Hi! I'm Philip. I am a FreeBSD Project cluster administrator. I help take care of the largely invisible infrastructure that makes the FreeBSD Project tick. The clusteradm team is responsible for approximately 150 physical servers, running nearly 300 jails, in eight locations around the world.

These are some of the clusteradm things I do:

• Develop and maintain automation for the many machines and jails in the cluster;
• Regularly build and deploy FreeBSD releases on the entire cluster, making sure dogfood is always fresh;
• Set up mirror sites in different parts of the world;
• Tweaks and tuning to get fresh packages from the builders to the mirrors as quickly as possible;
• Work with the security officer team to ensure the FreeBSD Project cluster is secure;
• Monitor the physical health of servers and get hardware replaced when it inevitably breaks;
• Install new servers and ensure critical cluster service jails are on reliable and contemporary hardware;
• Day to day systems administration: reading logfiles, arguing with LDAP, Kerberos and others;
• Fortnightly calls with the clusteradm team ... invariably at a time of the day I'd rather be in bed;
• Babysit Bugzilla, Git, Phabricator, MoinMoin, gdnsd ... and more!

I am also the FreeBSD Project postmaster and security-officer secretary ... someone has to do it.

The sponsorship hourly rate is the steepest discount I can offer without competing with my consultancy business. Note that you don't get to decide what I'll work on or when. If you buy more than an hour of my time every month, you're welcome to point out issues you feel need love (Bugzilla, email, whatever). I can't promise to fix them at once (or the way you want) but I can certainly try to prioritise. I'll also be happy to credit your sponsorship, though it won't necessarily be somewhere anyone will be able to see (e.g. commit logs in clusteradm repos). You can be sure of my gratitude though.

My FreeBSD work is my passion. Your sponsorship enables me to spend more time pursuing my passion and less time pursuing keeping a roof over my head and food on the table (and beer in the fridge).

*It goes without saying that I only offer these discount hourly rates for sponsoring my FreeBSD clusteradm work. Different rates apply for my consultancy services.

**If you are in Hong Kong, your bank may impose a foreign transaction fee. You may want to consider sponsoring me by FPS or bank transfer instead. Get in touch.

***On the bright side, GitHub does not charge any fees for GitHub Sponsors payments. Thanks, GitHub!