response 86 of 176:

Dec 1 05:58 UTC 2005

I'm upset about the mail debacle too but unfortunately, anytime any 
constuctive criticism is offered, it's somehow taken as a personal 
attack on that person.

Back when I was in the AF, every section had a recall roster, and a 
binder with documentation of a basic contigency plan and checklist. 
I think that would be a good idea for grex. Too bad that would be
construed as tieing staffs hands or micromanaging. 

I also think the heirachy of operation should change from every staff
operating as equals to someone volunteering as a main sys-admin, who
is accountable and reports to the board. It seems that the current way
of doing things is broken.

response 88 of 176:

Dec 1 18:43 UTC 2005

Amazon.com and LiveJournal have massive capital investments in hardware
and engineers that Grex simply can not and will not ever provide.
Further, the financial impact of outages is different for Grex than it
is for those two.

response 90 of 176:

Dec 1 19:13 UTC 2005

...Or the money could be spent on a colo that would give us 24/7 access
to the machine, thus giving staff a larger window to recover from outages.

You see, I think this is the sort of direction that some have been
saying Grex lacks. We're not sure what takes precedence.

Another suggestion:

Grex has security goals, why not have overall system goals? Maybe even a
mission statement? These goals could be put in order from most important
to least important...they could be things like: "Maintain a conference
system void of censorship", or "provide for limited dialup internet
access in the ann arbor area", or "provide for user data integrity
through fault-tolerant disk storage and regular backups".

Then, when it came to making decisions on expending resources, everyone
would be on the same page as to what problems took priority.

response 92 of 176:

Dec 1 20:29 UTC 2005

I care about Grex and M-Net (for different reasons).

And I still think that anyone who uses either system with the expectation that
their files are safe OR secure is a fool, and I don't have any sympathy for
people who lost important email they had stored on grex.

response 94 of 176:

Dec 1 20:38 UTC 2005

If most of the users agree with you mcnally, then that should be one of
Grex's goals.

response 96 of 176:

Dec 2 02:14 UTC 2005

I seem to remember a few times that you dropped him off at the Pumpkin when
you got back into town, and picked him up there in the morning to go back to
work.

For those advocating having an equivalent system for doing upgrades and
recoveries:  where do we store it?  The colo charges for space.  If a staffer
stores it we still have problems with access unless that staffer is the ONE
doing the upgrade/recovery.

response 98 of 176:

Dec 3 00:10 UTC 2005

Even though we are just a small organization, there is nothing wrong 
with us doing the best we can in all situations. I also think that 
criticism is ok although I sometimes think that some people around here 
have trouble presenting their criticism in the best possible way. It is 
pretty easy to start feeling defensive about things. 

As for the email loss. It was a mistake. It cant be undone and that is 
that. No one did it out of malice. And even the most competant 
technical people make mistakes sometimes and email sometimes gets lost 
even at for-profit firms. 

As for what we can do to prevent such a loss in the future...Well, 
there are a lot of good ideas being presented here. I dont know what 
the answer is. Our finances arent great and I know that there is a 
reluctance to spend a lot of money. However, exploring backup options 
is really something we should do. 

response 100 of 176:

Dec 3 07:56 UTC 2005

Have you tried in the last few days.  I reinstalled spamassassin and spamd
a day or so ago.

response 102 of 176:

Dec 4 07:35 UTC 2005

re #79 ...   excuse me! it wouild seem, that *i* undrsatnd "the nature of the
upgrade," one hulluva lot better than either you or other staff or other borg!

shit!  
  
"there was no path back" --- that is *precisely* the sysadmin situation 
for which i have been * t r a i n e d * !!
  
whtether it is an air defense missle ssytem or a fscking os upgrade - the 
cover-yur-ass attributes are identical. 
  
somewhare along the line i copied this:
  
Worse, a great deal of the delay was because we as staff really failed to work
 together effectively.  We ran into deep differences in basic philosophy about
 how grex should be run that cost us extra days.  Because we didn't all agree
 on what we were going to be doing before we started, our preparation for the
 rebuild was not complete.  We ended up redoing significant portions of the
 job more than once.

i don t know, at this moment, where it came from, but i did *not*write it.
  
some rooty-tooty (not sTeve) did .. and borg & staff are imtimately
responsible for the fsxk-up.
  
mostyl borg!
  
  'in-place' .... WTF!
  

response 104 of 176:

Dec 4 16:33 UTC 2005

StEve
steVE
sTeve
STeVE

response 106 of 176:

Dec 4 21:22 UTC 2005

His preferred choice came about by accident.  When he first started using
conferencing systems, he didn't release the shift key fast enough.  He went
to the National Computer Conference and while in a conversation someone asked
him if he was the S T eve.  He laughed and replied that he was and they had
a great time talking.  He decided that it was a good thing to keep and has
used it, purposely, even since.

response 108 of 176:

Dec 4 22:49 UTC 2005

re 105 I prefer using my calculator to solve those types of problems, but
really; i was just goofing around !@

response 110 of 176:

Dec 5 17:57 UTC 2005

That's true.  Think of each bit as being two people shaking hands.