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

[Matthias-Christian Ott]

On Fri, Jun 26, 2009 at 03:39:05PM -0400, Brian Templeton wrote:
> 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.

I created a list of volunteers:

http://wiki.hcoop.net/AdminArea/ListOfVolunteers

I hope forgot nobody and got your skills and desired positions right.

Regards,
Matthias-Christian