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11 new of 60 responses total.
remmers
response 50 of 60: Mark Unseen   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.
tod
response 51 of 60: Mark Unseen   Feb 28 14:42 UTC 2010

re #33
LOL! Yes, Tony is a magnet for cop raids
scholar
response 52 of 60: Mark Unseen   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.
richard
response 53 of 60: Mark Unseen   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.  
tod
response 54 of 60: Mark Unseen   Feb 28 19:49 UTC 2010

I think its time to recode Grex as a hosted Moogle solution.
tsty
response 55 of 60: Mark Unseen   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.
  
scholar
response 56 of 60: Mark Unseen   Mar 2 00:11 UTC 2010

No, Steve said that Grex would have to be off of provide.net.
tonster
response 57 of 60: Mark Unseen   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.
tsty
response 58 of 60: Mark Unseen   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.
krj
response 59 of 60: Mark Unseen   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)
remmers
response 60 of 60: Mark Unseen   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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