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

[Matthias-Christian Ott]

On Fri, Jun 26, 2009 at 02:25:41PM -0400, John T. Settino wrote:
> 
> > My opinion (because it looks like people want opinions here):
> >
> > I was/am definitely one of the hcoop members put off by relearning AFS and
> > domtool stuff when I wanna add something to my account.  The main problem
> > with AFS that I have isn't that it's networked (which is a great idea) but
> > that I can't use the usual unix permission commands to manipulate my
> > files.
> >
> 
> Same here. No qualms with a networked filesystem (we use NFS at work), but
> the ACLs were definitely an unwelcome change (had to modify portions of my
> website so it would continue working). For a coop made up of "power users"
> who I assume are very familiar with UNIX permissions, moving to an
> architecture that we don't have but one person to admin (says a lot about
> the technology vs our userbase, right there!), and forcing the rest of the
> userbase to learn a new way of doing things, was pretty stupid IMO. Same
> goes for domtool v1 -> domtool2. No effort to help the users convert their
> existing configs to new ones, just a "learn it or tough crap" brush off.

I agree, parsing the output of fs listacl correctly is horrible and the
restriction that ACLs can only be set on directories is a disadvantage
too.
 
> I believe an ideal architecture would be as follows:
> 
> 2 identical NAS machines for data storage w/ NFS

So you volunteer to set up and maintain NFS with LDAP? That would be
great.

> 2 identical beefy machines, each housing virtualized servers for services
> VMs would be something like
> mail
> web
> db
> shell
> ldap (for auth)
> et. al.

Do we really need VMs? I know that virtualisation is hyped these days,
but they should be used with care. Just because we have several VMs,
we don't avoid a single point of failure.

Maybe we should make a volunteer list that lists persons, skill and
desired responsibilities. 
 
> Duplicates of everything for failover capabilities, obviously.

The wiki lists rsync.net as a remote backup provider, that sounds like a
good idea.
 
> - J

Regards,
Matthias-Christian