ReleaseEngineering/Day 1 Checklist

Welcome to Release Engineering!

This page is meant to get new hires, interns, or interested community members up to speed with the right software, configurations, and communication channels to contribute effectively to the release engineering pipeline.

Video Introductions

• Release Engineering as a Force Multiplier by John O'Duinn (former director) about how Mozilla Release Engineering handles our business and how we work to improve each and every day.
• This crowd-sourced video list contains other videos about various aspects of working at Mozilla, including important information such as how to operate the espresso machine.

Development Best Practices

• Read and keep up to date with: Development Best Practices
• Read and keep up to date with: http://moz-releng-docs.readthedocs.org/en/latest/
  • Please fix any issues you find: https://github.com/mozilla/build-relengdocs As someone new to the project, your fresh perspective helps shine a light on missing information or assumptions we take for granted.

Mail

Mozilla mail is handled by Gmail now.

You should automatically be added to the release@mozilla.com alias as a new hire/intern. Send a test message to release@m.c to verify that your address has been added/subscribed. Open a ticket in ServiceNow if it isn't working.

WARNING: release@m.c can contain security-sensitive information. Do not automatically forward your email to a system that is not under Mozilla's control.

Mailing lists

You'll need to manually subscribe to:

• release-engineering public mailing list
• release-drivers mailing list
• mozilla.dev.planning
• mozilla.dev.tree-management

These are available as newsgroups, google groups, and Mailman lists

Email Filtering

With all that new email, you will want to set up some filters in Gmail (https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#settings/filters) to filter some of the higher-volume automated mail into a folder. You may eventually want to handle this information, but on day one hundreds of nagios notifications are not going to be educational.

Here is an imperfect set of Gmail filters that you can import to get you started.

A list of new (and some older) automated emails are indexed by subject, along with relevant actions, here.

If you are going to working on puppet, you should also look at this page on how to read releng shared emails.

Calendar

Like mail, we now use Google calendar.

You'll want to subscribe to the following public calendars:

• Release Engineering - Public
• Releng PTO

Talk to your manager/mentor to get added to the various other private calendars as appropriate.

Access

Bugzilla

Almost everything at Mozilla goes through Bugzilla. Create a Bugzilla account if you have not already.

You'll need a few tweaks to your account to get access to everything releng-related:

• Add privileges for bugzilla group "build" (Mozilla Build Team) (Can be done by coop, catlee, hwine, or bugzilla admin.)
• Add your irc nickname & ldap username as "aliases" for your account
  • log into bugzilla & follow links "Preferences" -> "Account Information"
  • append the aliases, with a leading ':' and enclosed in brackets ('[]') to the "Real Name" field
  • e.g.: "Hal Wine [:hwine]"
• Excellent video showing how to do power searches: Bugzilla Quick Search (5 minutes you NEED to give yourself)
  • QuickSearch help

LDAP

This is mostly applicable only to employees and interns, although it *is* possible for other contributors to acquire some limited LDAP access. Speak to someone you work with on the releng team if you would like to investigate this.

You'll need a number of bits set in your LDAP object to access releng networks and systems. This means filing ServiceNow requests for a whole bunch of things:

• Add your SSH key to your LDAP account, this will get you your people account and will be needed for access to various machines. You can do the following:
  • Go to ServiceNow.
  • 'Update Something?' > 'Accounts' > 'SSH'> 'Add SSH Key' && follow on-screen instructions
• Request VPN Access
  • 'Update Something?' > 'Accounts' > 'VPN Access Request'> 'Both' &&
  • Mention your manager will vouch for you in the comments
  • Mention the machines you need access to && follow on-screen
• If you're on MacOSX or Windows, you might want to request a license for Viscosity (A VPN client). To do so from service-now.
  • 'Order Stuff' > 'Software Applications' > 'Viscosity VPN' > 'Buisness Support && follow onscreen instructions

Other Services

For access to other services, you'll need file a couple of bugs:

• Access to hg, go to the HG section below.
• Access to Nagios
  • File a bug in bugzilla under 'Infrastructure & Operations::WebOps: Other'
• Access to build.mozilla.org
  • File a bug in bugzilla under 'Infrastructure & Operations::WebOps: Other'
• Access to inventory
  • File a bug under 'Infrastructure & Operations::WebOps: Inventory'