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

[Brian Templeton]

Adam Chlipala <adamc at hcoop.net> writes:

> [...] I think the costs of AFS and distributed systems magic in
> general are outweighing the benefits. [...]

I am strongly opposed to migrating away from AFS. Network filesystems
are extremely useful, and I don't know of any others that could meet all
of our requirements that aren't experimental. AFS may not quite be
"commodity", but it's used in _huge_ installations and we know it can
scale with us as we grow.

> 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.
> 3. We figure out which provider this should be and get those servers to 
> them.  We shouldn't end up needing to pay more than $200/mo. for 
> colocation, which comes out to less than $1 per member.
> 4. Come up with a set of at least 4 (and probably not more, either) 
> volunteer admins, with clear requirements on how much time they devote 
> to HCoop and when.  A few people on IRC miraculously offered to be "on 
> call," without any prompting from me.  At a minimum, we should have 
> scheduled "check-in points" several times a day, when someone with root 
> access is always scheduled to make sure everything is working and take 
> action to fix things that turn out to be broken.  We should use one of 
> the standard monitoring tools to make this easier.
> 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.

+1 on switching colo providers and recruiting more volunteers.

I'm interested in doing volunteer sysadmin work. Possibly relevant
skills: I've run Debian servers at home for the past ~7 years. I know a
variety of Lisp dialects and functional languages, including Elisp (I
wrote the original version of domtool-mode) and Erlang (which would be
useful for maintaining and modifying ejabberd). I don't know SML yet,
but I do know other statically-typed functional languages. I'm familiar
with the usual set of Web-related languages and technologies (the HTTP
protocol, HTML, XML, CSS, Javascript, etc.), which would be useful for
working on the portal and potentially for writing a domtool editor in
the future.

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