SysAdmins

We can always use SysAdmin support to help out with our infrastructure: developing tools & maintaining sites.

Deployment Cycle

• InstallationGuidelines
• MaintenanceGuidelines
  • UserGuidelinesUpgrade
  • BluePrintUpgrades
  • PakistanDeploymentCycle

Setting up a New Instance

Eden project have 2 servers kindly donated by ​Zen Internet.
These run KVM to provide different virtual machines.
We use ​Proxmox to manage these VMs:

• Type: Fully Virtualized (KVM)
• Installation media: Debian-503-amd64 (if not using the template)
• Disk Storage: Images (Host1) data (Host2)
• Start at Boot: tick
• Disk type: VIRTIO
• Disk size: 22GB
• Guest Type: Linux-2.6
• Network Card: virtio
• Bridge: vmbr0

These documents are secured - ask for access if you are going to contribute:

• ​IP Addresses/RAM Allocations for Eden Infrastructure
• ​Setting up a new VM instance on Eden Infrastructure

Copy from Template

We normally copy an instance from a predefined template rather than starting with a fresh OS build.

• consider changing this with scripts similar to ISO/VM builds?

1. Turn off template VM instance if on
2. SSH into the host machine

If using Host1:

3. cd /spare/images/images
4. cp 106/vm-106-disk-1.raw 1xx/vm-1xx-disk-1.raw

If using Host2:

3.

zcat /spare/template/vm_release.gz | dd of=/dev/data/vm-1xx-disk-1 bs=8M
dd if=/dev/data/vm-106-disk-1 of=/dev/data/vm-1xx-disk-1 bs=8M

4. That'll take a while. You can get it to notify progress by doing a kill -USR1 {process id of the dd}

5. start your VM after the copy is complete
6. Open VNC Console
7. read /home/INSTALL in the vm
8. Set the IP (using the spreadsheet)

Upgrading an Instance

Need to decide whether the site will be upgraded straight from Trunk, or whether upgrades are staged via a Test server.

We manage upgrades using Fabfile.

1. Add the site to fabile.py
2. If no keys generated yet, then generate some:

   fab generate_keys
   

3. deploy keys

   fab <site> distribute_keys
   

4. Run the upgrade (as/when required)

   fab <site> deploy
   

References

• ​SysAdmin notes for Eden Infrastructure
• ​Foundation Infrastructure
• ​Contacts

ToDo

Windows Installer

See if we can upgrade to Python 2.7 to have Foreign-Key support (#900)

Infrastructure Virtual Machine Template

• Update shell aliases: compile/pull
  • convert to scripts in /usr/local/bin (as per ISO/VM)
• Change permissions on languages files (we don't want these being updated live by the server)
• Add maintenance site & HTML
• Rename site as xxxx.sahanafoundation.org
  • To work with fabfile
• Provide a script to manage the MySQL root pw change
  • change the password
  • edit Eden's 000_config.py
  • edit /root/.my.cnf
• Update Eden
• Update Web2Py (as-required)
• Update OS (to Squeeze & then maintain patches)
• Increase swap to 2048Mb (from 750Mb)
  • can we do this in image? Add an emergency swapfile?
  • Add extra disk for those instances which need extra capacity

Test

• Set up an instance of Hudson to automatically run through our Selenium tests

Demo

• Have a set of reference data available

Pootle

• Upgrade to 2.1.4 (from 2.1.1)

Trac

• Upgrade to 0.12.1
  • Check Plugin Dependencies
• Convert from sqlite to PostgreSQL (or MySQL) to improve performance
• Add Timing & Estmation Plugin
• Investigate a fix or alternative to ​http://trac-hacks.org/wiki/MathCaptchaPlugin for allowing Trac users to register bugs anonymously whilst not locking out our testing team.
• See if we can not send emails out to users for the updates they make themselves (maybe fixed in 0.12.x?)
• Investigate a fix for the last section edit doubling-up the footers (maybe fixed in 0.12.x?)

Release Process

• DeveloperGuidelinesReleaseProcess
• Bzr start-commit hook to check for existence of 'compiled' folder

Translation Process

• Bzr start-commit hook to update all languages (need a script rather than the current appadmin UI method)

  cd web2py
  python web2py.py -S eden -R applications/eden/static/scripts/tools/languages.py
  

• Scripts to automate the conversion 2 PO & upload/download to/from Pootle: UserGuidelinesLocalisation