Hi Slavina,

I hope you don't mind me jumping in, but here are a couple things I did not find intuitive when I started using Toolforge. I've been using PHP/cPanel style web hosts since around year 2000 so I was expecting an experience similar to that, but I encountered a couple of "gotchyas" that surprised me and slowed down my onboarding. Windows 10 user here.

- FTP programs that aren't WinSCP with "environment -> SFTP -> server -> sudo -u tools.novem-bot /usr/lib/sftp-server" configured appear to the user to work, but create some hard-to-track-down bugs because files have the wrong owner. For example I tried using FileZilla Client before I found the tutorial. Suggested fix: give a separate login for each tool folder, so that you don't have to sudo.

- Other Toolforge users can view all my files by default, including my password files, unless I manually set them to 0600. Security issue, imo. Suggested fix: Perhaps only admins should be able to view other people's files, and perhaps create a page that is watchlisted by Toolforge admins to request copies of other people's files minus their password files.

- Kubernetes is not intuitive and has a learning curve. Suggested fix: Perhaps a GUI control panel should be created that auto-creates cronjobs.yaml files, generates the interval for you (e.g. 01 13 * * *), lets you pick the image from a dropdown box, and executes kubernetes commands such as kubectl apply --validate=true -f $HOME/cronjobs.yaml, kubectl delete cronjob task-a, kubectl get pods, kubectl logs [pod name], etc. with the push of the appropriate button.

Hope that helps. Thanks and have a great day.

Novem Linguae


On 9/7/2022 7:30 AM, Roy Smith wrote:
The biggest issues I see are the lack of any good logging, monitoring and alerting tools.  Things like icinga, logstash, grafina.  The kind of things that are standard for supporting any production system.  I've raised this before, so I won't belabor the point here.

And https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T256426 continues to be an every-day pain in my side.  The related https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T127367 is triaged as high priority.  It's been open for 6-1/2 years.



On Sep 7, 2022, at 10:17 AM, Slavina Stefanova <sstefanova@wikimedia.org> wrote:

On a side note, I'd be interested in hearing what you dislike about Toolforge, if you'd like to share. We (the cloud services team) are working on improving Toolforge and don't always get as much feedback, good or bad, as we'd want. 


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