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Grex > Coop > #261: Where is Grex moving to when provide.net closes in a few months? | |
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| 17 new of 60 responses total. |
goose
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response 44 of 60:
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Feb 26 22:43 UTC 2010 |
Is there any more news about Provide.net and where they stand? Are they
really closing imminently?
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tsty
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response 45 of 60:
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Feb 26 22:43 UTC 2010 |
thisitem begins with an unsubsatntiated calim that proviede.net is closing.
anyone haev a real fact from provbide? or is thns just scholar messing
his fingerttips dipping in prejudiced pixels?
i thoght not.
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tonster
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response 46 of 60:
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Feb 27 00:25 UTC 2010 |
resp:43: I agree that censoring/whitelisting email is not the best way
to do things. I don't really like veek's plan, but that's not to say it
can't work. It's just not the way I'd do things. The method I'd suggest,
and the way that m-net does it, uses 0 of m-net's (or grex's) resources
but still allows people to maintain their email address. You can either
use the web-based email account (I've just posted instructions and
opened ports so that this works with pine on m-net now, I'm sure you
could use other text-based clients similarly as well) or just login
after creating the account and forward the email to the address of your
choice.
resp:44: I certainly haven't validated the claim that provide is
closing, but I don't think it should come as any surprise. They're a
small town ISP in a dying industry. They were big dial-up guys and few
people in this area continue to use dial-up. They're probably only
surviving because of the colo these days.
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slynne
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response 47 of 60:
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Feb 27 02:38 UTC 2010 |
They sell dsl service too
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tonster
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response 48 of 60:
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Feb 27 03:44 UTC 2010 |
Traditional DSL is really a dying industry too. It was a nice service
when Northpoint and Covad were selling the SDSL service, but the future
lies in FiOS and Uverse, which isn't resold by external providers.
Unless provide is going to redefine themselves a colocation facility, I
don't think they're going to survive. It's a shame really. I liked the
small providers.
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tsty
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response 49 of 60:
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Feb 27 07:59 UTC 2010 |
i;m glsad noonwe other than this item's instigator makes the claim
that provide is going bellyup. (alsong with some sympatico dolts who
also would wish grex dead and crap on the staff.cf)
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remmers
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response 50 of 60:
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Feb 28 12:26 UTC 2010 |
Well, STeve did raise the possibility at the December board meeting.
It's not just "this item's instigator" and "sympatico dolts".
Regardless of whether our current provider is in imminent danger of
folding or not, I think it behooves Grex to have a plan for moving if
the need arises.
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tod
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response 51 of 60:
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Feb 28 14:42 UTC 2010 |
re #33
LOL! Yes, Tony is a magnet for cop raids
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scholar
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response 52 of 60:
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Feb 28 16:32 UTC 2010 |
Re. 49: No, I'm not the only one who's saying that provide.net is closing.
I'm repeating what Steve said at a board meeting which you attended.
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richard
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response 53 of 60:
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Feb 28 19:45 UTC 2010 |
I don't think it matters one bit whether provide.net is closing. The
fact is that provide.net has ceased to be a viable hosting solution.
Grex goes down and stays down because nobody authorized can get over
there to reboot the box. In addition nobody is thinking about *why*
Grex needs to be re-set this often? Are they taking the power up and
down over there?
I think it is clearly time for the grex box to be moved to a staff
member's house.
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tod
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response 54 of 60:
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Feb 28 19:49 UTC 2010 |
I think its time to recode Grex as a hosted Moogle solution.
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tsty
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response 55 of 60:
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Mar 1 19:49 UTC 2010 |
steve said that provide was cutting back - he didn;t say it was closing.
richard:
"fact is that provide.net has ceased to be a viable hosting solution." ???
and yo know this, as a 'fact', because?
thnking head is a decent idea though.
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scholar
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response 56 of 60:
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Mar 2 00:11 UTC 2010 |
No, Steve said that Grex would have to be off of provide.net.
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tonster
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response 57 of 60:
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Mar 2 02:49 UTC 2010 |
resp:55: I don't think it's difficult to find that that is a fact. The
place has limited hours, which makes it sometimes difficult for people
who are on the magic list to get in and do maintenance on the box, and
there are a limited number of people who can get access. Additionally,
should those people all be busy (and this has happened even in the past
few months, and certainly in the past few years!), it's not possible to
add someone to the list quickly to get the box back up. I think the
recent downtime over the past several months is enough 'facts' to
establish that provide is clearly not the best solution, though it beats
shutting grex down.
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tsty
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response 58 of 60:
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Mar 2 07:00 UTC 2010 |
actually, changing the list can be done by anyone -on- hte list except
that i got hte list changed to include me and remmers before i was
on teh list. it could have been done earlier & faster a few months
ago but i didn;t wnat to stomp on toes.
if there is a panic hands-on-rqueired situation it;s true that we aer
subject to proide's opne-hours. but less so than we were in ken's wharehouse
since provide is open weekends. having a site like lmaster's basemsnt
or the access of the pumpkin isn't, imo, all that critical altohogh it
was nice.
bsesides, there are more of us to assist now. awareness can./could go
back to seleep again but that;s remote for the near fture, imo.
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krj
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response 59 of 60:
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Mar 2 16:50 UTC 2010 |
What are the backup plans for the unlikely event that our
host takes an out-of-town trip, or (heaven forbid) is hospitalized
or something like that? (carpcarpcarp)
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remmers
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response 60 of 60:
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Mar 6 14:48 UTC 2010 |
It wouldn't be difficult to mirror some of Grex's facilities -
e.g. bbs and the website - such that if Grex's "main machine"
became unavailable, access could be switched over to the mirror.
Grex's storage and computing requirements are so modest that I
think that mirroring "in the cloud" is a pretty inexpensive
proposition.
Just mirroring the data is trivially easy. As an experiment, I
used rsync to copy all of the Agora conferences (dating back to
1991) to a FreeBSD virtual machine at my disposal. Creating the
initial mirror took 36 minutes of elapsed time - about 380 mb of
data. The mirror can be kept in sync by running rsync as a
cronjob at frequent intervals. Since rsync copies only the
changes since the last run, resource usage for keeping the mirror
synchronized would be quite low. Now, if you have backtalk running
on the mirror and also keep users' participation files sync'd,
people could participate in bbs on the mirror if the main
machine was unavailable.
Turning that into a production system would take a bit of thought
but shouldn't be too difficult. But anyway, I think it would
behoove Grex to implement some redundancy so that it doesn't rely
on the availability of just one machine. It wouldn't be expensive
to do this.
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