[AktiviX-discuss] RFC please .. devloping our infrastructure

[Alan Dawson]

Future for the aktivix server services

Hi,  since the problems with the tachanka server I put the lists back onto our
old ( and now not so well maintained ) server springnight.burngreave.net

I don't know how other people feel about this but for me this was a retrogade
step ( but unfortunately necessary ). 

for a couple of reasons:-
1.  we'd put some effort into moving the list services to a much more powerful
machine, and this has been not used.
2.  we were able to make some headway into decentralising the administration,
and strategies to make further progress in that direction.
3.  The new machine met much more of the criteria from

http://stamp.poivron.org/SecurityProtocolsWorkingGroup/DraftTwo
http://stamp.poivron.org/SecurityProtocolsWorkingGroup/DraftTwo/Comments
  
which we are working on at the http://stamp.poivron.org/DigitalStruggles event.


I'm guessing that most of us will agree that 

1.  Decentralising our administration is good - it will help us provide
services
better
2.  Making the server software and hardware more resistant to vunerability and
seizure, protects our data.

So ..  how to move the services and the way we deliver them forward.


The machine we currently use to provide email and lists would need much changes
to it to bring it forward, and is now quite aged, so rather invest more time
and money in it we could use our energy on new hardware.

There are number of options available to us

chrisc has put some here 
https://wiki.slugbug.org.uk/Managed_Servers

r7 and I have access to another community server - quite well specified ( dual
opteron processors 2GByte RAM, and 750GB disk space (4*250GB in RAID 5
confuration)
It would need some work also before it could be used by us, but this should not
be too strenous.  I can provide more details if required.

Finance 
-------

I think we should ask the alt-media-res people for some payment for services we
provide for them.  This could be used for hosting costs, or hardware or
whatever...

Other than that ..  what do you think ?  We need to get some consensus on how
to
progress this.. before some critical failure happens to us


-- 
"If you make decisions about software -- or anything -- based solely on
short-term cost and benefit, someone with a longer view can easily
manoeuver you into a trap from which it is hard to escape."