Traditionally during akademy the Akademy Awards are awarded. The jury decided to award one to me this year. See the news article.

I’m very, very, very happy with the award. I also find it awesome that fellow members of the sysadmin-team are mentioned. Although it is assigned to me, it is one for the team.

The last years I’ve shifted from translator, to developer to sysadmin. I started as a translator to dutch, then hacked on Digikam, started a very good mailclient, which never picked up somehow, started RSIBreak, which is picking up and then became Sysadmin after Dirk asked me to get involved.

I know the current infrastructure we currently have is quite good. It has improved the last years and we have almost no downtimes (knock on wood). Even the major release of 4.7 went fine, we saw some amazing stats like the www.kde.org-server, which had over 100GB traffic on the day after the release. We stll have some nice plans for the future, like a continious build cluster. These are no tasks for an individual, you need a group for that.

Getting the award makes me feel happy, it is a recognition of the work done by the team, so I want to congratulate them too: Ben, Eike, Dirk, David, Ingo and Jeff. Also the other winners of the awards, Dario and Martin, well deserved! You are doing amazing work, it feels a bit silly to be mentioned in one sentence with you two heros.

I hope I will be able to serve the community as best as I can for the times to come! Thanks all.
Ps. Do winners of the award still get a Qt green phone? :-)

Just imported all the old donations into the new donation database. Nice work to do, and satisfying to preserve the past!

Have you ever donated? You might find your self in the list of donations.

Today at 6.46am Dirk Mueller switched the mail handling for KDE to a new server. This includes all the mail to @kde.org addresses, including the complete handling of all mailinglists. So far there has been zero complaints and zero downtime, so we can say the switch has went smooth and successful.

There are some area’s we need some further work, like the spam setup and we see some bounces which could be valid or not valid. Seems like the bounce processing of mailman in the previous setup might not have been working correctly, so we see an above average of automatic unsubscribes from mailinglists to catch up with that.

The old server was qmail based, a small mail server, which has enormous speed and it served us well for the last ~decade, but it showed its age. We have now switched to Postfix, a modern mail server, which gives us a bit more control to the queues, better logging and it’s well known, so easy to get support for.

Enjoy the new mail server, and if there are any problems, file a sysadmin bugreport as usual. Dirk did the work on the new server, so hug him when you see him.

Maybe it’s a good idea to summarize a bit about the activities the sysadmin has done the last few weeks. We have been working on KTown. This is one of the older machine’s we maintain and we need to shut it down. Due to it’s age we can’t depend on it anymore.

KTown was a multi-function server, it performed a whole range of services, ranging from serving some sites, being the main mailserver for all kde.org traffic, being a stealth nameserver and serving the master source tarballs for everything we produce.

Once we decided to decommission the server we drafted a plan to move all the services around and organize them better. We moved the sites to our master webserver and rethought about the nameserver setup. Historically domain names were mostly registered by individuals, we have transferred most of those now to the KDE e.V.. Registering domainnames privately is just a bad idea. Times change, people come and go. In the end getting changes done from people who have been inactive for years already is no fun. I’m happy we have solved this now. Last week we even transferred kde.org, it was registered by Trolltech in the past. Though it was in good hands with the sysadmins of Nokia, we felt it was better to keep everything together.

For all those domains we need nameservers. bytemark.co.uk was kind enough to provide us some nameservers we can use.

Another server we worked on was Immanuel. The hosting arrangement is a bit dodgy, so we can not rely on it being repaired quickly after it crashes. That means we can not put mission critical stuff on there anymore. That means we needed to move stuff around. That means bugzilla had to move, we originally planned that to happen while upgrading to bugzilla4, but we had to move it before that was ready. Immanuel also served some websites which we moved around.

Next to that some remarkable things are: move of kdedevelopers.org, including a new layout, usual drupal updates and the update of the mediawiki version on our wiki’s.

Since that’s all done, we are looking towards new things. We have two somewhat bigger wishes: deal with api.kde.org / ebn and we want to start building a build farm, not for our own pleasure, but to have continuous builds of our repository and have reports when the unit tests breaks.

Call for a server

But I first want to start with api.kde.org, Allen Winter is currently maintaining it, but I think he needs some help to get it in a better shape. For that to happen, I would like a new server. It needs to have some hard disk space (like 120GB, as it needs to have a full copy of the svn repo + everything in git), a somewhat powerful processor and some memory.

If you are a hosting company and want to donate something like that to us, drop us a mail at sysadmin@kde.org or talk to us on #kde-sysadmin at freenode…

On the www.kde.org-site there is the possibility to make a donation to KDE eV. KDE uses that to finance the operations, like organising contributor sprints, paying for domains, travel costs, legal stuff, etc. In the past we had a nice page listing everyone who donated. But it was broken for a year now.

The system relied on the mails which were sent by PayPal after a donation was made. It parsed the content, extracted the information and then generated a piece of html from it and committed that, after that a signal was given to svn up so the donation would show up. At the beginning that probably worked fine. But PayPal was not very consistent with the mails it send out. Format changed, the script was adapted. Sometimes Paypal mails arrived in French or other languages. It became messy and at one point beyond fixing.

So, this week I sat down and have rewritten the stuff. We now use the PayPal API which provides a method to receive the payment details. This means the donation gets directly recorded and we put it in a database table. The user is redirected back to the kde site and can see his donation and the message he left instantly. Pretty straightforward in the end, just needed to get done. See the result (including a graph) here.

If you wish to test the system and make a donation to KDE e.V. at the same time, go here, click on the yellow Donate button and don’t forget to leave a nice message when you make the donation!