880126 - Find a better way to deal with requests for loaner slaves

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Infrastructure & Operations Graveyard :: CIDuty, task, P2)

Description

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

I'm not sure exactly what way would work for releng, but I'm absolutely sure that the current method, where people file in the generic Release Engineering bucket, almost never knowing that they should bring it to [buildduty]'s attention with the whiteboard, and then they either get their slave because they know to hound buildduty on IRC, or they just never actually get their slave, is not working.

The one thing I know would work is mozilla.org::Release Engineering: Loaner slaves.

See bug 877865 and bug 843307 as random examples I ran across tonight of just how much the current system is not working - neither 7 days for someone trying to reproduce a probably sec-critical bug that can no longer be reproduced on the slaves we run on trunk/try, nor 107 days with absolutely no word whatsoever, not even a WONTFIX, are the kind of loaner results we should have.

Comment 1

[Armen [:armenzg]]

I agree 100%. I will bring it up to the team.

Comment 2

[Chris Cooper [:coop] (he/him)]

This dovetails nicely with the discussion jhopkins started last week re: fixing the end-to-end process of loaning slaves. We have a similar problem on the opposite end of the process where re-imaged slaves languish before making it back into production.

Armen: is this something you have time to drive before you go on vacation, or should I assign it to someone else?

Comment 3

[John O'Duinn [:joduinn] (please use "needinfo?" flag)]

Found in triage. 

Coop put a lot of thought into the new components in bug#898244 ti help along with changes to buildduty docs. Anything else to do here?

Comment 4

[Chris Cooper [:coop] (he/him)]

(In reply to John O'Duinn [:joduinn] from comment #3)
> Found in triage. 
> 
> Coop put a lot of thought into the new components in bug#898244 ti help
> along with changes to buildduty docs. Anything else to do here?

Yes, quite a bit actually.

I'm on buildduty this week, so I may finally have time to formalize the process and write it down, create loaner queries, etc.

Comment 5

[Justin Wood (:Callek)]

(mass move of loan bugs to new releng component, filter on CallekAug2013LoanerMove )

Comment 6

[Armen [:armenzg]]

This got completed with formalization through https://wiki.mozilla.org/ReleaseEngineering/How_To/Request_a_slave

We also have a "Loan Requests" component plus we're improving the quality of buildduty periods.