Greetings everyone.
As those of you who frequent IRC probably already know, we are trying out having a Fedora Infrastructure "oncall" person for IRC reuqets/queries/pings. You can find out who this is by asking zodbot:
zodbot: oncall smooge (Stephen Smoogen) is oncall. If I do not respond please file a ticket
and then we would really appreciate it if you directed your IRC ping to the nick listed in oncall or (as the reply says) just file a ticket.
Why are we doing this? Well, there are 4 of us who are full time paid sysadmin/ops folks for Fedora Infrastructure and we were finding that a large portion of time for everyone was being taken up by IRC interrupts. Sometimes interrupting multiple people for non urgent tasks. We could of course just ignore IRC, but that prevents us from handling urgent interrupts where we do want to look at something quickly. Additionally, when the oncall person doesn't know how to solve or handle some issue, they can talk to whoever does know and learn how to do it and document it.
With this setup, the oncall person can plan on watching IRC and everyone else can focus on tasks that require more concentration.
If your issue is not time sensitive or urgent, do also just consider filing a ticket and we will triage it and work it as soon as we are able.
Thanks in advance for helping us out here.
kevin
Hi All,
On the lates meeting I had the feeling that the team is short on oncall personel because there are only a handful of people who know the infrastructure well. Since I'm only a fresh apprentice I doubt I could help in with this immediately however oncall duty is something that I've done at my job for 18 years and I'd be happy (and I think I could) help you out soon if there would be out there someone who could do some kind of intensive mentoring. What I mean is actively involving me (or anyone who is interested) to troubleshooting and daily maintenance work. Describing what are you doing and why. This might slow down these troubleshootings for a while but could bring it's fruit on the long term by having more well trained people available when needed. I see that the infrastructure we work with is complex and needs time to learn well but we could speed up the learning process with this kind of mentoring and ease up the preassure on some of the team members who already overwhelmed with other duties. If you think it would worth a shot just ping me, my IRC is 'sapo'
Peter
On Mon, 2018-05-14 at 14:04 -0700, Kevin Fenzi wrote:
Greetings everyone.
As those of you who frequent IRC probably already know, we are trying out having a Fedora Infrastructure "oncall" person for IRC reuqets/queries/pings. You can find out who this is by asking zodbot:
zodbot: oncall smooge (Stephen Smoogen) is oncall. If I do not respond please file a ticket
and then we would really appreciate it if you directed your IRC ping to the nick listed in oncall or (as the reply says) just file a ticket.
Why are we doing this? Well, there are 4 of us who are full time paid sysadmin/ops folks for Fedora Infrastructure and we were finding that a large portion of time for everyone was being taken up by IRC interrupts. Sometimes interrupting multiple people for non urgent tasks. We could of course just ignore IRC, but that prevents us from handling urgent interrupts where we do want to look at something quickly. Additionally, when the oncall person doesn't know how to solve or handle some issue, they can talk to whoever does know and learn how to do it and document it.
With this setup, the oncall person can plan on watching IRC and everyone else can focus on tasks that require more concentration.
If your issue is not time sensitive or urgent, do also just consider filing a ticket and we will triage it and work it as soon as we are able.
Thanks in advance for helping us out here.
kevin
infrastructure mailing list -- infrastructure@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to infrastructure-leave@lists.fedoraproj ect.org
On 05/15/2018 10:13 AM, Peter Szabo wrote:
do some kind of intensive mentoring
I wonder what it would be like if there were an apprentice slot for each oncall shift?
For example, an apprentice is scheduled to be paged with the oncall sysadmin, then at the least can shadow the syasadmin, help with communication on IRC, do initial troubleshooting & monitoring with the apprentice auth/access level, etc.
Honestly sounds like fun to me, but I'm stupid like that.
- Karsten
On 15 May 2018 at 13:41, Karsten Wade kwade@redhat.com wrote:
On 05/15/2018 10:13 AM, Peter Szabo wrote:
do some kind of intensive mentoring
I wonder what it would be like if there were an apprentice slot for each oncall shift?
For example, an apprentice is scheduled to be paged with the oncall sysadmin, then at the least can shadow the syasadmin, help with communication on IRC, do initial troubleshooting & monitoring with the apprentice auth/access level, etc.
Shadowing is difficult in an online setting versus a personal setting. We have a hard time shadowing each other because a lot of the time trying to fix things is staring intently at various config files, trying to remember which language does what, and a lot of radio silence. Apprentices who have tried to shadow us end up getting frustrated and asking a lot of questions which breaks our concentration when we are already dealing with a OMG WTF moment. Which ends up as a poor experience all around.
In order to make it work, it would take a lot of retooling everything we do while we are supposed to keep the current ship running. That would require it to be a large enough priority that we can drop a lot of other balls to make it work.
Honestly sounds like fun to me, but I'm stupid like that.
- Karsten
-- Karsten Wade | Community Architect | @quaid Red Hat Open Source and Standards (OSAS) : @redhatopen https://community.redhat.com | https://next.redhat.com | https://osci.io gpg: AD0E0C41 | https://red.ht/sig
infrastructure mailing list -- infrastructure@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to infrastructure-leave@lists.fedoraproject.org
On 05/15/2018 10:13 AM, Peter Szabo wrote:
On the lates meeting I had the feeling that the team is short on oncall personel because there are only a handful of people who know the infrastructure well. Since I'm only a fresh apprentice I doubt I could help in with this immediately however oncall duty is something that I've done at my job for 18 years and I'd be happy (and I think I could) help you out soon if there would be out there someone who could do some kind of intensive mentoring. What I mean is actively involving me (or anyone who is interested) to troubleshooting and daily maintenance work. Describing what are you doing and why. This might slow down these troubleshootings for a while but could bring it's fruit on the long term by having more well trained people available when needed. I see that the infrastructure we work with is complex and needs time to learn well but we could speed up the learning process with this kind of mentoring and ease up the preassure on some of the team members who already overwhelmed with other duties. If you think it would worth a shot just ping me, my IRC is 'sapo'
Well, we have talked about mentoring in the past, but we run into issues with it. It's hard for someone just learning to spend tons of time being mentored and we can't (and don't want to!) force them to either. So we don't know who is going to be around for a while or who has time.
The other thing is that I at least (don't want to speak for everyone) am super happy to explain whats going on or what I am doing (as time permits), but it doesn't seem like people take us up on that very often. Do you feel if we officially told someone "I am mentoring you" it would work better than "Please ask me anytime whats going on or what I am doing"?
Anyhow, I'm happy to help you learn about our infra... feel free to ask anything in #fedora-admin. :)
On 05/15/2018 10:41 AM, Karsten Wade wrote:
On 05/15/2018 10:13 AM, Peter Szabo wrote:
do some kind of intensive mentoring>
I wonder what it would be like if there were an apprentice slot for each oncall shift?
For example, an apprentice is scheduled to be paged with the oncall sysadmin, then at the least can shadow the syasadmin, help with communication on IRC, do initial troubleshooting & monitoring with the apprentice auth/access level, etc.
Honestly sounds like fun to me, but I'm stupid like that.
Well, depends on the stuff I guess. It means that the oncall person not only has to watch for and respond to pings on irc and triage tickets, but then explain/teach a apprentice. If there is time and willing apprentice thats great! If things are really busy, it could be too much work to do at once.
I'm open to ideas here... we should all try and figure better ways to get stuff done and learn and have a good time doing it. :)
kevin
infrastructure@lists.fedoraproject.org