Blog - /Tech

I don't think it has been announced elsewhere yet, so I thought I'd mention this: I've stepped down from my responsibilities as an HCoop Sysadmin. The primary reason is lack of motivation to work on remote system administration, particularly without machines to stage changes on before they hit prime time. Programming as a day job has been very good to me, to the extent that sysadmin work feels like drudgery.

It's been instructive. I had to adapt a lot of essential utilities like Mailman, Exim, and Courier to work with the AFS filesystem. Hacking Exim was easily the most invasive AFS-related change, and involved me grepping through the large Exim spec document numerous times. I also had to work on a cron script hack to deal with the mess procmail makes when it can't write to AFS for whatever reason.

It has also been fun. I've worked on a method for using git to work on custom changes to Debian packages. I've been impressed with the idea of directory-level ACL's, as implemented by AFS. I've been less than impressed with the idea of tokens that expire, causing standard tools to display weird error messages. I've written and organized a major collaborative documentation effort: the HCoop Member Manual. I've automated much of the work of signing and managing SSL certificates as a site-specific certificate authority.