Hello,
as many of you heard my "I'm sorry, I'm busy" phrase these days, I wanted to give you a quick follow-up on what's happening at infra. 
The tedious work of documenting the new platform seems to pay out, installing machines is now *much* smoother, even without any deployment solution so far. Plus, kermit-new, our new web server, has proven to be reliable and stable, and it seems all the previous issues have been cured. Not only by throwing hardware at the problem (tm), but also by fine-tuning services.
In the meantime, we have updated two internal servers that already were on the latest hardware revision, and now also carry the new base OS and configuration.
Some of you may have heard that we have serious issues with the SSDs in bilbo, our download master. We are trying to nail these down with the help of our ISP, since it seems to be hardware-related, but independent, bilbo-new is in place, equipped with the new base OS and configuration.
What's still missing:
- The migration of the VMs. This might be a problematic task we need to do at the same time, as host and guest systems should be the same, otherwise some modules or userspace tools might not work anymore (we use containers, no real VMs). A date for the migration is still to be set.
- The migration of the mail system. We want to move our mail and internal mailing lists away from the download server to the internal server.
- The installation of MirrorBrain to bilbo-new, to replace the old download server. Sadly, lots of magic has been applied, but not documented "in the early days", and I am still working on extracting everything. I make good progress, and hope we are done with this soon.
So, you see a lot's cooking, and we're making good progress towards a full update of the infrastructure, which then hopefully will give us lots of cycles free for other smaller tasks that we had to postpone because of the migration's urgency. My todo and wishlist currently has, I just conted,
I'd like to close by saying a big thank you to my fellow colleagues, especially Alin, Alex, Robert and Christian, who are extremely helpful and work like insane around the clock together with me to make things happen. Thanks a lot, folks, it's an honour working with you in this great team!
Florian
