Josh is asking folks to send him their security score card via twitter. Since I’ve been trying to blog more and like pontificating, I thought I would respond here in a blog post. 😉

There’s 4 parts to the scorecard:

  1. Number of staff
  2. Number of “systems”
  3. Lines of code
  4. Number of security people

For Fedora Infrastructure, some of these are pretty hard to answer, but here’s some attempts:

  1. Fedora Infrastructure is a Open organization. People who show up and start doing things are granted more and more permissions based on their merit. Sometimes people drift away to other things, sometimes new people show up. There’s some people employed by Fedora’s primary sponsor Red Hat, specifically to work on Fedora. Those account for 3.5 sysadmins, 5 applications developers, 2 release engineers, and 2 design folks. Specific areas will have potentially lots more community folks working on them. So, answer: 13-130?
  2. This one is easier to quantify. We have (almost) everything in ansible, so right now our ansible inventory + some misc non ansible hosts is around 616 hosts.
  3. This is another one thats difficult. We have a lot of applications (see https://apps.fedoraproject.org/) Some of them are just upstream projects we have instances of (mediawiki, askbot, etc). Others are things where we are primary developers on (fedocal, pagure, etc). It would be a fun project to look at all these and count up lines of code. Answer: dunno. ;(
  4. If this is full time security people working only on security issues, then 0. We do have a excellent security office in Patrick who is super smart and good at auditing and looking for issues before they bite us, but he’s not doing that full time. Others of the sysadmin teams do security updates and monitoring lists/errata and watching logs for out of the ordinary behavior, but thats also not full time. So, answer: 0 or 1 0r 3?

So, from this I think it would be nice to have a better idea of our applications (not lines of code), but just where to keep track of things better and who knows that application. It would be awesome to get some full time security folks, but I am not sure that will be in the cards.

I’d like to thank Josh for bringing up the discussion… it’s an interesting one for sure.