Report on the server team sprint in Frankfurt (April 2017)

Categories: Community Created by Michael Stucki
On the weekend of April 7-9, the server team met for the 2nd team sprint in 2017 at the office of dkd in Frankfurt. Here is our report about the tasks that we've been working on.
The documentation team joined the server team to discuss and work on the setup of the documentation server.
The team created a Docker image to wrap the upcoming, new toolchain for documentation rendering. A first version of the Docker image can be found at <link https: hub.docker.com r t3docs renderdocumentation>hub.docker.com/r/t3docs/renderdocumentation/. It still needs some refinement but works in general. It will render documentation locally, easily and in exactly the same manner as on the live server.
We also got that Docker image running on GitLab CI. Same here: It still needs to be completed but works in general. In total: Great stuff, big progress!
Most important: There aren't any blockers left that would prevent us from heading towards the new server. Have an eye on <link https: github.com typo3-documentation t3docs-docker-image issues>github.com/TYPO3-Documentation/t3docs-docker-image/issues/ to monitor progress. Much of the work was done by Daniel Siepmann who joined the small & busy team for the first time. Moreover, he is willing to continue working within the documentation team. That's very good news.
Many thanks to Martin Bless & Daniel Siepmann for attending our sprint and for the passion you brought. We hope to see you again at the next sprints...

Server Infrastructure

As usual when sitting together, we talked discussed a multitude of topics to improve workflows, communication, as well as technical implementations. Latter included DNS setup, VM migration, <link https: github.com typo3-infrastructure staticerrorpages>error pages on proxies.

Server Hosting

We would like to streamline our setup and consolidate all services within one environment. Thus, we are looking for a new supplier to host our whole infrastructure.
To find a fitting hoster, we defined the (soft) requirements for both variants, a virtualized IaaS offering or based on physical servers.
We hope that we can find a sponsor for the majority of the resulting costs. The open tendering will be published after negotiating the text with the T3A within the upcoming weeks...

Redmine Update

The task to update the Redmine installation used on forge.typo3.org was probably the longest-running within our team. Huge cleanups were required, as the state in which we got it handed over years ago contained many patches applied to the Redmine core. Additionally, our team was lacking any Ruby on Rails knowledge.
During the sprint, the final steps to update the installation to the recent Redmine version 3.3 (from 1.4) were made. The update itself happened on Monday after the sprint (see the News article <link https: forge.typo3.org news>forge.typo3.org/news/813). We want to especially thank our former team member Peter Niederlag, who invested massive amounts of time to prepare this migration. Merci Peter!

LDAP

The LDAP setup continues to keep us busy. We tried to finish our Docker based version of the LDAP server to provide a local development environment - however this failed after an unresolvable SSL connectivity problem. Therefore, we decided to switch to a Vagrant Box for this topic.
One of our goals was to move LDAP from manual to Chef based provisioning. As a consequence of this, we also decided to switch from plain config files to a database integration style to maintain the schema of the new LDAP system. Therefore, we deciced to work on a versioning script bundle to tackle this.
This script will be finished in the next weeks and is located here: <link https: github.com typo3-infrastructure ldap-schema-migration>github.com/TYPO3-infrastructure/ldap-schema-migration.
As a consequence of the Redmine update, we also managed to switch that site from the old & proprietary SSO login to the new LDAP based authentication. LDAP is used on more and more of our sites, and we continue to work on that...

Ticket Systems

We managed to clean up OTRS and Forge from a lot of open tickets. The cleanup solved a lot of requests and closed a few old ones.

Thanks

We like to thank <link https: www.dkd.de>dkd and especially Radica Kudric and Olivier Dobberkau for the warm welcome. An extra thanks to Olivier for sponsoring delicious Pizza for us! :-)
Many thanks to the members of the TYPO3 Association who are covering all travel and accommodation costs through their membership.
Participants of the sprint: Andreas Beutel, Martin Bless, Bastian Bringenberg, Steffen Gebert, Patrick Hausen, Jörg Schweizer, Daniel Siepmann, Andri Steiner, Michael Stucki
PS: If you like our work and want to know more about what we do, have a look at our <link https: forge.typo3.org projects team-server-public wiki team_report_2017-q1>quarterly report for 2017 / Q1 which was published two weeks ago.