[Mageia-sysadm] questions about our infrastructure setup & costs

Mon Apr 2 15:23:25 CEST 2012

Hi,
+
+following past week-end incident, and I know that there are already
+some reflexions and discussions about that, I'm posting the following
+questions/needs, with my treasurer/board hat; some of these may
+already have answers, so please just link me to them.
+
+It comes down to:
+ - board needs to have an up-to-date view of how much our
+infrastructure costs, and would cost in different setups; and this,
+split in separate, functional chunks;
+ - how can we change our setup to: 1) reduce the impact of having one
+chunk (here a faulty RJ45 in Marseille) shut down so much of the
+project for such a long time and 2) have a quick report, automatic
+about this (not only for sysadmin, but for all users of our
+infrastructure).
+
+So here is how I would put it:
+
+ A. could you, as sysadmin, draw (graphically) the dependencies
+between services, at a certain functional scale + their current
+location/host;
+   * goal: have an overview of Mageia infrastructure, from the outside
+of sysadmin team (and yes, again, that is needed);
+   * can we get it produced from the puppet conf? => the goal being
+for now to have such a visual overview first, not to have it
+automated.
+   * the function blocks I can think of would be (but add/split/fix
+accordingly):
+     + core for communication & doc:
+       - user accounts (LDAP, identity.m.o)
+       - communications (mailing-lists, mail server)
+       - documentation (Wiki, Bugzilla)
+       - a specific code repository (not related to the build system)
+for adm and/or one dedicated to organization (paperwork, reports,
+constitution, etc.)
+     + Web hosts (www, blog, planet, forums, security notifs, etc.)
+     + core for building the distribution
+       - code repo
+       - buildsystem
+       - translation tools
+       - other?
+     + core for distribution software
+       - primary mirror
+     + other?
+
+ B. based on these functional chunks, for each, could you:
+  * document what is needed for them: storage, bandwidth, what it
+represent in full hardware today, what it should grow to. Goals are:
+    - to have a clear idea of how much it represents/costs: today, or
+if we would move to other hosting solutions (paid or not, hardware or
+virtual);
+    - to know how much we need to budget in security for these services;
+    - to know what our options (and needs) are for migrating some
+services to an architecture or a paid solution that would improve
+their availability (and accessibility in case of failure).
+
+ C. various questions:
+  * could both above documentation (A and B) be maintained through changes;
+  * would it be possible to have the systems hosting our services to
+have a prefix in their fqdn with the city/country they are located in?
+Goal: being more explicit about where a service is located at this
+time, so that a $ host www.mageia.org can answer me something like
+champagne.paris.fr.mageia.org - for instance. I don't mean to change
+all that, but I'm wondering about the opportunity.
+  * what do you think about maintaining a separate blog (for
+opening/closing tickets + a global summary of what xymon provides
+already) under status.mageia.org (or maybe a different domain, for
+that matter)? (something similar to status.twitter.com)
+
+
+Thanks!
+