[DAS] Important info for all Open-Bio affiliated developers (people with CVS write access...)

[Chris Dagdigian]

Hi folks, apologies for the large cross-posting.

Really short summary:

We are going to migrate to newer server hardware over the next few 
months. If you are an OBF developer (someone who has a login account on 
"pub" with CVS write permission to one or more repositories) then you'll 
need to make sure we have your most current email address so we can 
communicate the transition plan directly without spamming N number of 
mailing lists.

We need updated contact info in order to manage the transition.

Details below.

Long winded details:

Our existing servers (the developer CVS repository and the 2nd system 
that handles websites & mailing lists) are getting a bit old and more 
importantly are running older Linux distributions that are long past 
official support dates and are difficult to update, secure and maintain.

We have 2 brand new servers sitting online in a Boston area colocation 
facility and the various OBF sysadmins are starting to think about 
planning for transitioning services and user accounts.

First to move (I suspect) is going to be the pub.open-bio.org system 
which is the main CVS sourcecode repository for our various projects 
such as biojava, bioperl, moby, etc.

We think the transition will be pretty quick and transparent. It should 
not be all that hard to migrate the user accounts and copy over the CVS 
repository tree. We'll be writing scripts to automate the process and 
can run repeated migration tests before officially switching on the new 
system.

What CVS committers and developers need to do
=============================================
1. SSH login to pub.open-bio.org
2. Run the "chfn" command to edit your user info
3. Make sure a good email address is listed for the Office: or Phone: 
field. Info about your project and institution would be great as well 
but is not required.

In a week's time I'm going to capture all the email addresses listed and 
will insert them into a mailing list that we'll use to communicate our 
plans. This way we can speak to developers directly without cross 
posting to many mailing lists.

Any user account without a full name and working email address will 
still be migrated but we are going to lockout the password until we hear 
from the person in question.


What OBF Project Leaders need to do
====================================
1. Login to pub.open-bio.org

2. Check /etc/groups for your project name and examine the users who 
have write access to your repository -- Email root-l at open-bio.org with 
the usernames of any inactive members who can safely be deleted.



Regards,
Chris
one of the open-bio admins (root-l at open-bio.org)



-- 
Chris Dagdigian, <dag at sonsorol.org>
BioTeam  - Independent life science IT & informatics consulting
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