[Engineering] Help test SessionManager on WMF beta cluster

[Bryan Davis]

One of the conclusions from the recent SessionManager rollout failure [0] was:

"we should have recruited and coordinated testing by developers and
users inside and outside of the WMF while the code was only on the
beta testing cluster"

SessionManager is back on the WMF beta cluster [1] now after being
briefly removed for the 1.27.0-wmf.12 release cycle, so an
announcement seems in order. The beta cluster implements a SUL
authenticated wiki farm that is completely separate from the Wikimedia
production SUL system. Helping test SessionManager there would involve
logging in, logging out, creating new user accounts and generally
wandering around the wikis doing things you would normally do in
production while keeping an eye out for session related issues.

If you spot something (or just think you spotted something) file a
Phabricator task with as many details as you can provide and tag it
with the #reading-infrastructure-team project. For session related
issues getting traces of the headers and cookies used in the requests
that are failing is most helpful. You can also poke around in the
logging interface [2] to try and find associated error messages.

If you find other bugs, report them in Phabricator too. :)

Also please remember NOT TO USE passwords in the beta cluster that
match the passwords you use anywhere else on the planet!


[0]: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Incident_documentation/20160123-SessionManagerRolloutFailure
[1]: http://deployment.wikimedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Main_Page
[2]: https://logstash-beta.wmflabs.org/#/dashboard/elasticsearch/default

Bryan
-- 
Bryan Davis              Wikimedia Foundation    <bd808 at wikimedia.org>
[[m:User:BDavis_(WMF)]]  Sr Software Engineer            Boise, ID USA
irc: bd808                                        v:415.839.6885 x6855