Category: Team

As we head towards the second half of the year – and an exciting new release of LibreOffice in August – I wanted to recap some work from the Marketing Team that I’ve been involved in over the last few months. But before that, I’d also like to say congratulations to the LiMux team for a great Debian Bug Squashing Party!

LiMux is a project by the City of Munich to transition away from proprietary software and closed document formats to free software and open standards. GNU/Linux and LibreOffice are key components in this migration, and on 27 – 29 May the LiMux offices hosted a Debian Bug Squashing Party. As the name suggests, this is a mini hackfest where developers work to fix bugs in the Debian GNU/Linux distribution (and related software).

LiMux is based on Kubuntu, which in turn builds on Debian’s mighty foundations; other developers associated with KDE, Kolab and LibreOffice were present as well. Lots of hacking was done and bugs fixed – but it was also a great opportunity just to chat about the state of LiMux, make new contacts, and try great food! The Indian dishes on the first evening were especially good…

Marketing updates

Moving on to Marketing at The Document Foundation: we’ve had a busy few months, attending the CeBIT show in Hannover with new flyers and other materials. Thanks to the ever-industrious community, we received audio translations for our LibreOffice 5.1 New Features videos – so there are now versions in French, German and Spanish. Following this, we started work on the 2015 Annual Report, a summary of last year’s news and activity inside The Document Foundation and LibreOffice. It will be online soon, so stay tuned to this blog!

The LibreOffice main website and The Document Foundation wiki are packed with useful information, but some of it is duplicated or slightly dated, so we’ve been going through both sites to perform cleanups and updates. In addition, we added a new page to track migrations to LibreOffice, a First Steps guide for potential contributors to the marketing project, along with a style guide. On the main website we updated the screenshots and added a new “Who uses LibreOffice?” page.

The Document Liberation Project (DLP) is another effort supported by The Document Foundation, and we’ve been working to raise awareness about its mission and spread the word. After talking with the teams at Inkscape and Scribus, both of those projects now feature DLP logos on their sites, while the DLP front page has been redesigned to more succinctly express what it does. On top of that, we made a short video summarising the DLP’s goals.

Month of LibreOffice

Most recently, we had our Month of LibreOffice campaign, highlighting activity across all areas of the software. Many people think that contributing to an open source project is all about code – but we’ve tried to show that it’s possible to help in other ways including translations, confirming bugs, writing documentation and simply spreading the word. We awarded over 330 badges, so thanks to everyone who got one, and we plan to do another campaign like this later in the year.

The next few months are going to be busy as well: LibreOffice 5.2 is due to be released in August with many new features, and then we’ll have our yearly conference in September. We hope to see you there!

The year 2015 brought some challenging and exciting developments regarding the ongoing restructuring of our infrastructure. At the beginning of the year, the migration of our existing virtual machines and bare metal machines was ongoing after an extensive test phase of the new virtualization platform.

This virtualization platform consists of three servers, each with 256GB RAM, 64 CPU cores and quite a lot of hard drive space. One of the machines is meant to be used exclusively by developers for crash testing. These machines are all hosted by manitu in St. Wendel, Germany, and are currently undergoing migration onto our own dedicated 42U rack – including the flexibility to set up a private network between these machines and others that we house there.

After some problems with the software previously chosen for our virtualization platform, much work went into setting up virtual machines where services run isolated from each other, based on plain KVM. This already led to the transition of the hosted blog to one of our own machines, which give us more control over installed plugins, and also provides more flexible control over the WordPress setup that we use.

During the Hackfest at the University of Gran Canaria, work went into making the used Salt States more easy to hack on by people who want to get involved in our infrastructure. This also resulted in a tutorial video on how to create a development environment for our infrastructure.

Monthly infra calls were also set up, taking place every last Wednesday of the month at 17:00 UTC. They resulted in the creation of a weekly maintenance window for server upgrades, reboots and major configuration changes, every Monday between 03:00 and 05:00 UTC.

Operating system upgrades

During the calls the community decided to upgrade the base operating system to Debian 8 over the next few months. This was already carried out on one of our virtualization hosts during the newly set up maintenance window, in order to check for any problems that may occur during the update. During the upgrade, some obstacles were identified and workarounds were set in place to allow smooth upgrades.

We have also invested in hardware from vendor Thomas Krenn which will allow us to set up two additional Windows buildbots with powerful dual CPUs and high speed SSDs, along with two more Linux buildbots with the same specs. These buildbots will also be housed in St. Wendel and connect to our growing intranet there. Two more servers will be used for backup space. We plan to connect all TDF-owned hardware with a VPN, forming a world-wide intranet.

In the second half of the year, more machines were migrated to Debian 8, including the two hypervisors still running Wheezy (Debian 7). Due to the huge success of the new build bots, two more were ordered and now extend the intranet, with a high performance cloud core router from Mikrotik becoming the central connection point of our intranet. The cloud core router also serves as a VPN provider for TDF members at areas with restricted internet access – such as the LibreOffice conference in Aarhus, Denmark in October.

As the number of new servers grew, we decided to migrate our monitoring platform to TKmon, running on a high-availability virtual machine that is separated from the rest of our infrastructure. TKmon integrates with the hardware vendor’s support and notifies them of hardware failures automatically. TKmon is open source software and uses tools such as icinga and pnp4nagios.

To be more flexible with the monitoring notifications, I wrote a tool called TMB that provides a bot for the Telegram chat service and sends notifications to admins. Development happened with PyCharm, a Python IDE.

Our server fleet

The current state of the infrastructure consists of three rented hypervisors, each with four CPUs, 256 GB RAM, eight HDDs and partially SSDs. Additional rented servers include one backup server and one website stand-in host that was needed after the virtualization problems occurred at the beginning of the year, and that will be decommissioned soon. Nine housed servers with Intel SSDs and powerful dual CPUs are only reachable in the intranet, with access to them being controlled by the core router.

On the hypervisors, there are currently 31 VMs, providing services such as AskBot, WordPress, Gerrit, Bugzilla, Jenkins, MozTrap and much more. At Hetzner there are currently four servers: one that contains the Wiki, MirrorBrain and our public mailing lists, one that is for internal services, and two backup hosts – including one that provides storage capacity of over 17TB and is currently being set up.

Much of our documentation and many of our Salt States are published now at https://github.com/tdf/salt-states-base, while the compiled documentation can be found at http://salt-states-base.readthedocs.org/en/latest/. The Salt States are now tested with Travis and the build results are at https://travis-ci.org/tdf/salt-states-base. It is therefore now very easy to contribute to development and improve the documentation. Just fork the repository and create a pull request – then the results will automatically be tested in Travis. If you want to contribute to the infrastructure of our projects, you are invited to join our monthly infra calls, the next taking place on … or introduce yourself to the infra team in #tdf-infra on Freenode.

I’d like to introduce myself as the new Marketing Assistant at The Document Foundation. My name is Mike Saunders, and some LibreOffice followers may have already seen the 5.1 New Feature videos that I made for Calc, Impress and Writer. Others may have come across my work in Linux Voice magazine in the last two years, and other computing publications such as Linux Format before that. (I’ve also written a book about Linux.)

I’ve been using, developing, writing about and advocating open source and Free Software since 1998, when I took the plunge with Red Hat Linux 5.1 from a magazine coverdisc. Around the same time, I discovered StarOffice, the commercial office suite which, of course, eventually became OpenOffice.org and now LibreOffice. I’ve seen the Free Software community grow from a grassroots movement to a major force in the computing world, and along with writing about and promoting FOSS, I’ve tried to give a little bit back with my own Free Software project: MikeOS.

So I’m really excited to be joining The Document Foundation – helping to promote and spread awareness about LibreOffice. Not only is LibreOffice a hugely versatile and useful piece of software, it represents much more: the growing importance of open standards and document formats. It’s clear that companies, communities and local governments are starting to recognise that fully open formats are the future, so it’s great to see adoption of LibreOffice all around the world.

I’ll be working on a part-time basis, helping The Document Foundation with various tasks and projects. We’re going to be at CeBIT in mid-March, we’re working on our Annual Report for 2015, and we have many ideas for presentations, events and social media promotions in the pipeline.

So far I’ve met lots of great people involved in LibreOffice and TDF, and no doubt I’ll be meeting many more – either in person at events, or collaborating on the wiki and mailing lists – over the coming 12 months. I look forward to working with you!