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Dear Free Software Supporter,

**This article gives a glimpse behind the scenes of recent work done
by the FSF tech team. Read about Prometheus, AMT data import, OS
upgrades, and more.**

The FSF tech team has continued to keep busy since we last wrote an
[appeal article][1]! In addition to other ongoing projects, on the
network security front we're working to replace our old Nagios
alerting stack with [Prometheus][2], a more modern tool that we're
currently adapting to our network. We plan on using plain Prometheus,
with some of our own automation to configure graphs and site-wide
monitoring, rather than integrating with third party systems that
typically offer proprietary editions.

[1]: [link removed]
[2]: [link removed]

There's a fair bit of work going into this change, but it will be
worth the effort. Prometheus will highlight the most important issues
in alerts based on the time of day, so we can focus on the really
important issues when we're out of the office. This will help us with
faster issue response times. We've also been fortunate to have very
few critical problems in the last several months that would have
required us to physically visit the colocation facility.

Some of the other work we're wrapping up is the AMT ("associate
membership tool") data import. AMT was our old, internally developed
member database. We switched to [CiviCRM][3], an [AGPLv3][4]
constituent relationship manager, several years ago, and it really
helped with fundraising and emailing people who want to learn more
about free software. We had a bit more data that needed to be exported
from our old membership database into the new one before we could call
it complete. And aside from updating our internal documentation, we're
finally done with that data migration. We had the original virtual
machine (VM) turned off, and we're using a [newer Trisquel][5]
installation running the [MariaDB][6] database software for working
with, filtering, and converting data into an importable format. It's a
good feeling to fully replace an outdated system, and, going forward,
we can now focus on completing the last few edge cases.

[3]: [link removed]
[4]: [link removed]
[5]: [link removed]
[6]: [link removed]

We've also been upgrading between major releases of Trisquel for some
of our older systems via `apt dist-upgrade`. This often works well for
systems that don't have a lot of moving parts. For others, we tend to
spin up a new VM so we can test the new version of the application
after migrating the data from the old server. For those who are
curious, I'll briefly cover some details here. Once everything is
working on the new machine, we find a time to turn off public facing
services on the old server and then migrate the data and update the
Domain Name System (DNS) record. We find that this tends to involve a lot
more work, but it's more reliable in the cases where we don't know if
software that doesn't come from Trisquel itself will be compatible
with the new OS dependencies, and whether the data migration will run
smoothly. We try to keep downtime to a minimum, but are looking into
ways to improve the speed of our major system upgrades. This is
necessary because we are only a three-person tech team maintaining
over 140 servers, along with help from dedicated GNU volunteers.

We are getting ready to continue work on modernizing our [fsf.org][7]
site as well. We're in the process of comparing various backend web
software that we may use and getting them up to date. For a future
iteration of this site, we're considering using a static site
generator for simplicity and easy maintenance of upgrades.

[7]: [link removed]

In parallel to these bigger projects, we are keeping up the daily
work. Part of this is answering questions sent to us by you and others
in the free software community. When anyone sends a technical-,
licensing-, or campaigns-related question, it gets queued in a ticket
system called "RT," which stands for [Request Tracker][8] and runs
entirely on free software. All technical questions that FSF associate
members and free software community members send go to our sysadmin
ticket queue. This helps us ensure that we've responded to all the
questions coming in and do so in an efficient manner.

We are proud to say that we closed a lot of tickets in the FSF
sysadmin ticket queue over the last six months -- 1,115 to be precise!
We have many more tickets to work on, but we're doing our best to keep
response times low while prioritizing the ones with the greatest
impact. That being said, don't hesitate to reach out to us. We will
listen to your request and do the best we can with the resources we
have. While our RT queues are not a general support service, we do
take the time to educate and assist volunteers, especially those who
help with GNU and FSF infrastructure.

[8]: [link removed]

We take our support position for the GNU project very seriously, and
we hope that we can some day expand our team so we can even better
support the work of all of the generous volunteers who keep writing
GNU software and keep GNU/Linux moving forward as a system.

**Can you join as an [FSF associate member][13] to help us support
GNU, our technical work, the FSF campaigns, and the Licensing and
Compliance Lab?** [The associate member program started in November of
2002][10] to maintain the core work of the free software movement,
independent from major individual or corporate donors. The FSF wanted
to be sustained by the community we serve. As of today, membership
dues make up most of the FSF's operational costs. Without members we
would not be able to carry out the important work the FSF does for the
free software movement.

The membership program keeps us working, and the FSF tech team is
nonstop working for the free software community. Together with your
help, we can strive towards a world where computer user freedom is
universal. You can start an FSF associate membership for as little as
$10 per month ($5 for students), or $120 per year.

You'll be able to enjoy all the [member benefits][12], which include
merchandise discounts, a 16GB bootable membership card, and use of our
associate member videoconferencing server. Plus, your membership will
count towards achieving our spring goal of 175 new associate members
before July 21. When you join as an annual associate member at $120 or
more, you'll also be eligible for this year's sustainable and stylish,
genuine wood GNU head sticker.

[13]: [link removed]
[10]: [link removed]
[12]: [link removed]

Happy hacking,

Andrew Engelbrecht
Senior Systems Administrator

--
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