[Dune-devel] Future of the Heidelberg-hosted Dune infrastructure

[Oliver Sander]

Hi,

> gitlab.dune-project.org <http://gitlab.dune-project.org>
> -----------------------

we (the TU Dresden School of Science) may be able to host and maintain a dedicated
gitlab instance for Dune.  Give me a few days to check this.


> Mailserver for @dune-project.org <http://dune-project.org>
> --------------------------------
> The mailserver that receives mail addressed to @dune-project.org <http://dune-project.org> is running on our webserver.
> This is mainly used for admin mails from Gitlab and signups at services like Let's encrypt, Cloudflare etc.
> Personalized email addresses @dune-project.org <http://dune-project.org> have been given out in the past, but are rarely used.
> 
> Heidelberg opinion:
> Those email addresses seem to be rarely used and could be removed without harm. 

That sounds like a good idea to me.

Best regards,
Oliver


Alternatively, we could move the
> mail services to some external, cloud-hosted platform if there is someone willing to take care of it.
> 
> Website dune-project.org <http://dune-project.org>
> ------------------------
> The website is currently hosted on the group webserver and the deployment process is managed by Gitlab CI.
> 
> Heidelberg opinion:
> We can continue hosting the website, but it might also be a good idea to offload that task to an external service
> to improve reliability and uptime.
> 
> One idea (if moving to gitlab.com <http://gitlab.com>) would be to use Gitlab pages, which allows to serve static websites
> (cf. https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2016/04/07/gitlab-pages-setup) and is free.
> The deployment process could stay in Gitlab CI and we can continue to provide the runner that
> performs this specific task (we need it anyway because our group website works similar).
> 
> Continuous Integration
> ----------------------
> Currently, several groups contribute hardware to the Dune CI system by registering runners to our Gitlab instance.
> The Heidelberg group also contributes 4 servers to this system.
> 
> Heidelberg opinion:
> The distributed nature of the CI system is well-suited for the future.
> We will continue to provide this hardware but restructure our servers to remove some moving parts.
> 
> Docker in Docker Continuous Integration
> ---------------------------------------
> The build process for Docker images from the repository https://gitlab.dune-project.org/docker/ci
> is a very special CI job, as it requires a Docker in Docker setup on the runner side.
> Such setups are prone to security issues as malicious code could escape the Docker sandbox.
> We currently provide this runner in Heidelberg.
> 
> Heidelberg opinion:
> While we can continue to provide this service for the immediate future, we would love to not have to maintain
> the DinD-setup anymore.
> We consider it worthwhile to move the building of Docker images to a dedicated service. There are multiple options
> here that would work and that would need discussing. Using external services at the Dune scale is not free,
> but neither is maintaining the process at university.
> 
> DNS for dune-project.org <http://dune-project.org>
> ------------------------
> The domain dune-project.org <http://dune-project.org> is registered to Peter with the registrar domaindiscount24.de <http://domaindiscount24.de>. The
> actual DNS servers are delegated to Cloudflare. This was done to use DNS validation for obtaining
> Let's Encrypt certificates, but could be moved back to domaindiscount24.com <http://domaindiscount24.com> again. Peter will continue
> to provide the domain and pay the yearly fee, but we would like to have an additional person with a bit
> of knowledge about DNS available when there are problems like the recent mailing list outage, which required
> changes to the DNS server.
> 
> 
> We hope that this email serves as a basis for fruitful discussion.
> If discussion becomes unwieldy, we propose to have a telephone conference to resolve these issues more easily.
> 
> Best regards from Heidelberg,
> Peter, Steffen and Dominic
> 
> 
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