[sane-devel] Access permissions on servers used by the SANE project

[Henning Meier-Geinitz]

Hi developers,

As we had trouble with several services (CVS, mail etc.) recently, I
want to provide a summary of who has which access permissions for
services/servers used by the sane project. I try to reduce the amount
of single points of failure (SPOF) but some still remain. When
speaking of "SANE developers" I mean developers registered on alioth
that belong to the SANE project. See
http://alioth.debian.org/project/memberlist.php?group_id=1308 for a
list. Entries in bold are also project admins.

* sane-project.org domain
  Only me has the password for the domain servers. There are four main
  name server entries:
  - www1.sane-project.org points to sane.alioth.debian.org, our main
    webserver. See below for who can change the web pages.
  - www2.sane-project.org points to http://sane-project.meier-geinitz.de/.
    It's a manually updated mirror of the static web pages. It'll be
    used in case www1 AND www3 don't work. It's administered by me.
  - www3.sane-project.org is 132.230.150.18 which is administered by
    Jochen Eisinger. It's updated automatically and also provides
    dynamic pages and a copy of the mailing list archive.
  - www.sane-project.org ususally points to www1, but is changed to
    one of the mirrors if www1 is down.

* CVS server
  It's located on alioth.debian.org and we have no mirror. Every
  developer can commit files and even create new modules. So be careful.
  Everyone can checkout (read) files.
  The CVS repository contains the source code of sane-backends,
  sane-frontends and the exprimental module. The latter can be used for
  code that's not ready for sane-backends yet.
  The CVS repository also contains the static HTML code of our website
  (module html).
  Further more, module CVSROOT contains the settings of the CVS server
  and some scripts that e.g. update the lists of supported devices
  automatically when a .desc file is changed in CVS. It's also
  writable by each SANE developer.

* ssh access:
  Every SANE developer has ssh access to alioth. Sometimes
  it's necessary to use ssh, e.g. to remove an old lock file of the
  CVS server. ssh can also be used to change the contents of the
  website manually in case the CVS server is down. This was the case
  during the "disk full" problem.

* website:
  As the HTML code is in CVS, every developer can change the website.
  Really! It's not only me :-) So if you find a bug/mistake/whatever,
  just fix it. There are some dynamic pages like the scanner search
  engine and some automatically created like the CVS and external
  backend lists. These are not in CVS and updated automatically.  

* FTP server (ftp.mostang.com)
  Operated by David Mosberger-Tang. Oliver Rauch can also upload
  new releases of SANE.

* Adding new devlopers to the project
  Only a developer who has an account on alioth and has been added to
  the project can use the CVS etc. servers. Addition must be done by
  one of the project admins, see link to list above.

* Mailing lists
  The administrative interface to sane-devel, sane-announce, and
  sane-commit is locaked by a password. Julien Blache and me have
  access to this interface. It allows to change the settings of the
  list, add/remove users and approve/teject postings.

* IRC server (#sane on freenode.net)
  The channel is open to everone. I'm the "founder" of the channel,
  Julien and Jochen also have the necessary access level to e.g.
  change the topic. This channel is a good way for communication
  especially when the sane-devel list doesn't work as it's located on
  different servers.

If there are any questions, feel free to ask.

Bye,
  Henning