Anyone who’s been around on IRC knows that life as a system administrator at the Mozilla Foundation is pretty darn busy. It’s definitely more than a one person job, and now we can finally do something about it 🙂 Think you’ve got what it takes to be a part of the Mozilla sysadmin team? I could use the help! 🙂 Here’s the job posting.
Glad to have everyone (mostly) healthy again
The flu is going around, and pretty much everyone in my family has had it over the last week and a half. My turn was over this last weekend, and I spent most of Sunday sleeping, and have been fighting off headaches and sore throats for the last two days. It seems to be trailing off finally.
Changing the domain for mozilla.org mailing lists
One of the projects that we’ve been discussing for a while is to move the mailing lists on mozilla.org to a separate domain name, such as lists.mozilla.org. The primary intent of this is to be able to use stricter anti-spam controls on it than we use on the personal and role addresses, since the moderation queues are constantly filled with spam messages that the list moderators can’t keep up with.
It ocurred to me the other day that the news hierarchy changing, and the corresponding changes to list names going with it, would be the perfect opportunity to kill this off with minimal disruption. Since many of the list names will be changing anyway, we can change the domain name at the same time without any additional disruption.
Polvi is looking into it to see if we can be ready to do that when the time comes to throw the switch.
Bugzilla 2.20 feature freeze and 2.18.1/2.19.3 release plans
Bugzilla’s feature freeze for version 2.20 starts today (Tuesday).
Here’s the plan.
I’m probably going to wait to enforce the freeze until late in the day because several people seem to have major projects pending that are this→â†close to landing, and would be very painful to suddenly put those on hold for 2 or 3 weeks. But nonetheless, freeze starts sometime today.
I’d like to release 2.18.1 and 2.19.3 this coming weekend. To make that happen requires a bunch of volunteers to help out with website updates, release notes, and getting a status update ready to go and so forth. I’d like Max Kanat to coordinate that, so get with him (mkanat on irc.mozilla.org/#mozwebtools) if you want to help.
The blocking2.20 flag has returned. If you know of any bugs that you think should be considered to be release blockers, please request that flag. I expect the release of 2.19.3 to generate a lot of new blocking2.20 bugs.
We’ll create the 2.20 branch, release 2.20rc1, and reopen the trunk as soon as we get all the blocking2.20+ bugs dealt with. Hopefully that’ll be within a few weeks. In the meantime, the trunk will be closed to keep people focused on the release blockers.
Reboot Adventures
Every so often, there are security updates for the Linux Kernel. Most security updates you get for Linux don’t require a reboot. Installing a new kernel is one of the few things that does. Well, we have 16 RedHat servers in production, and 11 of them had kernel updates in the queue (the other 5 were just put in production within the last couple days, and had the necessary updates installed already), so I got to spend a few hours tonight rebooting servers. And Myk and Chase got to spend that time at the colo facility watching them reboot in case anything went wrong. They also had other things to do while they were there (there were some tinderboxes being moved, and three of the above-mentioned new machines were actually getting put in tonight). And something did go wrong. Megalon (the CVS server) didn’t come back up after rebooting. After an hour or so, Myk power-cycled it, and it came back up this time. It seemed to have stalled trying to initialize the RAID controller the first time. Ah, what fun.