A quieter week than last in terms of meetings and releases, but a glibc stack overflow exploit made things “fun” from an operational standpoint this week.

Improve CI Pipeline:

Dustin deployed a change to the TaskCluster login service to allow logins by people who have LDAP accounts (e.g,. for try pushes) but do not have access to the company’s single-sign-on provider. This closes a gap that excluded some of our most productive contributors from access to TaskCluster. With this change, anyone who has a Mozillians account or an LDAP account can connect to TaskCluster and have appropriate access based on group membership.

Ben wrote a blog post about using the Balrog agent to streamline the throttled rollout of Firefox releases. This is one of the few remaining interactive activities in the Firefox release process. Being able to automate it will eliminate some email hand-offs, leading to faster turnaround.

Release:

As opposed to last week’s congestion, this week had a rather normal pace. Various releases have been shipped or are still in-flight:

• Firefox 45.0b5
• Thunderbird 38.6.0
• Firefox/Fennec 45.0b6
• Firefox 45.0b7 (in progress)
• Thunderbird 45.0b2 (in progress) picking up the swap back to GTK2 for Linux users

As always, you can find more specific release details in our post-mortem minutes: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Releases:Release_Post_Mortem:2016-02-17 and https://wiki.mozilla.org/Releases:Release_Post_Mortem:2016-02-24

Next week a handful of the people working on “Release Promotion” will be in Vancouver to try and sprint our way to the finish line. Among them are Jlund, Rail, Kmoir, and Mtabara. Callek won’t be able to make it in person, but will be joining them remotely.

Operational:

Over the course of the week, Jake, Hal, and Amy have worked to patch and reboot our infrastructure to make it safe against the glibc gethostinfo exploit.

Many people from various different teams pitched in to diagnose a bug that was causing our Windows 7 test pool to shut down. Special thanks to philor who finally tracked it down to a Firefox graphics problem. The patch was backed out, and operations are back to normal. (https://bugzil.la/1248347)

Alin landed changes to make the pending counts alerts more granular on a per platform basis (https://bugzil.la/1204970)

Outreach:

Aki wrote a blog post this week about how releng should get better about providing generically packaged tools. Not only would this make our own internal testing story better, but would make easier for contributors outside of releng to hack and help.

See you next week!

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