For the first time in a number of years we have a person responsible for system administration! Over the past few years we’ve been trying to spread the duties to maintain our servers among our developers. This only worked so well and the duties are piling up and not being attended to.
With the introduction of our new MetaBrainz site in May, we finally have an increasing revenue stream, which allows us to finally hire a paid sysadmin. Hopefully we can work on our back log of tasks now.
Laurent Monin (aka Zas) is no stranger to our project — he has been hacking on Picard for a number of years and he attended last year’s summit in Copenhagen. I’m quite happy to have found a community member and long-standing contributor to take on this task.
Some of the first tasks that Laurent will take on are from direct feedback from our blog series about community improvements. We’re hoping to consolidate our mailing lists and forums into a Discourse instance and then provide single sign on for Discourse, our Wiki and Jira. Stuff we’ve talked about for years, but never have made any progress on.
I’m quite excited to have Zas on board! Welcome!
MetaBrainz Blog 
Hi Zas. Congratulations !
🙂
Congratulations Zas, hope you like the job.
Congrats!!!
Also “provide single sign on for Discourse, our Wiki and Jira” – this would be incredible, so don’t be teasing us 😉
Sorry for commenting on this very old blog post, but it seemed like an appropriate place to ask: Any idea when we might start using Discourse? Like, is it possible for it to happen sometime in 2016 or is it later than that?
Hi! It’s definitely intended to be (early) 2016 – if Laurent hadn’t had to deal with our search servers breaking every few hours, it would probably be running already 🙂
Well, it is running. The main issue currently is that it won’t launch before you can log in using a MusicBrainz account.
Great, looking forward to it!
http://ftp.musicbrainz.org is exposed on http without valid ssl and the / dir of the ftp is open too (few levels up to the root dir) as i am not sure if this is desired state. I was looking for the musicbrainz software and sorry for bothering 🙂
If you are looking for HTTPS downloads use the original domain https://musicbrainz.osuosl.org/ . The MusicBrainz is under /pub/musicbrainz, but they do host a lot more open source projects.