[Hcoop-discuss] Help plan our next server set-up!

[Adam Chlipala]

j.c.hallgren at juno.com wrote:

> So bear with me...what benefits am I getting at the moment from 
> keeping Abu going online?
>
> Now if keeping it going meant that one would (optionally?) pay $1.50+- 
> month extra for some specific features (that I might not need or ever 
> use, but others depend on), or level of service (backup in case of 
> primary outage), then I'd agree...but right now, for my limited needs 
> (a local community chat-room), I don't see the advantage.  So $1.50 
> isn't much, true, but for me, it would get me 25min of voice calls to 
> users (most important) or 30 pages of copies or 3 stamps.
>
It's closer to $1/mo. now.  We'll be at 60 members soon enough.  That 
amount of money is completely trivial to me, valued at less than the 
price I place on engaging in a discussion about how to remove it. ;-)  
If more people complain, then perhaps we can make it a priority.

I've never had any permanent role in mind for Abulafia.  We've learned a 
lot since we set it up, and it has a number of flaws that are 
prohibitively difficult to correct remotely.  It definitely made sense 
to keep it running while we broke in the new server, but I think we've 
passed that point now.  I'm semi-game for using it more if others do 
most of the work to make it happen.

I would definitely want to decomission it as soon as we have our next 
main server installation running.  How soon we expect that to happen 
influences whether or not it is worth a long discussion now on how to 
use Abulafia.

ntk at hcoop.net wrote:

>But the #1 thing it is useful for is just a generic Linux shell server for
>development and whatnot.  I know Adam said after the migration that
>everything should be moved over and he might close login off (which was
>about the only thing that got users to move over to fyodor), but as far as
>I know everyone who had a Abu account can still log in there.
>
That's true, but I've been hoping that no one would.  I certainly don't 
want to do the work of creating accounts on multiple machines for each 
new member, and newer members might feel slighted if only the old timers 
had this special privilege.  If you use Abulafia at all for anything but 
the most trivial purposes, you are probably adding a tangible cost to 
our bandwidth bill there, and that bill is shared by everyone in our 
current scheme, even those without login access there.

>I have
>occasionally used it to compile code and run small computations, test
>scripts, and also running an IRC client to access #hcoop when I'm on a
>machine that doesn't have one--which is handy since Interserver blocks IRC
>both incoming and outgoing.
>
We determined months ago that this isn't true: InterServer is fine with 
IRC clients, and a handful of members have been IRC'ing from fyodor for 
a while.  Our firewall blocks most everything by default, so you just 
need to request firewall rules to allow the particular IRC connections 
that you want.

>I think it might be worthwhile to at least
>temporarily christen Abu as a "development box" and have it as an actual
>policy/recommendation that users go to Abu for things like testing,
>compilation, anything that would tend to burn memory & CPU-type resources
>but not lots of bandwidth.
>
I'd rather that people didn't do that.  You should be able to use your 
own local machine(s) for testing purposes.  I hope that we'll have a 
"real" development server available soon, with actual security measures 
in place to prevent users from crashing the machine at will, as is 
possible on Abulafia now.