Reporting issues and requesting project resources

The following principles apply to all requests for infrastructure assistance.

  • All project PMCs should have some members that can do infrastructure tasks for themselves. So please ask on your project dev- list first. Ease the load on the Infrastructure team.
  • Of course some tasks, such as new account creation and mailing lists setup and changes, must be done by people with the appropriate priveledges. See below.
  • All requests for resources must come from a PMC member and the PMC must be copied.
  • Incubating projects have additional instructions to enter and exit incubation.
  • Be patient. Remember that everyone is a volunteer.
  • Research your topic. See the developer information.

You might be asked to add an entry to the Infrastructure issue tracker (INFRA). As usual, you will need to register as a user to create an issue. Please do not use the INFRAREQ tracker, which is for a separate purpose.

Each section and sub-section below has a named anchor to enable specific URLs (see "View Source"). This helps with direct linking from other documents and with providing instructions for people.

Accounts for new committers and followup issues

See specific PMC instructions and see general notes about PMC issues. For follow-up issues with account creation (e.g. forgotten passwords, password reset) send email to root@ and Cc your PMC, preferably from the address supplied on your CLA.

Mail

See general notes about mail issues and see the Machine and Service Status for known issues about mail services.

Create new mailing lists

Gather the required information about the new lists. This includes the precise name and domain, the email addresses of the people who will be moderators (ideally three+ and well spread).

Send to apmail@apache.org and Cc your PMC. Add an issue to Jira in the "Mailing Lists" category.

Change the configuration of mailing lists

Please be specific about which details.

Send to apmail@apache.org and Cc your PMC. Add an issue to Jira in the "Mailing Lists" category.

Add or replace moderators

Gather the email addresses of the people who will be moderators (ideally three+ and well spread).

Send to apmail@apache.org and Cc your PMC.

Instructions for moderators

See instructions for mailing list moderation.

Unsubscribe me

You can usually do this yourself. Refer to the instructions via the documentation for your particular project.

The mail management software used by the Apache is mature and rarely goes wrong. This means that it's most likely something you're doing something a bit wrong which causes unsubscription to fail. Read the help for the list (post to the address given by the List-Help header value, e.g. dev-help@{$tlp}.apache.org).

The most common reason why someone ends up not being able to unsubscribe is that they have forgotten the address they were subscribed from. You must post the unsubscribe message from the subscription address. You can find the subscription address by examining the full headers of an email received from the list. The Received headers should allow you to track the inbound progress of the mail.

If you are still unsuccessful at unsubscribing yourself, then contact the moderators for the particular list. You can do this via the {$listname}-owner address (e.g. dev-owner@{$tlp}.apache.org). Tell them the exact email address that you are subscribed with (see above).

Subversion

See general notes about SVN issues and see the Machine and Service Status for known issues about Subversion services.

Each project has its own SVN-space. Your project committers can re-arrange that space to whatever your PMC desires.

New project SVN

New projects will need to ask for their SVN-space to be created.

Send to infrastructure@apache.org and Cc your PMC. Add an issue to Jira in the "Subversion" category.

SVN access troubles

First be sure of your facts. If you are a committer, then make sure that you are using 'https'. Also ensure that you have established your svn password. See the Machine and Service Status for known issues about Subversion services.

One common complaint is that after new committer accounts are created, your project PMC has not properly added your username to the SVN authorisation. See notes. If you can successfully commit to your project repositories, but cannot access the "committers" repository, then you have not been added to the "committers-[a-z]" group. Ask your project PMC.

For other access troubles, send to infrastructure@apache.org and Cc your PMC, and remember to provide the URL for the repository in question.

Machines

Machine Outage

The infrastructure team use a public monitor for Apache machines. This also lists scheduled downtime. If the machine is listed by the monitor as down then it's very likely that infrastructure already knows about it and so helpful messages posted to infrastructure to let us know the machine is down aren't needed.

Mirrors

Mirror Outage

The infrastructure team use a public monitor for mirrors. Bad mirrors are automatically removed from the rotation of "preferred" mirrors. If a mirror stays bad for more than a couple of weeks, it is usually removed permanently. If the mirror is listed by the monitor as down then helpful messages posted to infrastructure to let us know aren't needed.

Web sites

Permissions for project websites

To update your project website you need to be in the relevant UNIX group on the server. Do 'ssh people.apache.org; cd /www/$project.apache.org; ls -l' to see which group owns the files. Now do 'groups' to see which you are in. If the group is not listed, then send email to root@ (and Cc your PMC) asking to add your username to the relevant group.

Files with incorrect group permissions

Sometimes new committers do not configure their account properly. So when they create new files, these files have incorrect group permissions (see above) and other project committers cannot update. Send email to infrastructure@ (and Cc your PMC) asking them to fix the group permissions for the relevant directory. Also ask the committer to configure their account or else it will keep happening.

Wiki

How Do I Create A New Wiki?

Raise an INFRA issue in JIRA under wiki.

Issue Tracking

Users

Day to day maintenance of the Apache issue tracking systems. Users should report issues and ask questions to the appropriate project first though the appropriate mailing list.

Projects

Day to day maintenance of issue tracking is delegated to projects. Each project should have at least one person with rights to perform basic administration on the project's issue tracking system. The major exceptions to this rule are outages of the issue tracking applications. These should be reported to the main infrastructure mailing list but please check first that this outage is not already known.

Questions about the issue tracking systems should be directed to the main infrastructure mailing list and issues reported in JIRA.