Re: [Savannah-hackers] Re: Savannah situation

[Bradley M. Kuhn]

Nic Ferrier wrote:

> I think what I'd like to hear is some commitment to improve the
> situation that the FSF system admins find themselves in.

> There are too few admins with too much to do. This results in
> communication problems and what seems to be a certain amount of
> firefighting rather than progressive and deliberate action.

Two days before the crack, we hired another FSF sysadmin.  Had he had time
to actually get acclimated before flying into the crack situation, we
probably would have been much better prepared to respond.

This problem you raise regarding the FSF sysadmin (note the use of
singular there) is correct -- when Paul was working alone to keep
everything in the air, we had serious problems.  This is precisely why I
went to the FSF board meeting this past September and demanded we get an
additional hire allocated in the IT department.  The board was kind enough
to grant my request.

I believe that these problems will get better now that we have doubled the
staff resources.  I have also in the past few months reassigned some of my
direct management responsibilities (namely, the direct management of the
Compliance Lab), and I will be focusing more on management of FSF's IT
department.

Between these two changes, I think things will get better.  As I said, the
crack was discovered on the fourth day our new staffer (Jim Blair) was
here.  We had had almost no time to get organized as a new team before a
crisis came.  Add to that I had travel already booked that could not be
changed over the last two weeks (right when the crack response was
happening), and this lead to the horrendous mistakes we made in
communicating with savannah hackers.  For that we can do nothing but
apologize and commit to working to assist you in a collaborative way
moving forward.

I can commit to the situation getting better, because these resource
changes will make it possible for us to be substantially more responsive
and communicative.

What we would like most right now is to begin the collaborative process
over the next 48 hours to bring Savannah back online.


> Btw, it looks to me like ssh is down on savannah, so I for one can't
> login (but I have sent paul my key).

savannah.gnu.org is rerouted at the IP level to our webserver;
subversions.gnu.org:ssh for the moment is the way to get in.  Paul got
your key this morning and will install it in a few minutes.



Everyone, if you working on the system today, please come to #savannah on
irc.freenode.net so that we can coordinate our activities.

--
Bradley M. Kuhn, Executive Director
Free Software Foundation   |  Phone: +1-617-542-5942
59 Temple Place, Suite 330 |  Learn more about FSF and how you can help:
Boston, MA 02111-1307  USA |  http://svcs.affero.net/rm.php?r=bkuhn&p=FSF

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