[Mageia-sysadm] questions about our infrastructure setup & costs

[Romain d'Alverny]

Hi,

following past week-end incident, and I know that there are already
some reflexions and discussions about that, I'm posting the following
questions/needs, with my treasurer/board hat; some of these may
already have answers, so please just link me to them.

It comes down to:
 - board needs to have an up-to-date view of how much our
infrastructure costs, and would cost in different setups; and this,
split in separate, functional chunks;
 - how can we change our setup to: 1) reduce the impact of having one
chunk (here a faulty RJ45 in Marseille) shut down so much of the
project for such a long time and 2) have a quick report, automatic
about this (not only for sysadmin, but for all users of our
infrastructure).

So here is how I would put it:

 A. could you, as sysadmin, draw (graphically) the dependencies
between services, at a certain functional scale + their current
location/host;
   * goal: have an overview of Mageia infrastructure, from the outside
of sysadmin team (and yes, again, that is needed);
   * can we get it produced from the puppet conf? => the goal being
for now to have such a visual overview first, not to have it
automated.
   * the function blocks I can think of would be (but add/split/fix
accordingly):
     + core for communication & doc:
       - user accounts (LDAP, identity.m.o)
       - communications (mailing-lists, mail server)
       - documentation (Wiki, Bugzilla)
       - a specific code repository (not related to the build system)
for adm and/or one dedicated to organization (paperwork, reports,
constitution, etc.)
     + Web hosts (www, blog, planet, forums, security notifs, etc.)
     + core for building the distribution
       - code repo
       - buildsystem
       - translation tools
       - other?
     + core for distribution software
       - primary mirror
     + other?

 B. based on these functional chunks, for each, could you:
  * document what is needed for them: storage, bandwidth, what it
represent in full hardware today, what it should grow to. Goals are:
    - to have a clear idea of how much it represents/costs: today, or
if we would move to other hosting solutions (paid or not, hardware or
virtual);
    - to know how much we need to budget in security for these services;
    - to know what our options (and needs) are for migrating some
services to an architecture or a paid solution that would improve
their availability (and accessibility in case of failure).

 C. various questions:
  * could both above documentation (A and B) be maintained through changes;
  * would it be possible to have the systems hosting our services to
have a prefix in their fqdn with the city/country they are located in?
Goal: being more explicit about where a service is located at this
time, so that a $ host www.mageia.org can answer me something like
champagne.paris.fr.mageia.org - for instance. I don't mean to change
all that, but I'm wondering about the opportunity.
  * what do you think about maintaining a separate blog (for
opening/closing tickets + a global summary of what xymon provides
already) under status.mageia.org (or maybe a different domain, for
that matter)? (something similar to status.twitter.com)


Thanks!