[CentOS] EL 6 rollout strategies? (Scientific Linux)

[Les Mikesell]

On 5/16/2011 12:27 PM, Johnny Hughes wrote:
>
> The point is that we do not have a system built that can track that sort
> of stuff ... and we can either build packages or design systems to track
> stuff.

You don't really have to design a system for build automation/tracking 
since there are several free ones available.  Of course there is a 
tradeoff in terms of how quickly the automation would win back the time 
it takes to configure it.

> We are working on a new website design.
>
> We opened up a new QAWeb.
>
> We have an announce list.

All great, and much appreciated, particularly compared to previous 
postings that implied that nothing needed to change or was ever going 
to.  Still, I don't see how these help with the underlying issue of 
resources unless the bottleneck is in post-build QA.

> As far as build logs are concerned, they reside on the build server ...
> where we had people try to "break into".  That machine is now hidden and
> references to its name are also hidden.  We can't have people pounding
> away against important servers ... there is no such thing as a
> completely secure setup.  We therefore will not make our build machines
> open to the public.

Agreed on the security comment, hence the concern about timely updates. 
  It is pretty much a given that any public site will be hit with all 
known exploit attempts, but it is somewhat unsettling to think that the 
project itself considers that to be a problem.  But, most of both the 
'pounding' and security issues can be handled with a simple caching 
reverse-proxy server easily configured in squid/apache/nginx, etc..  And 
with build automation frameworks like jenkins/hudson, the results and 
logs are collated on a central server that mostly does scheduling, not 
the actual work: http://ci.jenkins-ci.org/builds.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com