FreeBSD The Power to Serve

Cluster Administration Team

Links:
Cluster Administration Team members URL: https://www.freebsd.org/administration/#t-clusteradm

Contact: Cluster Administration Team <clusteradm@FreeBSD.org>

FreeBSD Cluster Administration Team members are responsible for managing the machines the Project relies on to synchronise its distributed work and communications. In this quarter, the team has worked on the following:

  • Improved web service performance and security

    • Moved some critical services to newer machines

    • Swept all services to ensure the support of TLS v1.2 and v1.3 and disable v1 and v1.1

    • Enabled dual-stack certificates for the primary FreeBSD web services.
      ECDSA and RSA certificates, preferring ECDSA, discussed with secteam@, benefit the project in favor of security and performance matter.

  • Infrastructure improvements at primary site

    • Evicted some very old hardware

    • Moved cluster internal services to newer hardware

      • Build host

      • Parts of LDAP, kerberos, DNS and NTP

  • Installed an additional aarch64 package builder

    • ampere3.nyi.freebsd.org

    • Identical specs to ampere[12].nyi.freebsd.org

  • Moved ftp0.nyi.freebsd.org to an aarch64 machine.

  • Main distributed mirror site, download.freebsd.org, enhancements

    • Updated offline documentation (PDF and HTML) in the mirrors.
      The old directory /doc is now on ftp-archive; it contains files prior to the Hugo/Asciidoctor migration.

    • Moved ports INDEX files to distributed mirror, download.freebsd.org

    • Removed /ftp from the canonical URLs of files on download.freebsd.org.
      Old URLs are still valid.

  • Cleanup of Handbook/Mirrors section
    Much stale information; now there is more info about the official mirrors and locations. Former official mirrors are now named 'Community mirrors'.

  • Ongoing day to day cluster administration

    • Cluster refresh

    • Replacing failed disks

    • Babysitting pkgsync

Work in progress:

  • Improve the package building infrastructure

  • Review the service jails and service administrators operation

  • Set up powerpc pkgbuilder/ref/universal machines

  • Search for more providers that can fit the requirements for a generic mirrored layout or a tiny mirror

  • Work with doceng@ to improve https://www.freebsd.org and https://docs.freebsd.org

  • Improve the web service architecture

  • Improve the cluster backup plan

  • Improve the log analysis system

  • Set up Australia mirror

  • Hardware refresh

Last modified on: June 3, 2022 by Lorenzo Salvadore