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

[Matthias-Christian Ott]

On Fri, Jun 26, 2009 at 06:15:14PM -0400, Adam Chlipala wrote:
> 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.

Configuration management is used to replicate the standard
configuration file to all servers, so administration is easier. That has
nothing to do with multi-server deployment by members - you just
replicate the apache, exim etc. configuration, so that you can easily
deploy new servers.
 
> 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.

Load balancing doesn't mean that we run high-traffic websites, it just
means that we use our resources more effectively.

Regards,
Matthias-Christian