The past 24 hours have been amazing. The sysadmin team has been busy continuously. Eike Hein was on duty yesterday most of the day, and when he (finally) decided to go to bed, Ben Cooksley took over. I guess night shifts are not so bad when you are living on the other end of the world. I’ll take the next shift if Ben has had enough.

We are busy converting password based subversion accounts to ssh based ones. The benefit of doing that is that you automatically get access to the KDE Git repository. As KDE is moving to Git, we need to either convert the password based accounts or disable them.

In the past 24 hours we have sent out mails to 1210 subversion account holders which use a password. Of those roughly 150 have replied to the invitation. Roughly 100 replied with their ssh key, 1 with his gpg key and about 50 replied that they want to close their account.

That might seem like a high number of people closing their account, but seeing it into perspective of the total accounts we have, and considering nobody gives up his or her account usually, I think it is actually a very nice number.

The 100 we converted were all converted instantly, nobody had to wait, which is a great achievement. Ah, Ben just asked me to take over, so this blog needs to be ended now. The work is comparable with creating new accounts, so we still need to actually do something for each developer that wants to convert.

What I wanted to say is, that if you have not received an invitation to convert, please go to this page and re-request your invitation. If you still don’t receive it, check if your email address is correct in the accounts file. If not, adapt it there, and re-request the invitation in a day or so.

If you have any questions, jump into #kde-sysadmin irc channel or file a sysadmin bugreport here.

Oh, backlog building up…. Bye!

My last blog triggered a handful of people who requested the merge from a password based svn account to a ssh based one. This was very nice, because we could iron out the last glitches in the scripts processing the requests.

We are now approaching the password based accounts directly. Everyone receives an invitation to convert. We send them out in managable batches, and we expect the last batch to go out later this weekend. We still have roughly 1200 accounts which need conversion.

Approaching everyone individually also means for some account holders a flash back to the times they were active for KDE. They could have been inactive for years already, as we never ‘clean’ svn accounts automatically based on inactivity.

If you are inactive you can also indicate that on the form, your account will be disabled and we will no longer spam you in the future to convert your account. So, if you want to pro-actively help us, feel free to go to this page and fill in your svn account name. You will receive instructions in your mailbox within seconds.

Traditionally we have two different account types within KDE. Some people use https://$username@svn.kde.org and some people use svn+ssh://$username@svn.kde.org. While we are moving to git we can not use the https version anymore, write access to the git repository will be based on ssh keys.

To streamline your move to git, you will have to convert your svn account from https (if you are using that) to svn+ssh by providing us with your ssh public key. If you do that, you will automatically get write access to the git repositories. If you already have a svn+ssh account, there is nothing you need to do right now.

To facilitate the move from password to ssh based accounts, we have created a special page where you can request the conversion.

Please note that if you are behind a firewall, which blocks port 22, you should not convert your account at this moment. We are working on a solution!

As you all might know or not, KDE is moving to git. With applying for an svn you had the option to choose for a https account with a password. With the move to git now in high gear we have to convert all those accounts to ssh accounts.

What will happen is that we will send every https user personal invitation to go a to a webpage. On this webpage you can upload your public ssh key or indicate that the account should be disabled, because you don’t use it anymore.

The invitations will be send in like two weeks. Every invitation that bounces will probably mean that the account will be disabled. So we can not stress enough that you check your email address which is associated with your account. You can find it in kde-common/accounts. You can simply do a checkout and commit changes to your own entry.

Ssh users dont have to do anything, your public keys will migrate automatically. Https users, please wait for the invitation, as we will automate most of the process to move you from https to ssh. So there is no need to request the move from https to ssh at KDE’s sysadmin, unless you are developer of the first couple test projects.

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This post is made on my new N900, with the MaStory app, wich is a totally cool app on a totally cool device. I just had to tell you :-)

The last days I worked on the accountwizard. This will be the assistant that new users automatically see when they launch KMail for the first time.

I’ve changed it in a way that it wil automatically retrieve the correct settings for the incoming and outgoing server if they are already known.

I’ve blogged about it the last few days, so I won’t redo the details, I just wanted to show the final result. The video shows a kmail without accounts, than I launch the accountwizard, give my details for my (unused test) gmail address and the rest is done automatically. You can see the accounts are configured and KMail shows the account in the folderlist. We can’t make it easier I guess :)

Direct Link to the OGV.