> -----Original Message-----
> From: Christopher Browne [mailto:cbbrowne at ca.afilias.info] 
> Sent: 19 September 2006 16:24
> To: Dave Page
> Cc: postgres at breet.com; josh at agliodbs.com; 
> slony1-general at gborg.postgresql.org
> Subject: Re: [Slony1-general] Migrating From gBorg
> 
> If Niels is wrong about all of these things, then there's a rather
> serious communications problem, because I and others were also hearing
> the same reports.
> 
> Are we merely "wrong" because these problems have been (silently)
> repaired over the last few days?  If that's the case, then, in truth,
> we *haven't* been misinformed.  If these things *were* true, and there
> was no announcement of a fix, then for people to believe that these
> conditions might continue to persist is in no way unreasonable.
> 
> Alternatively, are we "wrong" because these things *never* were true?
> If that's the case, then someone spread outright untruth, which is a
> different kind of distressing.

I wouldn't say never - some were true in the distant past (the
overloaded VM for pgFoundry for example).

The communication 'problem' is almost certainly a case of Chinese
Whispers on IRC I suspect. Unless you hear a direct statement from
someone regularly involved in infrastructure matters such as Marc,
Magnus, Robert, Devrim or myself you should probably take anything you
hear with a suitably sized chunk of rock salt.


> Focusing a bit on this one point, what's wanted is the ability for
> community members to draw backups to eliminate this as a single point
> of failure.  If several organizations can pull backups, whereever the
> server may be, that can adequately answer that issue.
> 
> The "single point of failure" isssue is one that has been applying to
> far too many things:
>  - Only one person with root access to systems

Marc, Magnus, and myself have root access to all our systems. Various
other people also have root access - for example, John Hansen to the
search engine.

>  - Only one person with control of DNS

Marc has requested that I be added as tech contact for the domain, and
is in the process of providing me with access to the primary server.

>  - Only one person with access to the backups

Ditto, access to the hub.org backups is being sorted for me. The backups
to the new pgFoundry box will be accessible to others with root on that
box which I believe includes Josh Berkus and Andrew Dunstan.

> I'm not hearing things that convince me that there's not still a
> single point of failure.  If others generally *do* feel convinced,
> then perhaps it is reasonable for the migration to be to pgFoundry.
> 
> Non-negotiable, even in that scope, is that I want the ability to pull
> backups of the CVS repository frequently (rsync can make that
> reasonably efficient), as my level of trust in the systems hosted at
> Hub has been seriously degraded by the events of the last month.

I can give you that access anytime you like. Just let me know what IP
address.

> Simply saying that things have been addressed *isn't* enough, after
> having been burnt by problems.

You're welcome to come and watch me log into things if you fancy a trip
to the UK. I'll even shout you a beer or two. :-)

Regards, Dave