The FreeBSD.org cluster refit
Channel: Andrea Ross
Date: 2013-06-03

A way to do project infrastructure, and a way not to; or the FreeBSD.org cluster before and now.

The FreeBSD project is rather old and as such has had the infrastructure for running the project, such as CVS, Mail, and web servers, for a long time. The basic setup had been the same for more or less 10 years with the result that it was very complicated, had many inter-dependencies and of course no documentation on how it was set up. Security wise the old setup was out of date with current practices.

In 2012 we had to move from one datacenter to another, and in the process it was decided to redo the setup more or less from scratch with the goals of making the setup simpler, more robust, segregated, secure and basically something which didn't cause the administration team to lose sleep over.

The presentation will, for historic reference, present the old setup as an example of how not to have a cluster set up in 2012, and how we decided to set up the new one to meet our goals. The design of the new setup with heavy partitioning of network and hosts, using of FreeBSD for everything where possible including routers running FreeBSD 10-CURRENT.

The impact of the 2012 November FreeBSD.org compromise on the infrastructure will also be discussed and what was learned from that.