about documenting infrastructure

[Florian Effenberger]

Hello,

in the light of recent events, I want to to point everyone to the 
minutes at https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Infra/Minutes_20121108, 
especially the paragraph about documentation.

It did cost me days, if not weeks of time, to properly document things 
that have been previously undocumented, and the work still goes on. In 
other words, undocumented services eat up a lot of my time, time that 
right now would be despearately needed for migrating the next server. 
However, in order to do so, I need to know what and how to migrate.

Please, everyone, and I can't emphasize that enough, please do properly 
document all services you run, all changes you do, and mail this 
documentation to the admin team at hostmaster at documentfoundation.org. 
This is by no means mant to annoy anyone, but rather is needed for a 
growing infrastructure as we run it these days.

Be advised that the infra team *WILL* remove undocumented services in 
the future, even if these are production ones already. And we will *NOT* 
care if these are desperately needed. If this is the only way to enforce 
getting documentation, we will do so.

No documentation, no service. If you run crucial services, it is also 
crucial that you do document them. We are happy to help, but without 
your input, this won't work.

Two concrete examples (out of many) to show how we can effectively kill 
our own infrastructure due to lack of documentation:

- From what I know, there are still pieces from gerrit documentation 
missing. Soon, we may need to completely setup the VM again - if pieces 
are missing then, nobody can guarantee gerrit will run as it does today.

- I am now having a hard time documenting MirrorBrain. We thought we had 
documented everything in the past, but then, I stumbled across some 
settings hidden in various places. If I were to migrate without those 
settings, the LibreOffice download server, at least it's statistics, 
would effectively be killed.

Sorry for whining out loud, but the whole migration process did take 
probably three to five times longer already, as it would have taken with 
proper documentation.

Happy hacking, and looking forward to your docs ;-)
Florian