Wed Sep 20 14:10:26 PDT 2006
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I'm seeing some agreement in the discussion as to what main "user-visible" services are needed, where I'd order from highest priority to lowest: 1. SCM - CVS for now - discussion of alternatives to come. I have set up Darcs, Git, and Mercurial repositories out of CVS (I should make tarballs for them); I'll see about publishing copies of these in the interests of letting people fiddle with them to see how they like them. SVN, too. 2. Mailing list manager Mailman seems an uncontroversial choice 3. A bug tracker A highly integrated option seems out of scope at the moment, when still on CVS. The only highly integrated option I'm aware of is TRAC, which would imply use of SVN and which would also become the web site content system. If we borrowed access to the CMD Bugzilla instance, that could ultimately share things with PostgreSQL proper, and would be one fewer servers that need to get set up. I'd be happy with that. 4. Web site content system Initially, this should simply be Apache with a few files worth of "glue." But it would be good to then pick some CMS system, whether that be biased towards Wiki or blog, which would mean that we'd not have mouldering sets of directories with increasingly busted sets of HTML files... There are a lot of potential choices, alas, and plenty of opportunity for controversy to rage on the basis of which scripting languages you love/hate (PHP and Perl, particularly). It would be an excellent thing for a system chosen to be DB-driven, so that having a Slony-I-driven replica would be a sample application. There are further needful services that aren't so user-visible: 5. Backups of ALL of the above being available; we have 3 clear volunteers to back these up in a distributed fashion, which seems to me to cover redundancy fairly nicely. One challenge is in making it easy to recover this; Vivek pointed out the idea of running this in a virtual machine (plausible with either Xen or VMWare), so that one could backup the entire "machine" with relative ease. The other approach would be to use a Linux distribution that is highly "packageized" (e.g. - Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora) where all extensions would be installed as packages, making it fairly easy to replicate system configuration. In any case, having rsync/scp access to all the relevant data and application configuration, and giving that access to the volunteers, is good coverage of backups. 6. Perhaps some sort of DNS management diversity If there's only one server, there's not much value in having diverse managers of nameservers. But making sure that more than one party can manage nameservers would allow shifting this, in a pinch. The recent troubles with PG DNS would be nice to avoid... 7. Something resembling 7x24 support We obviously have recently seen a lack of that. If all that the Slony-I host provides, as services, are: a) CVS b) Mailman c) Perhaps NOT a bug tracker d) Apache with access to certain filesystems, I daresay that I could pretty much recreate that configuration in a couple hours from scratch, which would include rummaging around for a boot image to get a computer up and running. If the components are relatively pedestrian, and none involve particularly "deviant" configuration, then there's little that can go wrong, and "scrape off and rebuild from remote backups" represents a perfectly reasonable disaster recovery plan. Andrew's requirements that there be at least 2 people with knowledge+access privileges+authority to repair a service is easily achieved. At the other end of the spectrum, a complex Drupal instance combined with Apache virtual hosts could be a big pain to recover. Complex web apps that mix together a combination of config tables in a database, XML files hiding somewhere, as well as other text-based configuration, can easily leap into the "only <Ms. Foo> can fix that" scenario. It doesn't make sense to leap into any of that without an option that *three* parties can support, which is probably CMD staff, Afilias staff, and (for European representation) Stefan Kaltenbrunner. It may appear anti-democratic, but it seems reasonable to argue that what is reasonably supportable depends on what those three parties can agree on. It's not to say that others shouldn't be heard, but what's supportable does depend on the people doing the supporting... -- "cbbrowne","@","ca.afilias.info" <http://dba2.int.libertyrms.com/> Christopher Browne (416) 673-4124 (land)
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