telascience backup plan - was Re: [SAC] xblade 14 down

Markus Neteler neteler at osgeo.org
Wed Aug 5 07:17:03 EDT 2009


On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 4:43 PM, Frank Warmerdam<warmerdam at pobox.com> wrote:
> Folks,
>
> xblade14 which hosts quite a bit of stuff (buildbot.osgeo.org, www.gdal.org,
> mapserver.org, remotesensing.org, grass.osgeo.org, qgis.osgeo.org,
> www.geotools.org, upload.osgeo.org) is down and unreachable.

also
http://gallery.osgeo.org/

> John has been emailed but is travelling and it is unclear how soon he can
> arrange someone to reboot the system.  Norman may be able to
> contact someone directly if John is unavailable.
>
> In the meantime it is unclear how long the blade will remain down.

I would like to bring up the backup situation of our "services"
hosted at Telascience. We all appreciate very much the ease
of access there and the tremendous bandwidth they offer.

The problem

I learned (again) that no systematic backups were done for
xblade14. "Every project has to self-organize this" I was told
in IRC yesterday. While we, the GRASS project, have done our
homework others may not have done so:

For example, the "OSGeo Gallery" is not a group. We should not
lose important showcasing of "OSGeo in the wild" just because
we are unable to perform a rsync call to another machine. Disk
space is cheap today, I could have done the gallery backup
easily if I had *known* that there is no backup done so far.
Remember that the community has contributed the examples,
it will be hard to ask them to repeat everything.

A Proposal

I suggest that we immediately start to better coordinate
backups of OSGeo web sites hosted at Telascience.
Just having a simple clone of the disk could save many
hours of reconstructing all the stuff. Note, done with
a one-liner cronjob of rsync.
I know that Wikis, Drupals and so forth cannot be restored
like this but the majority of the (hopefully not lost) stuff
are plain files.

According to http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/SAC:Backups
the download.osgeo.org site is rsync'ed to osgeo2,
if that's not possible for xblade1x, I am sure that we
can find someone who offers this. As failover we
really need it. Additionally, the projects should take
care of course.

At least some more coordination is needed IMHO.
I'd suggest to nominate a contact person for each
project hosted at Telascience.

Best,
Markus


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