When Simon Häfele went to Estonia, mid-2006, for 12 months, he left the entire technical responsibility in our hands. This may look a bit crazy, but it happens all the time in the technical world. And, to sonance.crew, it was an opportunity to really address the issue: we were now much bigger than one person could handle.
We needed a team, but we had a rabble. RAIDs up and down, bits and bobs spread across 3 places. People were trying to help, but it's hard to help when all is chaos, and support calls are being bounced up to the Arctic circle. Machines dying, weekly visits down to Funkfeuer to fix this fan, that drive and this fan again. Nobody wanting to get too close, nobody wanting to be the one who broke it. Everything going sideways...
This is our story, how we faced these challenges, and knocked them over. This is how we built our team.
Big challenge #1: We had to start getting to know each other. Hold meetings. Gain some confidence. Some hope that none of us were in this alone. So our first group-wise task was to find a place and a time, a home. After random restaurants and homes, we settled in Metalab.at's library. And then we settled on our formula:
Every Wednesday Night
come hell or high water!
19:00
be there or be square....
It took a few months to create a sense of permanence, but we are there now, and we have an unbroken record since early 2007 (ok, August in Rathaus park, but....). With the deal established -- every wednesday night -- we faced the technical issues.
Big challenge #2: Zentrix was everything to sonance.artistic.network, and was dying... Not loudly, but bit by bit, painfully. Nobody dared touch it, but it cried out for help. A lot of debate decided us, as a group, that we had to reduce the complexity. Step 1: get out of the hardware business. We organised a fully-hosted server and handed it to Matthias "Mr Mail" Šubik. 6 months later, he had it RAIDed, installed, organised and finally, our mail core transferred and running. Bernhard followed with the maillists. Task complete.
Security patch #1.1: Permanence not being the same as togetherness, we decamped one fine May weekend to Symposium Lindabrunn for a hack-in-progress. We teched, we missioned, we resonated, and we broke bread, wine & heads. We got hacked, and we patched. A very fine place, very fine support, and many thanks to the Lindabrunn team. Kindred spirits, we salute thee!
Big challenge #3: Zentrix was still dying, and fully hosted servers took too long to shake down, whereas a bench server takes days. Step 2: get back into the hardware business, and let's get us some big iron. Matthias "Big V" Gassner purchased, bench tested and installed a fully virtualised platform for our total Zentrix replacement programme. Task complete, or will be, by the time these words hit paper and our users' eyeballs.
Big challenge #4: we needed to extract all of these services and hand them one by one to each of the techies. Step 3: Martin took drupal home, Gernot stayed with Typo3. Bernhard took the blogs & lists. Oliver picked up the phone as 1st line support, Martin keeps the systems going as 2nd line. Roland aims for nouveux Zentrix.
And it is really that last step that shows how our tech team is growing and maturing. We need one systems administrator or techie for each service. For which, we need many more techies. So for 2008:
Big challenge #5: Expand our tech team by giving services over to new systems administrators, as and when we find them. Put each into its own VM, divide and conquer rules ok. CALL FOR HELP: if you can handle any of the usual suspects: DNS, LDAP, CMS, Apache, etc etc ... then speak to us.
Big Challenge #6: 18 months later, we believe the team is in place. 2007 was the year of the techteam, and in 2008 we are going to be looking outward, out to the members. We want to talk to you about what you want and need. Did we mention Wednesdays? 19:00? Metalab?
We're not the first tech team. We won't be the last tech team. But, this is OUR sonance.techteam:
Martin Ferstl, 2nd line support, homepage
Oliver Maklott, help desk
Bernhard Bauch, blogs & lists
Gernot Hofer, Typo3/CMS
Roland Lezuo, New Servers
Stefan Nussbaumer, documentor
Matthias Gassner, virtualisation
Matthias Šubik, mail
Simon Häfele, zentrix troubleshooter
Iang, processmonger
Contact: support@sonance.net
http://technews.blogs.sonance.net/
http://www.symposion-lindabrunn.at/
Graphics: If possible, a background from Lindabrunn in some sense, #1 seems best, but we'll leave that to you guys. These photographs are by Stefan Nussbaumer ... http://www.23hq.com/st9fan/album/2061835