Hello,in the light of recent events, I want to to point everyone to the minutes at https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Infra/Minutes_20121108, especially the paragraph about documentation.
It did cost me days, if not weeks of time, to properly document things that have been previously undocumented, and the work still goes on. In other words, undocumented services eat up a lot of my time, time that right now would be despearately needed for migrating the next server. However, in order to do so, I need to know what and how to migrate.
Please, everyone, and I can't emphasize that enough, please do properly document all services you run, all changes you do, and mail this documentation to the admin team at hostmaster@documentfoundation.org. This is by no means mant to annoy anyone, but rather is needed for a growing infrastructure as we run it these days.
Be advised that the infra team *WILL* remove undocumented services in the future, even if these are production ones already. And we will *NOT* care if these are desperately needed. If this is the only way to enforce getting documentation, we will do so.
No documentation, no service. If you run crucial services, it is also crucial that you do document them. We are happy to help, but without your input, this won't work.
Two concrete examples (out of many) to show how we can effectively kill our own infrastructure due to lack of documentation:
- From what I know, there are still pieces from gerrit documentation missing. Soon, we may need to completely setup the VM again - if pieces are missing then, nobody can guarantee gerrit will run as it does today.
- I am now having a hard time documenting MirrorBrain. We thought we had documented everything in the past, but then, I stumbled across some settings hidden in various places. If I were to migrate without those settings, the LibreOffice download server, at least it's statistics, would effectively be killed.
Sorry for whining out loud, but the whole migration process did take probably three to five times longer already, as it would have taken with proper documentation.
Happy hacking, and looking forward to your docs ;-) Florian