At this time we are not actively looking for extra volunteers.

Who do we want:

• People with motivation to help out one of the largest public Git hosting sites who don't mind helping out some poor user once in a week and/or want to enhance repo.or.cz services and features while also fixing few bugs in the process
• People with reasonable experience in all of UNIX/GNU, shell scripting, Perl and Git itself
• Trustworthy persons with no bad history and preferrably some existing open-source community involvement - ideally (but not required) in the Git community
• People who don't mind working in a team, are willing to put up with a perfectionist pasky at the beginning and can get used to thinking thrice before doing something on the live database

What will you do (at least some of... ;-):

• Supporting users over email, possibly IRC. We get one support issue per week on average, usually project deletion requests.
• Other maintenance tasks - checking if jobs don't get stuck, possible project breakage, reviewing+applying patches from users, monitoring bogus content tags usage, cleaning up badly created projects and handling server overload (all fairly rare occurences)
• Implement gadgets to ease your maintenance tasks- could be e.g. issue tracking system or ability for users to remove projects themselves.
• Fix repo.or.cz bugs. E.g. the mirroring process gets stuck once in a while on misbehaving mirror source, and sometimes objects get lost during gc that shouldn't.
• Implement cool new features. E.g. something from the Girocco TODO list, cleaning up and adding support for more mirroring source VCSes, user experience improvements, maybe some interesting statistical analysis...

What's in it for you:

• Most importantly, good warm feeling in your heart! ;-)
• Chance to play with a reasonably large site and try out interesting things.
• Learning more UNIX/shell/perl/git on a very practical project.
• Getting more involved in the Git development community, getting general experience with OSS development of something that's actually immediately useful.
• Low and totally flexible time demands.
• Nice CV point to be sure!

Are you interested? Please apply at pasky@ucw.cz. (Note: If you want to look at the current repo.or.cz codebase or even deploy a copy locally to play with, just look at girocco.git.)

TODO: Make everything below this line less public. ;-) So far, no huge deal I guess. Volunteers can see what will they work with.

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The Admin Team Plan

These are pasky's ideas on how to set up the admin team and transfer control to it:

• Gather feedback and confirmation from volunteers that already applied.
• Set up admin@repo.or.cz alias plus internal mailing list.
• Create accounts for new recruits with sudo access to the 'repo' account. (We just got a complete tree backup while migrating, so we can be liberal and relatively trusting at the beginning. ;)
• Let the new recruits start helping out and self-organizing. There will be probably need to create a deployment staging area and some cooperation rules to avoid race conditions, but I'd prefer the new admin team to already figure that out for themselves.
• Give the two or three most experienced members root access after a while.
• Pasky would like to stay in the loop and keep veto power for a while to protect the site from some bad deterioration or major turnovers.

New admins rules:

• Do not be shy doing stuff. If you are not doing it, noone else probably is either. Just send a mail when you start doing something, and another when you are done.
• Document everything you do outside of your sandbox. On the mailing list for starters, we can figure out better book-keeping later. Reply on admin@ to all user requests that you have handled.
• Ask for consultations and acks whenever you have shadow of doubt.
• Think trice. Avoid doing unrevertable things!
• Think once. Make plenty of non-destructive quick experiments to learn about stuff.
• No abuse. One of us is directly responsible for everything that happens on this server. If you do stuff like illegal filesharing, that person will be very much not amused (and will definitely cooperate with the authorities in finding out who's responsible)!
• Do not use Ctrl-C to quit screen. You could kill a task!

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Cookbook

Working as repo user:

• All infrastructure is owned by the repo user, and runs as repo (except web scripts, suexec is not set up - for now?)
• Always work under the shared screen so others can check out who is working on what: screen -x repo/admins, this will get you to our shared screen session. jobd (updating mirrors, running gc) and taskd (creating mirrors, push notifications) run in the first two windows. Shells in screen are owned by user repo
.
• Live copy lives in ~/repomgr and ~/WWW, chroot jail for pushing is in ~/j, codebase is in ~/repo.
• Do not work directly in ~/repo. If you want to edit files, clone Girocco.git and push after committing (and verifying) your changes locally.
• To update the live copy, cd ~/repo, git pull (should fast-forward), then make install. This will OVERWRITE complete ~/repomgr! It's also not really necessary anymore to do this manually because the live copy auto-updates from the rorcz branch every 15 minutes.

New admins checklist:

• Make yourself a .forward file so that you receive admin@ mail.
• Add yourself to the admin team page, which is also a nice way to get comfortable with our girocco setup.
• Send a short introduction to admin@repo.or.cz.
• Take a look at the list of TODO items in rorcz branch of girocco. Perhaps you could tackle something right away?
• If you are bored, ask for some ideas! Or perhaps we can bounce to you some requests we did not have time to deal with. Don't be shy!
• Please check periodically that the jobd in screen window 0 is not stuck.
• Try to deal with something from the TODO list.

Removing a project:

• pasky: Philosophically, I'm not too happy to remove a project unless there's a good reason like turning it to a mirror or some consolidation or legal reasons (or it's almost empty); I believe in archiving everything. This position can change if others disagree.
• We've supported self-service deletions for quite some time now, linked at the top of each project's edit page.
• For manual deletions, check out /home/repo/repo/toolbox/projtool.pl which has a remove subcommand (also note the --keep-forks option in particular).

Other things running on the server – at this time, everything running is directly related to repo.or.cz operations:

• Postfix for delivering notification emails and forwarding admin emails
• A simple spam filter (currently SpamAssassin) for the admin list
• knot-resolver, a local-only recursive DNS service
• fail2ban for making it harder to do annoying things to our server