MinIT Archives

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2018-12-17

  • Thank you Potch! for everything you've done for Mozilla and the open web. We love you buddy! You'll always be a Mozillian :)
  • Happy Holidays! No updates this week from IT, but we've been happy to help all Mozillians work smarter, faster, and safer in 2018, and look forward to making Mozilla and the web better for all in 2019. Be safe and have fun this holiday season!

2018-11-26

  • Password Manager 101! You’ve heard you should use a password manager to secure your online accounts, but you don’t know where to start? Come to Password Manager 101, on Thursday, November 29 at 1200 Pacific Time, for an overview of why and how to use these important security tools. Broadcasting on AirMo from San Francisco, this session will include hands-on demos and support by InfoSec and Service Desk.

2018-11-19

  • New Wifi Authentication in offices! Reminder: There’s a new way to log in to WiFi at our spaces! Set up your new login before your deadline to keep using Mozilla WiFi (and other stuff) in the office. Most offices are done now, but Berlin, Mountain View, and London, you need to do this by this Friday! Generate your password at login.mozilla.com/wifi. For more info and how-tos, check out the project Mana page.
  • Use a Password Manager to make Wifi, and everything else, easier and more secure! Mozilla's InfoSec team recommends the use of a password manager to keep yourself and Mozilla safe. You can use a password manager to easily take care of wifi authentication across multiple devices. Mozilla has enterprise licenses for 1Password and LastPass. You can learn more about password managers in Mana, and can get your license by submitting a request through The Hub. Be safe out there!
  • Happy Thanksgiving to all Mozillians in the USA! Thanksgiving is a time to reflect on the bounty the harvest season has brought us, and to share that bounty with friends, family, and everyone around. I'm thankful to work with all of you at Mozilla, working to make the web better for everyone. And yes, there is a Thanksgiving song! Thanksgiving, by Poi Dog Pondering
Somehow I find myself far out of line/ From the ones I had drawn/ Wasn't the best of paths, you could attest to that, but I'm keeping on /Would our paths cross if every great loss had turned out our gain?/ Would our paths cross if the pain it had cost us was paid in vain? Thanksgiving for every wrong move, Thanksgiving for every wrong move that made it right...

2018-11-12

  • New Wifi Authentication in offices! Reminder: There’s a new way to log in to WiFi at our spaces! Set up your new login before your deadline to keep using Mozilla WiFi (and other stuff) in the office. Congrats to Portland to making the change last week!Paris, SF, Toronto, Vancouver, and Taipei, you need to migrate by this Friday! Other spaces are due next week. Generate your new Wifi password at login.mozilla.com/wifi. For more info and how-tos, check out the project Mana page.
  • Connected Workforce Work Week in PDX!- Speaking of Slackbots, IT's Connected Workforce team is having a work week this week in Portland! Our focus is on delivering valuable collaboration tools on the Slack platform to help all of us be able to work better together. Share your slackbot ideas in Slack in the #slackbot-ideas channel, and see how our team is using Slack to better enable our own collaborative work in the #connected-workforce channel.
  • More content coming in #little-learnings! Later this week, I'll be starting a new series based on my presentation on Enterprise Architecture as an Astrolabe to Guide Innovation in the #little-learnings Slack channel. The presentation spans astrolabes, Yoko Ono, ways to look at capabilities, and ideas on how to apply capabilities to innovation processes that help achieve long-range visions- like Innovating Like A DJ! Come join in the learning on Slack!
  • IT Brown Bag this Friday- This Friday's monthly IT Brown Bag session will be at the more globally-friendly time at 1700 Europe- 1600 UK- 1100 EST- 0800 PST, to accommodate a slate of international speakers. Dietrich Ayala will be giving his rescheduled session on Mozilla and Distributed Web from Istanbul, Alberto del Barrio will be speaking from Berlin about Visualizing Traffic across Mozilla Network Borders (from an IdeaBox suggestion), and Valeria Gonzalez will present from Seattle on the Mozilla Enterprise project. Join us on AirMo or in the #BrownBags Vidyo channel, and join the discussion in the #it-brownbags Slack channel.

2018-10-29

  • Wireless Authentication Changes: There will be a new way to log in to WiFi at our spaces. The authentication required for wireless, specifically the Mozilla SSID, is migrating away from your LDAP Password to Single-Purpose Password (WiFi Password). Action is likely required on your part to stay online in a MozSpace.

2018-10-22

  • MVK is going to MozFest! At MozFest, I'll be presenting Innovate Like A DJ!, teaching people how to use some of the skills and thought processes DJ use to innovate on the issues affecting the open web. There will be musical toys! And then on October 30th at Software Architecture 2018, I'll be presenting Enterprise Architecture at Mozilla: An Astrolabe To Guide The Future. It's essentially the same concepts, remixed for a crown of professional architects. The MozFest presentation will be streaming on AirMo, and the Architecture presentation will be available later. See you across the pond!

2018-10-15

  • This month’s IT Brown Bag Presentation will be Friday, Octrober 19th, at 12 Noon PDT, available in the #BrownBags Vidyo channel or live streaming on AirMo!. We have two exciing presentations: Dietrich Ayala from Emerging Tech will share about Mozilla and the Distributed Web, and Michael Van Kleeck will share survey results and gather learnings and next steps from the IT Hackathon. Please join us for the learning! All Mozilla staff and volunteers with NDA’s are welcome.
  • MVK will be giving 2 presentations in London on innovation! At MozFest, I'll be presenting How to Innovate Like A DJ!, teaching people how to use some of the skills and thought processes DJ use to innovate on the issues affecting the open web. There will be musical toys! And then on October 30th at Software Architecture 2018, I'll be presenting Enterprise Architecture at Mozilla: An Astrolabe To Guide The Future. It's essentially the same concepts, remixed for a crown of professional architects. The MozFest presentation will be streaming on AirMo, and the Architecture presentation will be available later. See you across the pond!

2018-10-08

  • The IT Hackathon was last Thursday, October 4th, and it was a huge success! Close to 40 people participated in tracks on AirMo, Service Delivery, Conference Rooms, and Service Lifecycle. For Mozilla IT, it demonstrated our new orientation as a collaborative, experiment-driven, solution-building organization. We look forward to sharing what we've learned as we work with all Mozillians to find new ways to build and preserve the web.
ITHackathon1sm.jpg
ITHackathon2.jpg

  • MDC (Mozilla Data Collective) has been upgraded to the latest release 5.3.1. Databot is now integrated with and available in MDC. Databot is now in #mozdatacollective, #mdcdatabot_test1 and #mdcdatabot_test2 slack channels. We would like to thank everyone who participated in the testing of the alpha version of databot. Your feedback is really valuable to the release of this feature in MDC. Thank You! Here’s a link to Quick How-To Databot
  • Berlin 6th Floor Expansion!- Sehr gut, und sehr schick!!! On Monday October 1st, the Berlin office opened the doors to their newly expanded space on the 6th floor. As part of the expansion, 17 newly standardized conference rooms were introduced. In addition, the 3rd and 4th floor existing systems were upgraded to meet the current standard and provide the same user experience across all 3 floors. In total, we touched 37 conference rooms across a ~2 week span. In support of the expansion, IDF buildout and 24 additional AP’s were installed to accommodate conferencing needs and 36 workstations. These efforts could not have been possible without the dedication, support, and collaboration from the multitude of staff members within IT and WPR. Alles gut! Wunderbar! Wir lieben unsere Mozillians auf Deutschland!

2018-10-01

  • Doing the work of our mission is rewarding and exciting, and the open web needs Mozilla’s leadership now more than ever. To lead, we need to be strong and united and need to trust one another. Please take care of each other and support your fellow Mozillians. Can you think of 1 or 2 people who have done great work? Reach out and thank them! Everyone feels better when they know their work is being seen and appreciated.
  • The Service Desk has designed a set of tools, documents, videos and services that can be self-administered by you. Such tools will allow you to address certain issues that you encounter with your technical environment, or to find answers to some common questions or situations. Look out for an email and a Hub banner to be posted soon.
  • Do you have Slackbot ideas? I'll be leading an IT effort to deliver Slackbots to help us better collaborate and to make our day-to-day work easier. Help us deliver what you want and need! Have you worked with particularly helpful Slackbots? Do you have ideas, especially for Slackbots to improve our international and community reach? Share your ideas in Slack in our new slackbot-ideas channel!
  • The IT Hackathon is this Thursday, October 4, with 4 separate sessions. A session hacking AirMo will start at 5 AM PST to better enable global participation, and three additional sessions will start at 8 AM PST, with readouts later in the day. The AirMo team would love your help hacking ways to identify and improve issues with streams in general, and Nightly in particular. The Hackathon is open to all! Sign up here and hack and learn with us!

2018-09-10

  • THE FINAL COUNTDOWN- 2 DAYS to the SCL3 DATACENTER SHUTDOWN! Many teams across Mozilla have been working for months to migrate services out of the SCL3 datacenter that we will be closing THIS WEEK. We are down to the LAST 2 DAYS in the datacenter, with THIS WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 12th being the last day that power and connectivity will be provided. Beyond that date we will be tearing down the physical infrastructure in that space. If there are any concerns please get in touch with Corey Shields.

In the spirit of Florence and the Machine:

Shake it out, Shake it out, Shake it out, Shake it out, Whoa!/ And it's hard to dance with a server on your back so shake it out/ 'Cause we are done with SCL3/ So Wednesday we'll cut it and we'll be free/ Cause we like to keep our apps running strong/ Cloud and MDC are our new dawn!

2018-08-27

  • THE FINAL COUNTDOWN- 16 DAYS to the SCL3 Datacenter shutdown! Many teams across Mozilla have been working for months to migrate services out of the SCL3 datacenter that we will be closing soon. We are down to the final days in the datacenter, with September 12th being the last day that power and connectivity will be provided. Beyond that date we will be tearing down the physical infrastructure in that space. If there are any concerns please get in touch with Corey Shields. IT'S THE FINAL COUNTDOWN!
  • VPN Move - As part of The Final Countdown, the Mozilla VPN is moving out of SCL3. Reiterating the email that was sent on Friday: If you use the VPN, you must download a new configuration bundle at https://login.mozilla.com and use that. The old VPN will be turned off on September 12th. Any transition issues, please bring up with #servicedesk on Slack.
  • AirMozilla public access unavailable until September 22, 2018. Any public events will need to be viewed on the Mozilla YouTube Channel or by logging in with any email address. Once a security update has been moved to production on September 22, air.mozilla.org will again point to the public page so that public webcasts are easily available via a single click. Until then, air.mozilla.org will point to airmo.mozilla.org. Public webcasts are always available on the Mozilla YouTube Channel or by logging in to airmo with any email. Staff and NDA Mozillians will need to log in via SSO to view secure content. Thank you for watching AirMozilla!
  • Mozilla Tests and Experiments- With lots of exciting tests and experiments happening across Mozilla, it can sometimes be hard to know where you can find all of the tests. IT has put together a quick reference page on Mana so you can easily find those tests you want to contribute to. We will also refer new Mozillians to this page during new hire on-boarding going forward.

2018-08-20

  • We've receieved an initial order of new MacBook Pros! In case you haven't heard, Apple officially announced the release of a new line of MacBook Pros. We are happy to announce that with the support of the IT VMO team an initial order has been received. The Client System Engineering, AVOps, and NetOps teams have completed validation on each of the new models. The 2018 Macbook Pros have been added to the Hub and we are ready to start taking your orders. Due to limited stock availability and current inventory we will make the 2018 models available only for refreshes of current systems. They will not be available to new hire until we have gone through our current stock of 2017 models
  • THE FINAL COUNTDOWN- 23 DAYS to the SCL3 Datacenter shutdown! Many teams across Mozilla have been working for months to migrate services out of the SCL3 datacenter that we will be closing soon. We are down to the final days in the datacenter, with September 12th being the last day that power and connectivity will be provided. Beyond that date we will be tearing down the physical infrastructure in that space. If there are any concerns please get in touch with Corey Shields. IT'S THE FINAL COUNTDOWN!

2018-08-13

  • Let’s train databot! Many thanks to those who joined the first session of "Let's train databot”. We got so much interest and so much positive feedback from the first round, and we are making immediate improvements in response. The second focus group session to test the @databot Slackbot has been rescheduled to this Wednesday, August 15th at 7:30-8:30AM. Please join us so that we can train the improved version of the databot. Meeting was re-scheduled and updates sent by Josephine Tanumijaya (Slack @josephine)
  • IT Brown Bag- August 2018- Mozilla's Community Participation Guidelines. Join the IT Brown Bag in Vidyo #BrownBags channel or on AirMo this Friday, 8/17, at 12 noon PDT. Kate Mancuso will be leading us through a session on Mozilla's Community Participation Guidelines. The CPG's are a great tool for creating inclusive communities and for fostering consensus and cooperation. Join us Friday to learn how to apply them in your work to make the Web a welcoming place for all.
  • Get a little education! Come join my learning experiment in the #little-learnings Slack channel . Every day or so, get a little lesson on some topic, never more than 3 minutes long. Currently we're in the middle of Mozilla's Journey From The Datacenter to the Cloud, and after that journey wraps up next week, we'll have something new!
  • THE FINAL COUNTDOWN to the SCL3 Datacenter shutdown! Many teams across Mozilla have been working for months to migrate services out of the SCL3 datacenter that we will be closing soon. We are down to the final month in the datacenter, with September 12th being the last day that power and connectivity will be provided. Beyond that date we will be tearing down the physical infrastructure in that space. If there are any concerns please get in touch with Corey Shields. IT'S THE FINAL COUNTDOWN!

2018-08-06

  • Fancy a little learning? Check out #little-learnings on Slack!' As Enterprise Solutions Architect, part of my role at Mozilla is to enable all Mozillians to envision routes to the future. Reaching the future requires new skills and ways of thinking. I've set up the #little-learnings channel as an educational service and experiment. Just about every day, I'll post a single slide or map, and give a little context in the Slack channel. It's a little 2-3 minute learning morsel for you. Sometimes technical, sometimes philosophical, but always as interesting as I can make it. I hope you'll join me and let me know if this is valuable. Thank you!

2018-07-30

  • Vidyo migrated to new data centers! After 8 intense hours this past Saturday, AVOPS has successfully migrated Vidyo out of our SCL3 datacenter. All of Mozilla’s Vidyo conferences are now load balanced across MDC1 and MDC2, to enable better geolocation for our Vidyo conferences across the planet. Additionally, this is one step closer to a VidyoWebRTC solution for our environment. There was an immense amount of effort put into this task from all across the IT org. If you have any questions about Vidyo, please contact the team in the #avops Slack channel
  • The Vidyo migration has been a large-scale effort. Special thanks to John Bircher and Justdave from Netops, Chris Knowles from Infrastructure and Operations, and Van Le from the Data Center Operations team for all your hard work and attention to detail to make the migration a success!
  • Coming soon! More educational resources from IT! I'll be doing a short slide-a-day review of my OSCON talk Mozilla's Journey From The Datacenter to the Cloud in a Slack channel soon, as we try to find more ways to efficiently bring you the education and tools you need to power up your efforts to preserve the Open Web. Watch the Slack #announcements channel for more info later this week.

2018-07-23

  • OSCON- Last week I attended the O'Reilly Open Source Conference here in Portland, along with several other Mozillians. It was powerfully different from past OSCONs. The crowd was diverse across visible and technological spectrums in a way I hadn't seen before. Everyone was talking about how to open up everything, and we're talking big players as well as small. Mozilla is a spiritual parent of OSCON, as was apparent every time someone saw me in a Mozilla shirt and asked about us, or talked about the origin of therm Open Source. I spoke about Mozilla's Journey From the Datacenter To The Cloud. In last Friday's IT Brown Bag, available on AirMo, I give a recap, along with some teachings from sessions I attended.
  • From our InfoSec team, April King released her long awaited TLS Cerfificate Viewer ‘certainly-something’ providing easy-to-read insight into the certificate status of sites you visit with Firefox. Install it and take it for a spin today! Thank you so much to April for your hard work and to InfoSec for all you do in keeping us safe as we empower our missions!

2018-07-16

Andrew Krug guest hosting.

  • Two focus group sessions will be held to test @databot, a slack application that would help you to find relevant metrics by asking a question to the databot. Josephine T (JT) jtanumijaya@mozilla.com is inviting you to join the sessions at: Tuesday, July 17th at 10:30-11:30AM, Wednesday, July 25th at 7:30-8:30AM. Invitation details were sent to all moco mofo (at July 11th).

2018-07-09

  • A shout-out to MDN! Over the last week, three different non-technical people here in Portland have come up to me and said Thank you Mozilla for MDN! MDN is a powerful tool for all web users in our daily work to keep the web open and independent. One of the MDN fans told me it was his professor that told all the new coders that MDN is where you need to go to learn to code the web. Thank you everyone who works on and contributes to MDN!
  • Debugging The Technical Interview. Are you near Portland and looking for some guidance about interviews? Next Monday at 5:30 PM at Mozilla Portland, we'll be hosting a workshop by Cate Connolly from karat.io about how to improve technical interviews. How we interview and who we hire has a huge impact on our engineering communities. Join us if you're in the area, and get free tickets at the link here. I'm still working out the details to see if we can broadcast and/or record the workshop.
  • Create your own events in Moderator! Moderator is an application developed by our Open Innovation/ Participation Systems team for collecting questions before or during an event. Moderator events can be set up for NDA Mozillians or public access, and posters must log in, but can post anonymously. We have been using Moderator for years for internal meetings, and it is now available for wider use. Click on the Create Event link in Moderator to create your event. Consult the thread in Discourse for more information and to ask questions about this great new feature to enable participation! Thanks to Tasos Katsoulas and the whole ParSys team for your work on Moderator.

2018-07-02

  • DevOps Cohort This Friday, July 2nd! Join the DevOps cohort in the DevOps Vidyo channel or watch on AirMo. The DevOps cohort is a monthly meeting for all Mozillians interested in topics related to DevOps, the intersections between development and operations. The meeting is the first Friday of every month, 9 AM PST. This week, Daniel Hartnell will be sharing what we've learned about Amazon's Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS).
  • Interested in learning more about how we track contribution at Mozilla and what you can learn from this? Bitergia, the company behind our Community Analytics Dashboard, which is based upon the open source GrimoireLabs product, will be in our San Francisco office Friday, July 20th. Check out the incredibly rich Community Anaytics Dashboard, full of information about all sorts of things the Mozilla community works on, like Github PRs, Bugzilla, Stack Overflow postings, and so much more! If you'd like to participate in a tutorial or a Q&A on July 20th, reach out to Susy Struble (@susy on Slack). The Bitergia agenda is still being finalized but there will be remote participation for these events.

2018-06-25

  • Shiny/New WPR tech! Badging and camera systems are comfy in their new homes across all offices, keeping you safe. The backend systems have moved into our new data center as well. In the process the team (WPR, EUS, NetOps, Service Desk, Systems, Security Vendor, PMO) upgraded 10 different systems and executed 50+ tests across 9 different offices. Years of tech debt paid down! Special kudos to Jen Hayashi, Ashish Vijayaram, Brian Hourigan, JustDave, Frances Reda,Lisa Gray, Diana Perez, and everyone else involved in the project!
  • Help us test the MDC Data Bot. The MDC Data Bot is a Slack-based application that enables searching the Mozilla Data Collective from within Slack. It's a great way to bring data into your discussions! Thank you Josephine Tanumijaya for your presentation and your great work with MDC and the MDC Data Bot!
  • New printers are coming to MTV, PDX and SFO. We will be refreshing the current fleet of Ricoh printers in the coming weeks. Look for more information in your inbox.
  • Audio Visual Incident form made simpler! Remember when you had to answer 20 questions to open an AV ticket on the Hub? Well...that’s a thing of the past. We always hope that your audio, video, and Air Mozilla experience works seamlessly during your meetings.That, however, is not always the case. When you do encounter issues, please visit the Hub, select Get help: Audio Visual, answer 3 simple questions and Help will be on the way!Making conferencing effortless is our mission, so, let the AV team help you.
  • IT is having a Back-to-School Hackathon! At our All Hands last week we began work on our first-ever IT Hackathon, a Back-to-School Hackathon on September 13th. We're working to develop an experimental, future-facing mindset in IT, and our first hackathon will give us a chance to exercise this new muscle. Tentative themes we'll be hacking on include conferencing, security, engagement, and service lifecycle management.

2018-06-04

  • Keep your devices safe from theft! Device theft is on the rise, especially in urban areas. Device theft at Mozilla has also steadily risen over the years, with the current year being the worst over the past four years. To reduce risk to personal property, and Mozilla property and data, IT sent out an email today containing a list of Physical and Data safety practices you can take. We also have included instructions for what to do if your device is lost or stolen which we recommend skimming through when you get the chance. If you have any questions about the content of this email or about general Device safety please don’t hesitate to contact the Service Desk via email or on IRC/Slack
  • 1Password 7 app is here! This is a redesign of the 1Password 6 desktop app built from the ground up. 1Password 7 is available now for Mac and PC. Updates include: Faster item lookup and improved vault management. And there's new support for Windows Hello which will allow you to log in to your 1Password account using your fingerprint or simply your smile :). Available to download by navigating to the “Get the Apps” section when logged in to the 1Password web interface. For helping getting the new version setup or for any 1Password questions feel free to contact the Service Desk via email or on IRC/Slack
  • OpenVPN upgrade: An upgrade to our OpenVPN server went live on June 2nd, 2018 in order to to bring our environment in-line with current versions. For most users this will have no effect and no action will be necessary, however a select few may need to make some changes. An email was sent out by The Service Desk last week detailing the upgrade. You can contact the Service Desk via email or on IRC/Slack for questions or concerns about the upgrade.
    • Make sure you’re on the most up to date version of Viscosity
    • If on Linux, check that your VPN client is using OpenVPN v.2.3.3 or later
    • And Ubuntu 14 LTS is no longer supported at all, so make sure you update to a later version of Ubuntu LTS

When the lights go down in the city/ And the sun shines on the bay/ Oooo I want to be there in my city/ with my fellow MO-ZILL-IANS!

2018-05-21

  • The Mozilla IT Brown Bags are held the 3rd Friday of every month, at noon Pacific time, and are open to all staff and NDA volunteers. They are broadcast live, and recordings are archived, on the IT Operations AirMo channel. Last week's session featured a wonderful presentation on Spectre and Meltdown at Mozilla by Michal Purzynski. Michal's presentation was engaging for people of all technical levels. If you're curious about the algorithms and underpinnings of these vulnerabilities, or want to know how they affect you, check out the recorded presentation on AirMo!
  • Last week, the IAM Team met in San Francisco for a UX workshop.
    • The UX workshop is the first effort to create user journeys and wireframes for the evolution of a replacement for the web properties mozillians.org and phonebook.mozilla.org.
    • I.A.M stands for Identity and Access Management. The IAM team is comprised of members of Open Innovation’s Participation Systems and IT’s InfoSec teams. The project started a little over a year ago. Its mission is to ensure all Mozillians (paid staff and contributors) have convenient and appropriate access to Mozilla services through a unified, authoritative, integrated identity system that empowers them to build a better Internet.
    • For more information on the effort around consolidating these two very important systems you can attend the fortnightly IAM Sprint Review. The next sprint review is on Thursday May 24 @ 8AM Pacific in the Parsys Vidyo channel. Special thanks to Henrik Mitsch, Thomas Gläser, Rina Tambo Jensen, and Megan Branson for the great research leading up to the workshop.
    • Code and docs at https://github.com/mozilla-iam/mozilla-iam
The IAM team hard at work at the Mozillians.org workshop

2018-05-14

  • The next Mozilla IT Brown Bag session will be this Friday, May 18th, at 12 noon PDT on the IT AirMo channel and in the #brownbags Vidyo room. The topic will be Spectre and Meltdown at Mozilla, presented by Michal Purzynski. Come join us to learn about how these vulnerabilities affect Mozilla and what we’re doing to protect ourselves. More information about the IT Brown Bags here: https://mana.mozilla.org/wiki/display/IT/IT+Brown+Bag+Presentations

https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/it-brown-bags-may-2018-spectre-and-meltdown-at-mozilla/28492


  • We are now live with our Firefox-Enterprise Web-To-Lead integration in our Salesforce CRM. This was a coordinated cross-org (MoFo,MoCo) and cross functional effort that we got completed in roughly 2 weeks. We worked closely with Ben Sternthal's MOZMEAO (pronounced Moz-Meow) team, Michele Warther’s Lifecycle Marketing team, and Porfirio Landeros on the FF Enterprise Product Marketing Team. Two days after launch we have already captured over 500 Leads from interested I.T. professionals across the globe with a potential install base of over 500K computers!

2018-05-07

  • We’ve enabled the new Gmail UI as part of the Early Adopter Program! Those who want to try it can do so, in the Gmail web interface, by going to Gmail > the gear icon > "Try the new Mozilla Mail". Right away, you’ll see the UI redesign with new sidebar, snooze options and smart reply. Over the next few weeks you’ll see other new features like confidential mode (emails with expiration dates), nudging (reminders on important emails that you have yet to respond), and better security warnings.

Click on the gear to unlock the new Mail UI

  • The Gmail UI update is brought to you by our Google Admin team that quietly keeps all of our Google apps up and running. Thank you to Tristan Thomas (SF), Henry Langi (MTV), and Jen Hayashi (MTV) for keeping up the Google apps that are so important to our work!

Tristan Thomas, Henry Langi, Jen Hayashi

2018-04-30

  • Thank you so much Andrew Krug for hosting the MinIT the last two weeks! Andrew did some great things for the MinIT and he and I will be collaborating on future MinITs! I'm so happy to share the MinIT with him, and with all of Mozilla!!!
  • I was at Coachella/ Leaning on your shoulder/ Watching your husband swing in time/ I guess I was in it/ Cause baby, for a minute/ It was Woodstock in my mind -Lana Del Rey
  • I had an incredibly inspiring 2 weeks at Coachella. Lovely people from all over the world gathered to celebrate music and art, and participate in a vision of a peaceful, colorful future for all. I'd like to share some Coachella slides with you...

2018-04-23

  • MVK is still at Coachella this week. Andrew Krug guest hosting again.
  • Errata - Last weeks IT Brownbag on Meltdown and Spectre was replaced by an IT wide AMA Session with Denelle Dixon, recordings are available on AirMo. Stay tuned to the brown bags wiki for updates the new date for Michal’s presentation on Meltdown and Spectre. AMA Recording Link
  • Wednesday at 10am there will be an Operations All Hands as well for those who would like to attend. The session will be streamed on Air Mozilla in addition to the recording for non-PST viewers. AirMo Link
  • Today you may receive a survey regarding your conferencing experience here at Mozilla. We ask that you fill out the survey relating to Vidyo or any other conferencing solution you use, in order to help determine the direction of conferencing at Mozilla.
  • No more IRC gateway on slack: Starting on May 15th, it will no longer be possible to connect to Slack using the IRC and XMPP gateways. Slack Announcement If you're using Slack in a desktop based IRC client you'll need to switch to a slack API based alternative. If you are a WeeChat user there is a great Slack API plugin. WeeSlack
  • Phishing Exercise ( the reveal ) - Infosec ran a phishing exercise last week! For those of you who got it, thanks for playing! Emails came in the form of a fake mail from bill.com and directed users to a dummy auth0 page. InfoSec will host a session at the SFO All-Hands to share results, what we learned, and what we’re doing (or have done by then) to improve for next time. For any questions on the internal phishing assessment reach out to Jonathan Claudius. For more information on how you can protect yourself and learn to better spot phishing emails visit this great page from InfoSec. Phishing Guidance

2018-04-16

  • MVK is at Coachella this week and next. Andrew Krug guest hosting.
  • Good news everyone! Mozilla's instance of 1Password will be getting DUO 2nd Factor Authentication coming soon to a browser near you.
  • Speaking of browsers VidyoConnect WebRTC on track to start Internal AV Beta testing by next week. If interested and you want to participate contact Tony Recendez.
  • Bugzilla is now live in Cloud Services AWS and out of our data center in Santa Clara. Congratulations Bugzilla and everyone who worked so hard to move to the Cloud.
  • Nubis v2.2 has just been released with a number of fixes and improvements for AWS users taking advantage of the platform. CHANGELOG
  • IT has kicked off a company wide service management project and is calling for participation. Let's all name the service management framework that will help us provide the best user experience! Service management frameworks are evolved from concepts like ITIL or ITSM but this particular framework will be uniquely Mozilla and align with our Open by Design Principles. You can get involved by joining the #itsm_all channel on slack or by commenting on the discourse thread linked here: Discourse Thread on the Project
  • Brownbag Inbound! InfoSec will debrief on April 20, 2018 at 12:00 PST in Brownbags Vidyo on the response to Meltdown and Spectre. Learn more about meltdown and spectre before the presentation here: MeltDown Attack Information

2018-04-09

  • On March 31st our DNS and DHCP infrastructure within the SCL3 data center and external DNS was migrated from an old homebrew system to “Infoblox” appliances. This will provide a more robust service and pave the way for further service decommissioning as we work to exit the SCL3 data center. Big thanks to everyone involved in making this happen, including Rob Tucker, Brian Hourigan, Van Le, John Bircher, Vien Doan, and Krishna Nagaraja
  • What is DNS? DNS is the Domain Name System, a foundational piece of Internet technology. DNS is a common standard for mapping named hosts to addresses, and is fundamental to the way the Web functions. DNS as we know it today has been in service since 1985. DNS emerged from 10 years of standards debates, and it launched when servers were big and long-lived, and it has adapted to service the ephemeral Cloud-based web where hosts come and go every second. The story of DNS is core to the story of the decentralized Internet. If you'd like to learn more about DNS, here's links- The history and prehistory of DNS , A Slate article about the importance of DNS and its history, An intro to the tech of DNS,and Wikipedia on DNS.
  • Mozilla IT would like to especially recognize Rob Tucker- the pride of Stow, Ohio- for his work along with the rest of the team listed above in seamlessly transitioning office authoritative DNS (across MTV, SFO, TPE, BER) from Inventory to Infoblox with minimal impact and downtime. Additionally, I'd also like to thank Rob for coming to the rescue over and over again with his code skills for services that have needed special help. Rob's skills are the duct tape holding some of our more fragile systems together. Thanks Rob!

Rob Tucker phonebook.png


  • I'm headed to Coachella for 2 weeks to revel with my music tribes and to glimpse a possible future of love, peace, and mixed reality! Though I will be tech free... Out in the desert Friday night, when SZA sings that "All the Stars are Closer" and the Weeknd declares he’s a mofo Starboy, I’ll be reorienting myself towards a cosmic future. Andrew Krug from InfoSec will bring you the MinIT the next two weeks. I'll see you all in the stars!


2018-03-26

  • The Mozilla IT/WPR Program is under way! We’ve just completed sprint 1 of this program, which will leverage IT’s strengths to help Workplace Resources focus on all the things they do so well, like MozSpaces, culture building, real estate, connecting remotees, and so much more! The first sprints have been especially focused on understanding the current and future capabilities of WPR, and on helping WPR manage time-consuming applications related to workplace security. You can track the project and learn much more at the IT/WPR Program Mana page.
  • Mozilla IT would like to celebrate Service Desk superstar Jonathan Lin, for his great work supporting the Mozilla mission! Jlin has gone above and beyond in supporting events in the Toronto office. His work has had a huge impact on MoCo and MoFo. Plus, he delivered an awesome presentation about LastPass in the recent IT Brown Bags session. Thanks for all you do, Jonathan!

Jonathan Lin- IT Service Desk Superstar!

2018-03-19

  • Event designer for Air Mozilla has simplified! As of Friday, March 16th, we've consolidated your requests into one form on The Hub:

EventD.png

  • Starting this week, I will be regularly thanking individuals and teams who help empower all Mozillians' work on the mission. This week I'd like to thank the IT staff that helps make the MinIT a success! They built out the new tech here in Portland and produce our meetings on AirMo. PDX and all of Mozilla appreciate you. Thank you- Andy Kochendorfer, Diana Perez, James Dirks, Jason Helmers, Khanh Nguyen, Mark Richards, Tony Recendez!

Screen Shot 2018-03-15 at 5.54.55 PM.png

2018-03-12

  • This Friday, March 16, at 12 Noon PDT, I will be hosting the IT Brown Bags - Lightning Talks edition! We broadcast live at 12 noon PST on Air Mozilla and in the #BrownBags Vidyo channel, and sessions are archived in the AirMo IT Operations channel. We have 5 hot topics scheduled for this week's Lightning Talks- LastPass, 1Password, the Enterprise City Map, How to identify a switch port, and the MOC! That's quite a Mozilla buffet. Come join the feast this Friday! Questions and conversations about the Brown Bags are held in Mozilla IT's Discourse and in the #it-brownbags Slack channel.

2018-03-05

  • The IT Brown Bags are a one hour program on the third Friday of every month, broadcast live at 12 noon PST on Air Mozilla and in the #BrownBags Vidyo channel. Next week's program (March 16) will be an hour of lightning talks, and we're looking for suggestions and volunteers to present 5-10 minute topics. Check out the Lightning Talks Mana page for more info, or contact me (mvk on Slack).
  • Based on staff and volunteer feedback, the IAM Project released an improved version of the login experience .
    • Autologin now shows what login method you’re autologging in with. All users now get a loading spinner rather than the login form when autologin is being attempted. Autologin is now turned off for Passwordless logins.
    • Various UI improvements were deployed, including an improved mobile layout and submitting with ENTER from the password field now ‘just’ works.
    • Account linking has improved. The login screen is now better optimised for adding a new identity to Mozillians.
    • The IAM project aims to continuously improve the login experience. Please give your feedback in Discourse or file an issue in our GitHub repository

2018-02-26

  • Welcome to the new PDX Commons! Now Witness the Firepower of this fully Armed and Operational new Portland MozSpace.
Don’t call it a comeback, PDX been here for years
But thanks to AVOps we got the funky fresh gear
Now take it all in on the dope new TV screens
Our tech is so legit, we're Mozilla’s coolest scene- WORD to MozPDX!

The PDX Commons is back online and refreshed with the latest AV standard that will serve all of your event production needs. AVOps is providing a consistent user experience across our global sites. The team has been in Portland throughout the month, enabling the entire office with state-of-the-art audio and video equipment. We've got four new screens in the Commons, including a sweet rotating TV and a fully-equipped event management booth. Lots of Mozilla and community events coming soon in PDX! Thanks you AVOps, and thank you WPR!

  • The IAM Project has redesigned the login to Mozilla websites from scratch and implemented a New Login Experience for all Mozillians with auto-login, login method detection, experience optimizations including password manager integration, and better security. We welcome your feedback, comments and questions in our IAM Discourse category. Report issues on Github issues.
  • IT’s 2018 objectives include enabling our customers to focus on their most strategic ambitions and making technology work like our people do. We’ve kicked off a joint project with Mozilla’s Workplace Resources team to help enable WPR, and to drive increased productivity for WPR’s business applications . IT and WPR teams will be meeting this week in Mountain View to plan out our efforts for 2018. We’ll be working together to improve technology for WPR and workplaces for all Mozillians- on every continent, in every MozSpace, at home and remote.

2018-02-12

  • The IT Brown Bags are open to all Mozilla staff and NDA volunteers! They take place the 3rd Friday of every month at 12 PM PST, and are broadcast on AirMo in the IT Operations channel and in the #BrownBags Vidyo room. This week, Josephine Leung and Heather Crince will be presenting about the Product Owner process, including a trip through the Product Owner Boardgame. Come join us! Discussion takes place in the Mozilla IT Discourse channel
  • The Mozilla Data Collective is now open to NDA volunteers! Please visit https://www.mozdatacollective.com/ and login using your LDAP or Github+2FA. There's a ton of data there about all things Firefox and Mozilla, and new data and reports are being shared regularly. Whether you're staff or volunteer, it's always fun to check out the MDC and gain new insights on what we do as Mozilla.

2018-02-05

  • In last week’s tl;dr End User Services announced the launch of OutpostT, a program designed to improve IT support for our remotees. The team will initially focus on remotee onboarding, security awareness, and hardware support and will offer expanded coverage for Eastern North American and European time zones. OutposT is based in Toronto. See the tl;dr for more info or reach the ServiceDesk here
  • The NetOps team, along with Workplace Resources, won the Super Bowl of MozPDX this last weekend, as they brought the next phase of the new Portland office space online. 36 new workstations opened up here today. Congrats to our champions, soaring like Eagles here in Portland!
  • As part of Mozilla's Trust and Safety initiative, LDAP servers are being removed from MozSpaces. This means the authentication required for wireless, specifically the “Mozilla” SSID, is migrating away from LDAP to Certificate-Based Authentication and action will be required to stay online on the Mozilla SSID in a MozSpace. You will receive an email with instructions as this improvement comes to your location. If you use the Mozilla Guest SSID, no change will be needed. For your device to receive a certificate for authentication, our new onboarding process must be completed, and the email will have details. Contact Service Desk with any questions.

2018-01-29

  • Gene Wood and Sierra Reed got together to mash up Peanut Brittle Day and Privacy Day into one delightfully delicious web-protecting holiday. Check out their Peanut Brittle and Privacy video, share widely, and bring some sweetness to your privacy stance.
  • As noted in the tl;dr, Slack is now officially open to NDA’d contributors! This month volunteers under NDA are being invited to Mozilla’s Slack instance after a pilot last year with a subset of this group. You can see if a Slacker is a staff member or a volunteer by clicking on their Slack profile. Including trusted non-staff on Slack is part of a larger effort from the Open Innovation and Information Security teams to remove barriers to collaboration. Staff, if you see volunteers in your channels and docs, say hi and welcome them! And volunteers, introduce yourself in channels you join! We are all part of the Mozilla community, protecting the web. Volunteers who'd like to access Slack can sign up via SSO using their Github identity and have the same level of access as staff.
  • AVOPS will be upgrading the VidyoDesktop application to 3.6.14 after hours tonight PST. This release addresses a number of issues to enhance the reliability and usability of VidyoDesktop. Please upgrade to the latest release at your earliest convenience.
    • What’s next for Vidyo’s Desktop communication platform at Mozilla
      • Linux 3.6.3 update
      • Enable WebRTC for Vidyo
      • Evaluate Vidyo’s new VidyoConnect platform. If you would like to Alpha test, reach out to AVOPS via Slack #avops or email.

2018-01-22

  • Happy New Year from Mozilla IT! In 2018, IT's objectives are to Enable our customers to focus on their most strategic ambitions,to Make technology work like our people do, and to Provide comprehensive visibility into information security risk across Mozilla. We're eager to help all of Mozilla in our work to protect the Internet.
  • AVOps rolled out phase 1 of the PDX office expansion last week, making 10 new conference rooms available with the latest and greatest in AV and conferencing gear. 6 small rooms and 4 kiosks. The great Portland conference room shortage is over! PDX office expansion continues over the next several weeks
  • I'm hosting the IT Brown Bags every 3rd Friday at Noon PST, available on AirMo to staff and NDA contributors. This past week's Brown Bag was on the Nubis platform, IT's solution for Amazon Web Services hosting, providing rich monitoring and a standardized operations interface for your hosted applications. Nubis is a completely open source platform- all code is available in the nubisproject Github. You can watch last week's presentation on AirMo.



2017-12-04

  • New AirMozilla coming! Please visit airmo.mozilla.org to see the new library. You can view this meeting streaming live by clicking on the Spotlight in the upper left. The new platform offers full support and development, lots of interactivity, and concurrent social streaming (Facebook, YouTube, etc.) with many ways to present. You can see a brief overview here. To help, we’ve created an FAQ in Mana. Please contact AirMo Andy Kochendorfer with comments and questions.
  • The Mozilla Contract Database is now live! Thanks to a collaborative effort between IT, Legal, People, and Finance, we delivered this service that reinforces the foundation of Mozilla’s business in 90 days, from conception to delivery. Those of you who manage contracts that are coming up for expiration should have received advance notices, giving you plenty of time to take care of your renewals before December 22. Thanks to everyone who contributed to this project!
  • Join me in Austin for the Containers@Mozilla elective, Wednesday December 13th, 1 PM, in JW Marriott room 4. I'll be hosting a panel presentation and live Q&A on how container technologies like Docker are being used to solve problems across Mozilla, in Marketing, Open Innovation, and IT.
  • Austin is Weird. Austin is a city built on music. Willie Nelson is the smoky grandfather of the scene. Local legend Kinky Friedman, in his Austin guide The Great Psychedelic Armadillo Picnic, says that when Austinites die, they go to Willie Nelson's house. In Willie's honor, in Mozilla's honor, in anticipation of Austin, here's a song:
 On the Road again
 And I just can't wait to get On the Web again
 The life I love is saving the Internet with my friends
 and I can't wait to get On the Web again!

I'll see all y'all there!

2017-11-20

  • This Thursday is Thanksgiving in the USA. In this time of giving thanks for the harvest in the northern latitudes, Slack channel #thanksgiving is a place where you can share your gratitude. I am thankful for all my fellow Mozillians who fight tirelessly to keep the web open and free, through Firefox and all the things we do.

2017-11-13

  • Happy Launch Week! As we go forth and Grow From Firefox, remember that IT is here to help you manage your technology so that you can focus on applying your core capabilities to the Mozilla mission.
  • Mozilla is now a USB-C friendly environment. IT has retrofitted all cable cubby equipped Small, Large, and Commons conference rooms with USB-C power and Video adapters. If you need USB-C hardware support outside of the conference rooms, please contact your local EUS representative.
  • InfoSec and ParSys have launched the capability for volunteers and staff to work together in a shared Google drive, in a secure fashion. This is the first staff-volunteer collaboration use case that we have implemented on top of the IAM architecture. Andrew Krug will demonstrate.

2017-11-06

  • The Mozilla Reps have launched an app to crowdsource tweets. Significantly, the app is live, launched on the ParSys container infrastructure in AWS after the initial experiment was a success. Container infrastructure is supporting experiments at Mozilla! Come to the Containers@Mozilla elective at the Y'All Hands to learn more.
  • Today in Mountain View, we are kicking off data entry for our Contract Database project, a joint effort by IT, Finance, Legal, and People teams. It's part of Mozilla's continuous improvement efforts, bringing teams together to solve our shared problems. We are working together to strengthen Mozilla's business foundations

2017-10-30

In honor of Morrissey coming to Portland, intepretive Morrissey song titles in italics

  • NetOps completed the infrastructure refresh of the Vancouver City of Glass office. With this, the Mozilla-wide office infrastructure refresh is complete, save for the Portland office, which will be upgraded during the office expansion. A Rush And A Push And The Land Is Ours
  • This Friday at 9 AM PST, the DevOps cohort will feature a presentation on Kubernetes in AWS, from Andrew Krug. The DevOps cohort is available to staff only. Email Scott Idler to be added to the weekly invite. That's How People Grow Up
  • The Mozilla Data Collective brings you data for launch activities! For the release of Firefox Quantum (or Release 57), we are getting metrics related to Release 57 to the MDC to be shared with all staff. In The Future When All's Well

Everyday Is Like Sunday....

2017-10-23

2017-10-16

  • Mozilla’s Infosec department is sponsoring the 7th annual BSides Portland event this Friday and Saturday at the Portland Convention Center. Andrew Krug will be offering an encore presentation of his BlackHat talk on hacking serverless runtimes, and Mozilla has provided a reference architecture for Kubernetes to power the Capture the Flag Contest as part of our bug bounty program.
  • Researchers have discovered a flaw in WPA2, a common Wifi encryption protocol. If you use WPA2 on your laptop, device, or access point, you are likely exposed. We use Aruba Wifi access points in our offices, and a patch will be deployed shortly- look for communications from the MOC about any office downtime. Your mobile devices are particularly vulnerable- you may want to use 4G instead of Wifi when you have a choice.

2017-10-9

  • Infosec will be rolling out more alerts to the SSO Dashboard this week. In addition to existing alerts for out of date software we will add alerts for security anomalies we may notice about your @mozilla.com account.

2017-10-2

  • IT began build out of a new data center space two weeks ago for the hosting of Firefox build and test resources that are not fit for the cloud. This space will also begin to give us geographical redundancy for these resources. While migration work will continue throughout the next 12 months, this initial move is a major milestone!
  • Starting two weeks ago, all incidents and requests through ServiceNow (The Hub) will generate a brief 3 question survey (https://mozilla.service-now.com). Please take the time to give us feedback on the Customer Experience in order for us to continue to improve.
  • Mozilla has completed our transition away from Okta. If you were previously using Okta to access Workday or other apps, you should now be accessing through Auth0. You can reach the most active secured apps through https://sso.mozilla.com.


2017-09-25

  • Over the weekend, the dial-in access for the teleconferencing systems moved from our old Asterisk system to Jive. The extension numbers and prompts have changed. Vidyo is on extension 2000 and no longer needs the extra 9 added at the beginning of the conference room numbers. The basic audio-only conferencing is now on extension 4000. Please use 2000 or 4000 as appropriate for the password on the 800# instead of 369 (if you dial 369 it'll give you instructions though). If you see any dial-in instructions which need updating, please update them or contact the organizer and remind them to. HUGE shout-out to Andy Kochendorfer from AVOps for providing his voice for the new prompts.
  • IT is initiating a proof-of-concept for the new Vidyo Cloud solution, as a separate instance. Those interested should be part of relatively insular group that can regularly use the NEO client. If interested, please join the #vidyocloudpocrequest Slack channel.
  • The site intranet.mozilla.org will be shut down on September 29th at 5pm PST. We've identified several Mana pages that have links to intranet.mozilla.org. To view the list, please visit the Slack channel #intranet-shutdown or if you have any questions, contact @jojo on Slack
  • Interested in DevOps? Jon the DevOps cohort! Open to all community- staff and volunteers. Join the #devops channel on Slack, get more info on Mana at https://mana.mozilla.org/wiki/display/DO/DevOps+Cohort, or email sidler@mozilla.com to join. Next meeting is Friday, October 6!


(below are info items that won't be read in the Project meeting due to time)

  • Starting last week, all incidents and requests through ServiceNow (The Hub) will generate a brief 3 question survey (https://mozilla.service-now.com). Please take the time to give us feedback on the Customer Experience in order for us to continue to improve.
  • End User Services is discontinuing the use of Kaspersky Endpoint Security 10 for Windows 10 laptops. Instead Windows users will now use Microsoft Windows Defender, the built-in antivirus solution. Malware and virus protection is a constantly evolving field. In the past, dedicated products provided the best defense against malicious files. However, Microsoft’s built-in service has matured over time to be a competitive/formidable antivirus product.

2017-09-18