Hello everyone!
We held our usual meeting a week late in April. But still, here are the minutes, preceeded by a usual, carefully hand-crafted variable header by your favorite editor (the human, not the software).
Stay safe, inside, wash your hands, and take care of each other. :)
# Roll call: who's there and emergencies
anarcat, hiro and weasel are present (gaba late)
# Roadmap review
We changed our meeting template to just do a live roadmap review from Trac instead of listing all the little details of all the things we did in the last month. The details are in Trac.
So we reviewed the roadmap at:
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/teams/SysadminTeam
SVN, Solr got postponed to april. kvm3 wasn't completed either but should be by the end of the week. hopefully kvm4 will be done by the end of the month but is also likely to be postponed.
We might need to push on the buster upgrade schedule if we don't want to miss the "pre-LTS" window.
We also note that we don't have a good plan for the GitLab deployment, on the infrastructure side of things. We'll need to spend some time to review the infra before anarcat leaves.
# Voice meetings
Anarcat and hiro have started doing weekly checkups, kind of informally, on the last two mondays, and it was pretty amazing. We didn't want to force a voice meeting on everyone without first checking in, but maybe we could just switch to that model it's mostly just hiro and anarcat every week anyways.
The possibilities considered were:
1. we keep this thing where some people checkin by voice every week, but we keep a monthly text meeting 2. we switch everything to voice 3. we end the voice experiment completely and go back to text-monthly-only meetings
Anarcat objected to option 3, naturally, and favored 2. Hiro agreed to try, and no one else objected.
A little bit of the rationale behind the discussion was discussed in the meeting. IRC has the advantage that people can read logs if they don't come. But we will keep minutes of the monthly meetings even if they are by voice, so people can read those, which is better than reading a backlog, because it's edited (by yours truly). And if people miss the meeting, it's their responsability: there are announcements and multiple reminders before the meeting, and they seem to have little effect on attendance. So meetings are mostly hiro and anarcat, with gaba and weasel sometimes joining in. So it makes little sense to force IRC on those two workers to accomodate people that don't get involved as much. Anarcat also feels the IRC meetings are too slow: this meeting took 30 minutes to evaluate the roadmap, and did not get much done. He estimates this would have taken only 10 minutes by voice and the end result would have been similar, if not better: the tickets would have been updated anyways.
So the plan for meetings is to have weekly checkins and a monthly meeting, by voice, on Mumble.
* weekly checkins: timeboxed to 15 minutes, with an optional 45 minutes worksession after if needed * monthly meetings: like the current IRC meetings, except by voice. timeboxed to 60 minutes still, replacing the weekly checkin for that week
We use Mumble for now, but we could consider other platforms. (Somewhat off-topic: Anarcat wrote a [review of the Mumble UX][] that was somewhat poorly received by the Mumble team, so don't get your hopes up about the Mumble UI improving.)
[review of the Mumble UX]: https://anarc.at/blog/2020-04-09-mumble-dreams/
# Other discussions
No other discussion was brought up.
# Next meeting
Next "first monday of the month", which is 2020-05-04 15:00UTC (11:00:00EDT, 17:00CET).
# Metrics of the month
* hosts in Puppet: 76, LDAP: 80, Prometheus exporters: 123 * number of apache servers monitored: 31, hits per second: 168 * number of nginx servers: 2, hits per second: 2, hit ratio: 0.89 * number of self-hosted nameservers: 6, mail servers: 10 * pending upgrades: 1, reboots: 0 * average load: 1.03, memory available: 322.57 GiB/1017.81 GiB, running processes: 460 * bytes sent: 211.97 MB/s, received: 123.01 MB/s * completion time of stretch major upgrades: 2020-07-16
Upgrade prediction graph still lives at https://help.torproject.org/tsa/howto/upgrades/
Now also available as the main Grafana dashboard. Head to https://grafana.torproject.org/, change the time period to 30 days, and wait a while for results to render.