Report on the Server Admin Team sprint in Hannover (May 2016)

Following the invitiation of our friends at <link http: www.bitmotion.de>bitmotion, the TYPO3 Server Admin Team came together at their great offices in Hannover during the weekend of May 20th-22th, 2016.

Besides many discussions of various topics that involve our team within the TYPO3 ecosphere, many smaller tasks were resolved. Here is a brief overview of the things we've worked on.

As a continuation of the work that was started during our previous sprint, we worked further on a migration of the server infrastructure towards being centralized in one data center. The migration from OpenVZ to KVM is still an ongoing task.

As most of our services are set up using Chef cookbooks (open-sourced on <link https: github.com typo3-cookbooks>github.com/TYPO3-cookbooks), improving our Chef workflow is an always ongoing task.

Previous efforts to set up a CI/CD service for our infrastructure code have reached a first milestone, which can be seen on <link https: chef-ci.typo3.org>chef-ci.typo3.org.

Using the pipelines defined there, we can now manage our Chef infrastructure without directly interacting with the Chef Server, but instead letting Jenkins upload our cookbooks, once tests pass. Making them all pass is an ongoing task.

For setting up the cookbook pipelines, we are using the new Jenkins Pipeline plugins that not only allow to get a nice pipeline view, but also allows to define them using our favorite way: using code. As always, the server setup is <link https: github.com typo3-cookbooks site-chefcitypo3org>freely available.

Based on the work of Andreas Beutel and Bastian Bringenberg, we succeeded to build a Chef recipe to install LDAP with our configuration on any server and test-server we like. 

We now have a virtual machine running with LDAP. The next steps to take were an import of all TYPO3.org users via script into LDAP. This required additional fields. Also, the importer was improved so it can run multiple times without adding all users again and again.

Passwords are not synchronized at all, because of different hashing methods. As soon as the migration happens, every user will need to reset the password on the new server.

Currently we are working on a possibility to give our users the possibility of self management of their user-data at a platform divided from TYPO3.org.

Documentation

Following the prior team sprint we've been working on an Ansible playbook to provision the new documentation server. At this sprint we could add a first documentation to this and discuss details with the server team. As a result the recipe was released to the public during this sprint. It's available from <link https: github.com typo3-documentation vagrant-ansible-t3documentation-server>github.com/TYPO3-Documentation/Vagrant-Ansible-T3Documentation-Server.

We thank the TYPO3 Association for taking over expenses and Ekkehard Gümbel and his colleagues at bitmotion for inviting us to their offices.