Look behind the scenes of the FSF tech team
The FSF tech team has continued to keep busy since we last wrote an appeal article! In addition to other ongoing projects, on the network security front we're working to replace our old Nagios alerting stack with Prometheus, 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.
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, an AGPLv3 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 installation running the MariaDB 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 It's a good feeling to fully replace an outdated system, and, going forward, we can now focus on completing the last few edge cases.