[tor-project] January 2019 in sysadmin land

[Linus Nordberg]

Hi Tor,

Here's what January looked like to the sysadmin team.

# What's been done

- Dealt with an unusual high frequency of hardware issues on physical
  machines.

- Held a two days meeting in Brussels, just before FOSDEM, where a lot
  of work got done. Minutes from the meeting can be found at
  [minutes].

- Silvia Puglisi (hiro) has joined the sysadmin team!

- The ordinary resolving of requests and bug reports, as can be
  followed better over at [tickets].

[minutes] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/meetings/2019BrusselsAdminTeamMinutes[tickets] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/report/44

# Upcoming new things

- Migration of CiviCRM to new VM's.

- New VM for an evaluation of GitLab.

- Continue onboarding hiro.

# Fact of the month

We use icinga for checking the status of the systems we're
running. From the 42 types of checks we have defined, each system ends
up with a catalogue of 237 unique checks. Many of these checks are for
a certain service, like checking that backup files on the backup
storage system are current.

Tor sysadmins and service admins can be notified of problems in a
variety of ways -- f.ex. on a web page, by email or through an IRC bot.