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

[Adam Chlipala]

Matthias-Christian Ott wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 26, 2009 at 07:47:26AM -0400, Adam Chlipala wrote:
>   
>> Matthias-Christian Ott wrote:
>>     
>>>>> 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?
>>>>     
>>>>         
>>> They have a single fileserver which store all the data and you can
>>> simple log into any of the diskless servers and find the same
>>> environment. These servers just provide CPU power and the filesystem
>>> server provides the storage.
>>>
>>> You could load balance, do cloud computing (like Google App Engine or so),
>>> and you don't have a single point of failure, so if one server goes down
>>> (except the fileserver), the members can simply use one of the others.
>>> Moreover, new services don't have to be distributed to the server (like
>>> http, smtp, imap or pop), because they operate on the same set of data,
>>> this saves a lot of administration work and is more flexible. You could
>>> simply PnP new servers.
>>>   
>>>       
>> It would be simple enough to let people opt into a variety of shared 
>> filesystems.  I think most members would be glad for the chance to avoid 
>> opting in, but we could still make it easy to access networked storage 
>> from any machine.  Setting up the common daemons on a new machine should 
>> be simple enough as to be an irrelevant cost, given the rate at which I 
>> expect we'd add new member servers.  Maintaining them shouldn't be much 
>> work, either.  It wasn't back when we had a single server.
>>     
>
> If end up with this idea that members are bound to single server, then
> we need a configuration management tool, so that we can easily replicate
> configuration files to all the servers.
>   

I don't agree that we "need" that. Hardly any members are interested in 
any kind of multi-server deployment. Those who _are_ interested have 
probably grabbed their own VPSes elsewhere. There are many services that 
would be nice to provide, but I think we should prioritize the most 
popular, and we shouldn't make our lives harder to support a minority 
interest.

I think we would need to raise dues for members to make it possible to 
let them run wild distributing tasks across servers, and this would 
bring dues up near the levels of Linode and EC2 costs, making it unclear 
why we're taking the trouble. Our core audience is hobbyists with 
minimal performance requirements.

> Moreover, I suggest that domains are bound to single servers as well, so
> that only http://www.hcoop.net/~user and user at hcoop.net have to be proxied
> to the specific servers.
>   

Yup, that was my plan.

> In addition to this we should provide some tools to migrate users to
> other servers, if they wish (we could have an amd64 and x86 server).
>   

This seems reasonable and quite straightforward. Domtool does all the 
shared daemon config stuff already, so we would really just need to copy 
home directories, crontabs, and a few other things.