[OSGeo-Discuss] Upgrade Planning 2014 - Project Feedback

[Jeff McKenna]

I have added an idea to the SAC Transition Plan page
(http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Infrastructure_Transition_Plan_2014).  What
happened recently during our infrastructure 'challenges' was that when I
awoke one morning (Atlantic, AST timezone) all of our SysAdmins were on
the West coast of North America and fast asleep for at least another 4
hours, and I was asked to go into the #osuosl IRC channel to speak with
the host's technical people about OSGeo's servers (it should not have
been me doing that!).  Therefore I have added the following to the
transition plan:

* Have a Systems "fire crew" on alert throughout the entire day, 24x7

** at least one "fire crew" member (ready to handle any emergency SAC
issues) on alert at any time in the day, which includes one in the North
American timezone, one in a European timezone, and one in an
Asia/Pacific timezone

** "fire crew" positions should be funded/paid

-jeff




> 
> 
> On 2014-04-18, 8:50 PM, Alex Mandel wrote:
>> Calling all Project Steering Committees, SAC is looking at the future of
>> OSGeo hosted services. Please chime in with your wants and needs for the
>> next 3-5 years. We want to maximize services while being efficient about
>> effort (pooling sys admin time amongst projects).
>>
>> http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Infrastructure_Transition_Plan_2014
>>
>> More details below.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Alex
>> OSGeo Sys Admin Committee Chair
>>
>>
>> -------- Original Message --------
>> Subject: [SAC] Upgrade Planning 2014
>> Date: Thu, 10 Apr 2014 15:25:41 -0700
>> From: Alex Mandel <tech_dev at wildintellect.com>
>> Reply-To: tech at wildintellect.com, System Administration Committee
>> Discussion/OSGeo <sac at lists.osgeo.org>
>> To: System Administration Committee Discussion/OSGeo <sac at lists.osgeo.org>
>>
>> In light of our recent hardware woes, the ending of osgeo1, and the age
>> of current machines (3-4yrs) I think it's time to start planning what to
>> do next.
>>
>> We do have budget, and the board is interested in ideas and additional
>> funding is not out of the question.
>>
>> >From my perspective, I think we need:
>> 1. To survey PSC of all projects to assess what services we should
>> offer. Do we need buildbots, sphinx builds, mail service, issue
>> tracking, various CMS/wiki, mirrors, bandwidth for downloads? Now that
>> everyone is love with Github (any word on what the next hot host will
>> be), are there things we should retire?
>>
>> 2. Look at other hosting options besides physical machines in one place.
>> Renting space like QGIS or OSM, racking machines elsewhere, getting
>> OSGeo-ICA labs to mirror. If we do mirror look at GeoCDN and MirrorBrain
>> for geo-ip redirection balancing.
>>
>> 3. Look at new hardware that better meets the needs. RAID is nice but
>> not always the right answer to needs as we discovered recently. We also
>> didn't buy specific to Ganeti/Cloud style setups where hotcopy failover
>> works best with multiple identical machines, and lots of smaller disks
>> with single disks per VM keeps i/o from competing (RAID is handled in
>> mirror mode via DRBD over the network between nodes).
>>
>> Anyone want to tackle making a short survey for Projects to describe
>> their needs and wishes?
>>
>>
>> All ideas welcome, we'll pool it all into proposal and a wiki page
>> before deciding on anything.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Alex
>