Andrea Veri's Blog Me, myself and I

The GNOME Infrastructure Apprentice Program

Jan 28, 2015

Many times it happened seeing someone joining the #sysadmin IRC channel requesting participation to the team after having spent around 5 minutes trying to explain what the skills and the knowledge were and why this person felt it was the right figure for the position. And it was always very disappointing for me having to reject all these requests as we just didn’t have the infrastructure in place to let new people join the rest of the team with limited privileges.

With the introduction of FreeIPA, more fine-grained ACLs (and hiera-eyaml-gpg for securing tokens, secrets, passwords out of Puppet itself) we are so glad to announce the launch of the “GNOME Infrastructure Apprentice Program” (from now till the end of the post just “Program”). If you are familiar with the Fedora Infrastructure and how it works you might know what this is about already. If you don’t please read further ahead.

The Program will allow apprentices to join the Sysadmin Team with a limited set of privileges which mainly consist in being able to access the Puppet repository and all the stored configuration files that run the machines powering the GNOME Infrastructure every day. Once approved to the Program apprentices will be able to submit patches for review to the team and finally see their work merged on the production environment if the proposed changes matched the expectations and addressed comments.

While the Program is open to everyone to join, we have some prerequisites in place. The interested person should be:

  1. Part of an existing FOSS community
  2. Familiar with how a FOSS Project works behind the scenes
  3. Familiar with popular tools like Puppet, Git
  4. Familiar with RHEL as the OS of choice
  5. Familiar with popular Sysadmin tools, softwares and procedures
  6. Eager to learn new things, make constructive discussions with a team, provide feedback and new ideas

If you feel like having all the needed prerequisites and would be willing to join follow these steps:

  1. Subscribe to the gnome-infrastructure and infrastructure-announce mailing lists
  2. Join the #sysadmin IRC channel on irc.gnome.org
  3. Send a presentation e-mail to the gnome-infrastructure mailing list stating who you are, what your past experiences and plans are as an Apprentice
  4. Once the presentation has been sent an existing Sysadmin Team member will evaluate your application and follow-up with you introducing you to the Program

More information about the Program is available here.