[HCoop-Discuss] Reorganizing, people-wise and tech-wise

[Adam Chlipala]

Matthias-Christian Ott wrote:
> Instead of giving up the idea of a distributed filesystems, we should
> reevaluate other possible solutions. I have experience with NFS and 9P.
> NFS kind of worked seems be wide-spread. 9P is primarily present on Plan
> 9.
>   

Can you explain why you think it makes sense to put home directories in 
a networked filesystem by default? I'm pretty sure most HCoop members 
don't see any particular benefit from it.

> I vote against separate machines, my experience at TIP9UG showed that
> it's quite valuable to have a shared filesystem.
>   

Can you elaborate on this?

>  
>   
>> Here are the steps I can think of for getting from here to there.
>>
>> 1. Form a committee of at least 3 members who are responsible for all 
>> hardware purchases (and ideally most of whom aren't volunteering for 
>> anything else).  They should determine what we should buy and who we 
>> should buy it from.
>> 2. This committee should find either 2 or 3 fairly beefy 1U servers for 
>> us to buy and colocate at a new provider with rates more in line with 
>> the average.
>>     
>
> Peer1 wants 75 USD/1U, is that correct?
>   

I'm not sure about any prices beyond the $750/mo. we pay now for a 
quarter cabinet.

> Maybe we should choose the location for the servers near someone
> reliable (who is HCoop member for a long time or so), so that if some
> hardware stuff has to be fixed, he can go to the hoster.
>   

I'd much rather find a colo provider whose techs will fix our stuff for 
reasonable rates. People move to different cities all the time; we 
shouldn't depend on having someone in a particular location, unless we 
can pay this person.

>> 5. These admins divide up the work to set up the servers as outlined 
>> above, documenting everything in our wiki.  We have the main server, the 
>> member server, and (optionally) the spare server.  I expect that we can 
>> buy a beefy enough member server that we can handle the current load 
>> just fine (there are used machines available for under $1000 that have 
>> more capacity than all 5 of our currently-on machines put together), 
>> though we would want to start planning immediately for adding new member 
>> servers when needed.
>>     
>
> But we will keep the current server, am I right? Or are we going to sell
> at least some of them?

I think all of our current servers are too underpowered to make sense to 
colocate, given that recurring costs are based on space. A beefy 1U 
server takes up as much space as any of our current servers, but we can 
get a lot more out of it. Also, we have no warranties or service plans 
for any of our current machines, and we may be able to procure new 
machines with such plans for reasonable prices. I would opt for selling 
all of our current servers, once the new stuff has been up and running 
for a while.