So, the last month or so has been extremely eventful in so many ways.
I don’t even know where to start.
SCM and Issue Trackers
I spent a few weeks evaluating various SCM systems and issue trackers for SURRO. Ended up settling on mantisbt. I’m actually really glad I found it as it was much better than what we’d initially set out for.
We were looking at potentially migrating gitlab but decided to stick with it as our SCM and migrate it to the SURRO domain.
I got to see a little deeper how to install gitlab from source. Not for the feint of heart. We’ll be using omnibus.
Interestingly enough once the issue tracker got up we had a huge surge of productivity that’s maintained ever since. Just having it there made things more organized.
New Baby Project: checkinstall
Along the way found that checkinstall doesn’t compile on newer systems and is a dependency of gitlab build process. Work journal is here. I’ll be making it into an official patch and offering a patched fork on the SURRO repos.
Also found that our target system, Fedora 25 doesn’t offer omnibus packaging for gitlab, but CentOS does. I suspect this is likely due to the fact that checkinstall from upstream doesn’t compile.
So once on the SURRO repos we’ll try to get a package included in the fedora repos. I may need support from the checkinstall project owner to do this.
Had my yearly bout with postfix on the new prod buildout. Still hate postfix. We gotz emails.
SALT
Greybeard Prawn is working on salt master configuration to build a preprod with. Once done he’ll be able to generate a new prod with it and we’ll cut over DNS. Perfection.
Examplar vs. Support Infrastructure
No updates. Between dayjob and my picking away at an infra push for SURRO I haven’t had time. We’re laying groundworks down for staff to maintain all that once in place though so there’s that. I need a vacation – I’m fighting burnout from spending too much time in front of a computer.
I’ve decided we’ll borrow from ITIL where appropriate but not for the purpose of implementing ITIL.
Greybeard DJ_L and Greybeard Son_Goku have been huge helps in offloading some of the work as it’s ramped up and I’m hoping we’ll reach a point where I can step away from infra and focus solely on Examplar and the broader SURRO Lifecycle.
SSO / Web Services User LifeCycle Management
Looking at FreeIPA + Ipsilon. Still evaluating.
Branding / Migrations / Server Refreshes
This shit is taking forever. I’ll be moving this blog under the surro umbrella and the new official surro linux blog will either be in its place or at linux.*. Don’t know yet. Still looking at the diagram. I was pretty sloppy when I built out the first round of stuff and now I’m paying for it with sweat and tears. You wouldn’t believe how much planning goes into this.
SSL
We’re going to an HSTS-centered configuration for web services. Stay tuned.