Infrastructure/GettingStarted

In other languages: English (en) español (es) português do Brasil (pt-br) 中文（中国大陆） (zh-cn) [edit]

Help Wanted

We're looking for dedicated and energetic people to join the fun times in the Fedora Infrastructure team. What fun stuff will you do to support and grow the Fedora community?

• You will help design and implement highly available and fault-tolerant systems
• Fix system issues for grateful Fedora developers
• Maintain the servers that make the Fedora Project possible
• Create and maintain custom tools and applications to automate systems maintenance
• Create and maintain tools and applications to enhance and grow the Fedora community

The skills you should possess or be willing to learn to do this work include:

• Being polite
• Being patient
• How to help fellow hackers
• How to write systems administration scripts
• How to write web applications
  • We primarily use Python, SQL, and associated technologies
  • Other equivalent technologies are welcome
  • We can especially use skills in this area or folks that are willing to learn
• How the Fedora Project works "behind the scenes"

It would be great if

• You have previous systems admin experience
• Have access to your own testing machines
  • Our resources are limited, especially for testing!
• Work in other areas of Fedora like packaging or documentation

Getting Started

See below for a list of steps or head down to the Quick Start section if you just want to submit a single change or fix.

First steps

• First you will need to read through and understand how to be a successful contributor.
• Next you will need to create a Fedora Account:
  • This account will be used for just about everything you do as a member of the Fedora Community
  • You will need it to sign the FPCA which is required to contribute to the Fedora Community
  • You will need it to login to various systems associated with the Infrastructure Group
  • You will need it to upload code changes, make changes to this wiki and etc.
• After you have created your account and signed the FPCA, you should then subscribe to the Fedora Infrastructure Mailing List as you will use this to send your "Hello World!" to the Fedora Infrastructure Team as well as communicate with other team members
• When you are ready to send a introduction to the group, your subject should be 'Meeting Agenda Item: Introduction Your Name'. The message body should include:
  • Your IRC handle
    • What's this?
    • Beginner's Guide to IRC
  • What skills you have to offer and which you would like to learn. This can include...
    • Programming languages you are familiar with or have used
    • Systems administration skills, certifications, and technologies you have or have used (or wish to learn)
    • Any associations you have (e.g. local hackerspace/makerspace, Linux User Groups, employer, etc.)
• What you want to learn
  • What you would like to work on and quite possibly which outstanding issues you would like to help resolve
• Any initial questions you have for the team
  • Be patient, as sometimes folks are busy and might not reply to your email quickly. You may get a faster response on IRC.
  • join the #fedora-admin channel on IRC and attend the next IRC meeting.
  • Watch some videos intended to introduce new contributors to the team.

What is next?

After you've completed the steps outlined in the First steps section you should

• Regularly attend the Weekly Meetings on IRC and be sure to introduce yourself the first time you attend. There is a section at the start of the meeting where you can give a short introduction of yourself to the rest of the team.
• Take some time to learn about the services the Fedora Infrastructure Group develops, deploys and maintains.
• Ask about joining the Fedora Infrastructure Apprentice (fi-apprentice) group.
• Read up on SOPs [1] you find interesting. These are a good point of reference for hosts related to an app. They give an overview of how things work for that app.
• Idle in IRC and chime in with questions or offers to help when you see an interesting problem being discussed.
• Setup Gobby so you can see and add to our weekly meeting agenda.
• Look at our Fedora Infrastructure Easyfix issues for one that is of interest.

If you don't have the time to be involved on a regular basis at this point, please feel free to watch over things and report bugs and RFEs as you see fit. Showing interest now is a great way to make it easier to join the team's activities later!

QuickStart

• If you just want to make a single change or fix a single issue, then just jump right in at attach a patch for it to the existing issue, or post a patch to the mailing list. Note that we still would like you to create an account and sign the FPCA so we can properly license your contributions.

How the team works

The Fedora Infrastructure Group consists of volunteers and Red Hat employees. Our preferred method of communication is IRC on freenode.net in #fedora-admin^[?] channel though we also heavily use the Fedora infrastructure Mailing List. We try to be as transparent as possible and default to open.

New members are encouraged to join the list, IRC and attend meetings.

Asking questions (in any of our public areas: IRC, lists, meetings) is encouraged. Unless there's an outage or people are busy we are happy to try and explain how something is setup or works.

The team is a meritocracy, which means those people who solve issues and do work are given more privileges over time. In general don't worry about the access and privileges, instead, try and solve problems and prove that you will be around and reliable over time and you will be setup with what you need to do that work. Since we are a small team we don't usually have the cycles to do full time mentoring of new contributors, so you will be expected to be a "self-starter" and able to gather information on your own. We are happy to answer questions when you get stuck.