After the recent debacle where gBorg was out of commission for about
two weeks, discussions have taken place as to what to do next.

We had had a plan to move the Slony-I project over to pgFoundry
<http://slony-wiki.dbitech.ca/index.php/Move_to_PgFoundry_Checklist>

Indications have been from some of the people involved that this may
not be quite the ideal answer that it was imagined to be, from a
couple of perspectives:

  1.  The makers of the gForge software have evidently decided to
      fork the software in favor of supporting a proprietary version,
      boding ill for useful continuing support for the free version.

  2.  The current pgFoundry hardware is already heavily loaded,
      running things under virtualization, and there is concern
      that it will crumble, which would worsen our situation when
      we were hoping to improve things.

  3.  It took over two weeks for the sole person with hardware
      access to get at backups; the staff hosting pgFoundry
      are the very same people, hence we might expect identical
      problems to recur should we experience problems.

Josh Drake of Command Prompt (hereafter called "CMD") has offered to
provide a dedicated host, supported by his multiple staff that already
provide 7x24 support, where key community members will also have some
sudo access.

His preference would be for this to be an Ubuntu system (for which CMD
is a "Gold Partner"); that seems quite fine to me, presumably playing
to some organizational strengths, and being a system where there are a
pretty rich set of packages should we need extensions of one sort or
another.

In the short term, there's at least one backup of the CVS tree at the
moment, supposing gBorg fell over again.  (I'm unhappy with it being
merely one; if *I* had a copy, that copy would *immediately* get
mirrored several places to give the project some better protection...)
In future, we need much greater redundancy on this, and
cross-organizational backups.  So, the "CMD" server will need to offer
the ability to rsync CVS elsewhere on a regular basis.

It may make sense for the project to migrate from CVS to some more
modern SCM system; I'll specifically leave that out as being a
separate matter to be discussed later.  To *my* mind, the worthwhile
migration would be to a distributed SCM, which would support the
notion that any SCM node could be used to take over development, in a
pinch.  (My list of plausible SCM options consists of Mercurial,
Monotone, Darcs, git/Cogito, Codeville, SVN, but please, let's hold
discussion of this to a separate thread...)

Initially, the CMD server needs to host the following things:

1.  CVS

2.  Mailman

    Mailman has worked well for us in the past

3.  A web server to host what "webby things" are needed, notably
    documentation and release downloads.

    The more "wild web apps" get added, the more complex system
    configurations get, which makes them increasing challenges to try
    to administer, which is an argument against having terribly much
    other than static files on the web server.

I'd propose, at least as a strawman, that we use the Bugzilla instance
at Command Prompt <http://pgbugs.commandprompt.com/> as the bug
reporting system, for now.  It isn't tightly integrated with anything
(ala Trac), but it is a bit more sophisticated than what we have had
had at gBorg, and it would be *very* attractive to see a common system
used to collect bugs for both PostgreSQL and Slony-I.  I think (hint,
hint, Josh) that at least some of us community members would need some
admin access to that Bugzilla instance to get it fully functional;
that shouldn't be over-difficult.

4.  rsync and/or Unison should be available so that various community
    members can replicate data remotely, thereby protecting us from
    events like the recent gBorg outage being nearly as injurious.

First steps...

a) The CMD server needs to be made available

b) We should see to getting copies of CVS and Mailman up and running
to verify that they're working

c) We make sure that they're working and that people are able to draw
backups

Once they are working, we set dates for migration to the new server
for each service.  There is no need to do it all at once.

Comments welcome...
-- 
(reverse (concatenate 'string "ofni.sailifa.ac" "@" "enworbbc"))
<http://dba2.int.libertyrms.com/>
Christopher Browne
(416) 673-4124 (land)