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System Hackers

Coordinator

Albert Dengg (albert)

Deputy-coordinators

Max Mehl (max.mehl)

Membership

By invitation, but get in touch with the coordinators if you're interested in system administration. Typically, you can start with taking over maintenance of a FSFE service.

Principal mailing list

https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/system-hackers (invitation only)

Description

The system hackers team is a trusted group of individuals taking responsibility for the low level infrastructure of the FSFE, including our host servers and services running on their respective virtual machines. You can read an overview of the FSFE's infrastructure.

Structure and communication

The System Hackers teams consists of two different sub groups: Service Maintainers and System Administrators. Maintainers take care of one or two services, often Docker containers or separated servers, while Administrators have access to multiple hosts and therefore bear much more responsibility.

We try to follow a number of basic principles that describe how we work and interact with each other.

The mailing list is the central communication channel for the whole team. We use it to discuss new development, potential changes and existing issues. It is also a point for other FSFE people to ask in case of technical problems or uncertainties and some automatic system messages so members should accommodate to ~2-3 messages a day. It is especially important that service maintainers keep track of new messages to be aware of changes in the infrastructure or new requirements.

We also have an OTRS queue for our team in which we reply to technical question and inquiries. If you would like to help answering them and getting a deeper understanding of the FSFE's infrastructure, please ask us for an account.

For internal coordination, we use a Kanban board where we track all open and closed tasks and their responsibilities.

The System Hackers meet regularly in person. Recent reports about these meetings may also give you a good impression of who we are and what we do.

Security and Privacy

We set the highest standards to the security and uptime of servers and services. However, as a team mostly run by volunteers, we cannot give any guarantee. If you think we should improve in certain areas, please get in touch with us.

All team members – no matter which sub-group, whether volunteer or employee – are required to sign a Server Access Agreement in order to legally secure data of the FSFE and users of its technical services.

Responsibilities

As a team, we set standards for ourselves to guarantee good service quality. Therefore, any maintainer of a FSFE service shall:

• Keep everything connected to that up-to-date
  • Updates for virtual machine and services itself
  • Unattended updates for stable OSes are normally OK, especially Debian Security
• Feel responsible to maintain service and fix issues
  • Time frame and intensity depends on declared importance of service
    • High: Regular checks, fix within a few hours
    • Low: Regular checks, fix within a few days
• Documentation: how does it work? How to debug? How to fix common server/client issues?

• Documentation for GDPR: fill data processing transparency table

• Feel responsible to handle internal and external requests
  • Subscribed to system-hackers@
  • Account in Ticket System (OTRS), not necessarily signed up to the queue
• Send service passwords to system hackers coordinators for central documentation

For high importance service, we require at least 2 maintainers having debug capabilities.

If a service is not constantly maintained, system hackers can stop/delete a service

Members

Below you'll find the active members of the System Hackers unless they decided to not appear publicly:

• Albert Dengg (albert)
• Alvar Penning (alvar)
• Thomas Doczkal (doczkal)
• Florian Snow (floriansnow)
• Linus Sehn (linus)
• Max Mehl (max.mehl)
• Francesco Bonanno (mibofra)
• Michael Weimann (mweimann)
• Reinhard Müller (reinhard)
• Björn Schießle (schiessle)
• Vincent Lequertier (vincent)

Service information

• TechDocs -- An user-oriented overview of technical services the FSFE offers with links to documentation and help

• Services -- An overview of all technical services run by the FSFE with maintainers, priority, and some pointers to documentation

• Systems -- Detailed explanation of some complex systems like Docker, Community Database and emails

• TechnicalProcesses -- A collection of processes and tasks for system hackers. This is the primary place to store such documentation.

• documentation -- A Git repository storing all technical documentation about servers and services which aren't processes. documentation.fsfe.org is the pretty-generated website for all its content. Both resources are only available to certain user groups.

• docker.fsfe.org is a list of all running Docker containers with some other useful information for debugging. Only accessible to certain user groups.

• The internal Kanban board collecting ongoing tasks.

Graphical overview

The graphic below shows all physical and virtual servers the FSFE is running. It might not be as up-to-date as the Services overview but more helpful to understand the structure.

Subpages

Category/Teams