The ASF Infrastructure provides and manages all infrastructure and services for the Apache Software Foundation and so for every project. This infrastructure includes the various machines and their operating systems, the systems administration, the mailing lists, the version control systems, the creation of committer accounts, various supporting software, the establishment of services for each new project that comes via the Apache Incubator, the distribution mirroring system, the various issue tracker software, etc.
The ASF Infrastructure is a team of volunteer ASF committers. Yes, volunteers. We need more ASF committers to assist us.
The Infrastructure team is a "President's Committee" rather than a "project". Sander Striker chairs the committee at the moment (meaning he sends regular reports to the ASF board every few months). There is no precise definition for who is "on the infrastructure team", the people doing the work are :-). They are all ASF committers.
There are various infrastructure mailing lists. See notes about their purpose and who can subscribe. As a new volunteer, you will be mainly interested in "infrastructure@" which is the main list for reporting issues. Please help by answering the simple questions, like directing people to specific documentation. Other infra lists are for developing solutions and doing core operations.
The irc channel on freenode.net called #asfinfra is used for
realtime issues and is especially useful when the mail server is down.
There are no logs for this channel. It is open to anyone who subscribes
to the infra mailing lists. We know who you are.
There is a website for infrastructure information at www.apache.org/dev/ which also includes various information to assist all committers and developers. See Updating the Infrastructure web site.
There is no Infrastructure wiki and there will not be one.
There is a Subversion repository
https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/infrastructure
which is only available to people on the infrastructure team.
Some of its subdirectories have more relaxed access restrictions.
Talk to us if you need access.
There is a project in Jira for managing issues, called INFRA. Anyone can submit issues. There is a custom policy in place where some issues are marked as more secure.
ASF Infrastructure is a lot less organised in decision-making than your average ASF software development project. Sometimes we vote, sometimes people just do things because they know they make sense. Some people are more familiar with the configuration of a machine and have the authority to "lay down the law", whereas others may have sufficient priviledges to change stuff there but would only do so after extensive consultation. The only way to learn how decision-making happens is to hang around on the infrastructure mailing lists and see what happens. Amazingly big far-reaching decisions are sometimes made after a 3-minute conversation on IRC. It is the only way Infra can stay productive.
The uptime of the ASF services is amazing considering how many admin hours we need to spend and how little hardware resources we have to do loads of stuff. We are very sensitive about protecting that service level, which is why we are sensitive about giving people access to stuff. If there are a lot of root people who know you and know how good you are at sysadmin, you might get karma real easily. Otherwise, you might not. It is not particularly "fair", and it certainly isn't neccessarily a "meritocracy", but its the only way we know that guarantees our service level. Don't take it personally.
In addition, the ASF does have certain sensitive data which is dubbed "members-only". Therefore, there are some machines on which only ASF members can gain login access. Root access is restricted to members on most machines.
You do not need to be a top-notch sysadmin to help out (although that would certainly be appreciated). There are many small tasks that you can help with, and will learn about others as you go.
You need to be able to use SVN. You need to use Jira for some things and e-mail for other things. Which method to use is not properly documented, but will be explained on a case-by-case basis. You need to be able to handle loads of emails. You need to do proper quoting. You need to use descriptive and proper subject lines. You need to be familiar with the contents of www.apache.org/dev/ website. You need to start small by submitting patches, rather than expecting karma. You need to do as much preparation work for any particular task as possible, to minimize the time a root person needs to spend on it.
The Infra team is always very busy and consists of volunteers only. Please always take that into account. Please don't ask questions that have been asked before. If you ask a question to which the answer is not in the documentation, please submit a documentation patch. If you know the answer to a question, please always answer it even if you are not otherwise an active Infra participant.
If a service is down, discussing it on #asfinfra is probably a better idea than sending an e-mail about it, since usually the Infra team is already aware of that anyway and working on it (we have monitoring systems and alerts). Especially if there seems to be an issue with e-mail, don't send e-mail about it (you would be surprised how many people do), rather jump on IRC and see if you can help.
A time will soon come where you will see a lot of areas that need attention and you'll become aware of what kind of attention they need. You can then volunteer to give that attention, or at least write up a problem description and potential solution process, and file that in the Issue Tracker.
Basically, we don't really need more root people. What we need is people who help to make the root people more productive, and free them from the tasks which do not require root access. That may not sound very glamorous, but it is very very neccessary that it is done. That is very much appreciated.
The above guidelines may sound a little harsh and unthankful, but that is an unintended side-effect of trying to be productive and keeping everything afloat. Most of us are really nice in person :-)