and break things to your  
hearts content, we have a very serious problem. Only 2 or 3 people  
know where the machines are physically located, how they work and can  
get access to them. Those people are me, nick hill and nick black.  
The people with all the passwords are me and nick hill. So, I've been  
avoiding handing out root passwords like candy not because I really  
hate the idea of other people running the machines - viz handing off  
www an tile - but because if you break anything then I will have to  
drop everything and visit the machines. I just don't have the time,  
closeness or patience for this any more. I've made it very clear to  
the people with root that if they break anything they have to go in  
to central london and reboot the machines. Really.

Of course, this is not sustainable. But, I hope this is all giving an  
insight in to my thinking. Sorry, my evil thinking.

Over in the corner, OSMF has magically raised some pesos for spending  
on, you guessed it, servers. So we're in the joint positions of  
needing a/many sysadmin(s), people who can access the machines,  
people deeply competent, and people to buy and install the new  
machines we need.

Where all the machines are, today, is in central london. I'd love you  
to host machines. Multiple times people have offered to host T at H on  
their servers, and it's not happened. openstreetmap.de sits basically  
idle AFAIK. So - while I respect that you may want to host some part  
of OSM at your machine, and I think it's a good idea, and I'll help  
if I can, and I'm sorry that I'm evil, I have to deal with the  
immediate problem of a lack of sysadmins and people who can fix the  
existing machines, which are spinning right now.

Please help me deal with this problem.

I need people who are very competent with machines in racks, _very_  
competent with linux, who have people skills to communicate with our  
hosts at UCL, who can travel to central London and install / fix  
things that arise and who are trusted by the community. Such people  
might live in Oxford. You will need to help price, buy and install  
new machines and remote power and remote consoles. Really - I cannot  
describe to you how difficult it is going to be to move forward with  
new hardware if we don't have one or two people as described in this  
paragraph.

It will be a pain in the arse - but you'll be helping your 9,000  
friends.

Next, we need more sysadmins. How do we do this? Do we continue with  
a person per machine or function (eg, all the tile machines say, if  
we have more than one?). Do we have some other system? Do we need a  
steering committee for this? How have other projects managed it?

have fun,

SteveC | steve at asklater.com | http://www.asklater.com/steve/



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