[HCoop-Discuss] Alternative contact method

[Jonathan Roes]

> If the servers were completely down, I'd pop into #hcoop @
> irc.freenode.net to ask what was up, and probably get a login message
> answering the question.

I can imagine the situation where the servers are down and none of the
admins are at their terminals and/or available on IRC for help.  I
don't see this as too particularly unlikely.

I think IRC is probably the best place for everyone to check on server
status, with ops in the channel utilizing the topic or a ChanServ on
join message to inform users of any downtime.  What might be a good
idea is to have something automated that would verify that the server
is responding to service requests, and when it is not responding
within a certain threshold, notify administrators by their preferred
emergency contact information - phone/cell, sms, etc.  This might even
be a service offered by the colocation provider, I've seen it at other
providers before.

When an administrator begins taking a look, they could just drop a
line in the topic to notify users of what's in progress.  Icing on top
would be an IRC bot that automatically let us know an administrator
has been notified by changing the topic.

Jonathan