Topic on Talk:Wikimedia Labs

It states We'd like to have an environment where anyone can eventually become root, even on our production cluster. Ummmm. I guessing/hoping there are all sorts of safeguards in place and that root access to the prodcution cluster would be only for highly trusted users that have a specific need for root. I was just hoping for a bit of clarification on that. Other than that, I think this sounds like a great idea and think it could be a huge benefit to the community. Thanks.

This post was posted by Peachey88 (Flood), but signed as Hydroxonium.

Well, just from having a labs account, it's possible to make root level changes in the production cluster. We have our puppet configuration in a public repository, and having an account allows contributors to push changes to the repository. When the changes are code reviewed, they can be deployed to production.

Otherwise, though, we already have volunteers with root access on our production cluster. Our beginnings were founded in volunteers being root, and I'd like to continue that tradition. Over time, by contributing to the labs environment, contributors should be able to gain privileges. I believe that it should be possible for well trusted contributors to be given higher privileges, including privileges in the production cluster.

There are a number of safeguards in the labs environment to safely give out higher levels of permissions over time.

Thanks for the reply, Ryan. I also must thank you, and everybody else at the WMF, for all the support you've given us. I think this will be really helpful for our bot operators and the volunteers that write all those useful tools.

I knew we had a few volunteers with root, I just didn't realize that things were that open. I guess it makes sense since we're a volunteer run organization. Anyhoo, thanks for the clarification. Best regards. - Hydroxonium (T•C•V) 02:25, 6 December 2011 (UTC)