Server Team Sprint 2014/2

By: Server Team

Report from the Server Team Sprint which took place on June 27-29 2014 in Lucerne.

At your service: Guido, Andri, Fabien, Bastian, Steffen, Peter, Michael.

The TYPO3 Server Admin Team (Andri Steiner, Bastian Bringenberg, Fabien Udriot, Peter Niederlag, Steffen Gebert, Michael Stucki and our guest Guido Haase) came together last Friday to Sunday for the 2nd team sprint in 2014 in beautiful Lucerne (Switzerland).

First of all, we were happy to welcome Andri as our latest team member. Andri was our host during the weekend and invited us into his employer's office (snowflake), where he is head of servers. He joined our bi-weekly Skype meetings since many months and participated in the last two team sprints already. Andri, we're glad to have you with us!

Friday started with some of our daily work: Processing OTRS tickets, fixing small issues and documenting some of our procedures. Time was flying, and it was already 8pm when we left for a nice dinner just besides the Reuss river. The dinner was sponsored by snowflake - many thanks for that, it was brilliant!

During Saturday and Sunday, our work focused on the following work packages:

Redmine (forge) and Gerrit (review) Updates

The update of the forge.typo3.org website (running Redmine) is an outstanding task since a long time. We continued working on that topic and are confident to release it in a new setup together with an updated version of review.typo3.org (running Gerrit Code Review). Connected by a message queue server (RabbitMQ), our remaining task is to create new Git repositories when a new Forge project is created.

To be able to test the complex setup (that also involves our SVN server), Peter has been working on a project called "t3stacks" (github.com/t3dev/t3stacks). This allows to replicate some key parts of the *.typo3.org infrastructure in an isolated enviroment. This turned out to be very important for us, to ease the pain of testing multi-server setups with Chef.

DNS Server

While we maintain big parts of the *.typo3.org infrastructure ourselves, we are very happy to rely on some sponsors who offer us their services (like email or DNS hosting). We now found time to setup a new primary nameserver which will be maintained by ourselves. Secondaries will still be maintained at external data centers by our sponsors at punkt.de and snowflake. This allows us to manage the zones through Chef, which can then automatically include all our servers without manual interaction.

The server is currently still in the testing phase but will go into production during the next days...

OTRS for the Security Team

The OTRS installation for the TYPO3 Security Team is still running on an external server. We continued with the integration of that site into our infrastructure.

LDAP as central authentication and authorization service

The *.typo3.org infrastructure is using a non-standardized single sign-on implementation using TYPO3 as source of truth. As this non-standard solution requires an integration every time when a new application is added to our infrastructure, there have been many wishes to replace it with a more-widely used solution. The team already had a workshop during T3DD13, where we asked the community for input on that topic. Back then we already wanted to use a standard protocol like LDAP for the job. However, because of many existing requirements, the conclusion back then was to stay with the current SSO implementation. In the meantime, we found a solution which allows us to use best of both worlds by mixing the two solutions.

Some of the team members and especially Guido kicked off this project to introduce at least LDAP and probably SimpleSAML. The current state of the investigations can be found here: notes.typo3.org/p/LDAP_investigation. Further input is welcome!

Demo + Docs Vagrant box

Fabien has been working on a Vagrant box to offer a full clone of the demo.typo3.org as well as the docs.typo3.org websites. It can be downloaded as part of the "t3stacks" project which was mentioned above. We hope to receive contributions to of these sites, which are very important for the whole TYPO3 project.

Final words

Once again we had a very productive time. We made lots of small steps forward and hope to finish one or the other task soon. We are confident about the outcome and for having the opportunity to discuss projects face to face. Also we hope that the "t3stacks" project will lead to one or the other contribution. If you are interested to help or need further assistance, get in touch with us!

We also want to thank snowflake productions for inviting us to their office in beautiful Lucerne, and for sponsoring the tasty dinner on Friday evening. Many thanks to the TYPO3 Association for covering travel and hotel costs. And special thanks to Andri for being our host during 3 very productive days!

TYPO3 Server Team