I’ve been wanting to work on upgrading build.gluster.org setup for ages. There’s a lot about that setup that isn’t ideal in how people use Jenkins anymore.
We used the unix user accounts for access to Jenkins. This means Jenkins needs to read /etc/passwd and everyone has SSH access via passwords by default. Very often, the username wasn’t tied to an actual email address. I had to guess the account owner based on their usernames elsewhere. This was also open to brute force attacks. The only way to change passwords was to login to the server and run passwd command. We fixed this problem a few months ago by switching our auth to Github. Now access control is a Github group which gives you more permissions. Logging in will not give you any more permissions than not logging in.
Jenkins community now recommends not running jobs on the master node at all. But our old setup depended on certain jobs always running on master. One by one, I’ve eliminated them so that they can now run on any node agent. The last job left is our release job. We make the tar from every release available on an FTP-like server. In our old setup, the this server and Jenkins were the same machine. The job ran on master and depended on them both being the same machine. We decided to split up the systems so we could take down Jenkins without any issue. We intend to fix this with an SCP command at the end of the release job to copy artifacts to the FTP-like server.
Now, we have a Jenkins setup that I’m happy with. At this point, we’ve fixed a vast majority of the annoying CI-related infra issues. In a few years, we’ll rip them all out and re-do them. For now, spending a week with my colleague in Brno working on an Infra sprint has been well worth our time and energy.
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