Working inside the Team

The Server Admin Team consits at the moment of the following people: Michael Stucki (Leader), Steffen Gebert, Peter Niederlag, Christian Trabold, and Fabien Udriot. Bastian Bringenberg is a frequent contributor and attends all of our meetings. The team meetings are held on a regular basis (bi-weekly on Tuesdays at 8:00am), where we keep each other up to date, go through open issues, and assign tasks. Meeting protocols can be found in the team's wiki.

Besides the usual maintanence work for the whole infrastructure, we provide end-user support to people having problems with the infrastructure. Support is mainly done through issue trackers and the admin(at)typo3.org email address, where in total 404 tickets have been resolved in the year 2012.

Team Meeting during the typo3.org sprint in december

As part of the code sprint for typo3.org in december the server team met at AOEmedia in Wiesbaden to plan further steps for 2013 and finish opened tasks out of 2012. It was very nice to see everybody again at the end of the year. We did finish a lot of work there and closed a lot of tickets. 

Gerrit upgrade

The Gerrit Code Review installation on review.typo3.org, which is used to peer-review all code changes for TYPO3 CMS, Flow, and Neos has been updated. Furthermore, the setup is now managed through our configuration management software Chef. More details can be found in the previously published announcement.

Backup server

Our backup server has been moved from a team member's basement into the data center of the University of Wuerzburg. The ability to restore backups with 1Gbps has already been used during the trouble with the host serving typo3.org couple of weeks ago. We use the great BackupPC software to run this service.

Documentation on docs.typo3.org

The Documentation Team was supported by the server team to create the rendering chain for the new documentation infrastructure on docs.typo3.org. See here for more recent news on documentation changes.

Forum

After a very long development phase, the official TYPO3 forums have been launched at the end of January. The forums are automatically synchronized with news groups / mailing lists, to provide a more beginner-friendly interface to our community's communication channels.

Until now, the forum has not been announced publicly except via Twitter. However, it is running as a public beta and everyone is encouraged to report feedback in our issue tracker. We hope to finish this phase in 1-2 months and will then announce the website with some more bells and whistles..

The majority of the work was done by Tim Dülken in close cooperation with Server Team members. Thanks for your work!

Central Log Server

In order to inspect system logs of all our servers in one place, we set up a rsyslog server that collects logs from our whole server infrastructure.

More tools to inspect the logs are in the process of being added, e.g. Graylog2 and Kibana.

Closing Words

We are happy about these achievements and look forward to improve the whole infrastrcture further in 2013. At least, there are plenty of plans already...

If you have any feedback or suggestions for things we should watch, please let us know with a short comment.