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:

  • Regular cluster-wide software upgrades
    Two full upgrades to fix and prevent some impacting issues (FreeBSD-EN-22:25.tcp and FreeBSD-EN-22:28.heimdal).

  • Regular support for FreeBSD.org user accounts

  • Regular disk and parts support (and replacement) for all physical hosts and mirrors.

  • Site audit at our primary site

    • Inventory of spares and other miscellanea occupying space in our cabinets.

    • Inventory of PDUs/power outlet usage and identifying faulty PSUs.

  • Identify and fix major DNS issue impacting the project
    The primary DNS servers hosted on HE.net suffered outages for a few days, and new DNS servers were deployed worldwide. We thank our sponsor Metapeer for providing anycast infrastructure.

  • Deploy a new mirror in Frankfurt, Germany
    A replacement for our mirror in Amsterdam (site decommissioned). Former and new mirror hosted and sponsored by Equinix.

  • Reuse parts of three broken CI machines
    No replacements for these at this moment, awaiting a cluster refresh soon.

  • Work with the PowerPC team to improve the PowerPC cluster machines

    • Parts like mainboard, NVMe and Power 9 CPU bought through the FreeBSD Foundation.

    • Former package builder fixed, and re-deployed as powerpc and powerpc64 package builder.

    • Former devref machine reinstalled as a new powerpc64le package builder.

    • The cluster has now only these two PowerPC machines in operation.

  • Several rounds to free up disk space usage in the cluster machines

  • Setup of an experimental search engine for the mailing lists: https://lists.freebsd.org/search

  • Fix a bug in the mailing lists archiver, which resulted in some broken links
    All mailing lists archives have been regenerated.

Work in progress:

  • Large-scale network upgrade at our primary site
    New Juniper switches arrived at our primary site to replace the former ones. We thank Juniper for the donation.

  • Replace old servers in our primary site and a few mirrors
    Besides the broken CI servers, we have a few old servers with broken disks and faulty PSUs. This task is in conjunction with the FreeBSD Foundation and donors/sponsors.

  • Create a new database for the mailing list search engine to allow searching for mail in the archives from mailman’s time

FreeBSD Official Mirrors Overview:

Current locations are Australia, Brazil, Germany, Japan (two full mirror sites), Malaysia, South Africa, Taiwan, United Kingdom (full mirror site), United States of America (California, New Jersey [the primary site], and Washington).

The hardware and network connection have been generously provided by:

The Frankfurt single server mirror is now the primary Europe mirror in bandwidth and usage.

We are still looking for an additional full mirror site (five servers) in Europe to replace old servers in the United Kingdom full mirror site.

We see a good pattern in having single mirrors in Internet Exchange Points worldwide (Australia, Brazil, and South Africa); if you know or work for some of them that could sponsor a single mirror server, please get in touch. United States (West Coast) and Europe (anywhere) are preferable places.

See generic mirrored layout for full mirror site specs and tiny-mirror for a single mirror site.

Last modified on: January 23, 2023 by Lorenzo Salvadore