[OSGeo-Discuss] Fwd: [SAC] Upgrade Planning 2014 - Project Feedback

[Daniel Morissette]

Hardware is important, but let's not forget that system administrator 
time is at least as important to keep an infrastructure running smoothly.

Can we find ways to avoid relying solely on volunteer time to support 
the infrastructure? What about including funded sysadmin time in our new 
plan?

Not that the SAC (System Administration Committee) team is not doing a 
good job (quite the contrary, kudos to you all), but I think that 
relying solely on volunteer time for some things is not fair to the SAC 
team and is a high risk for OSGeo (risk of exhausting the volunteers). 
Contributors to open source projects can in general find clients to fund 
their time, but contributions to SAC are not something that anyone's 
client are going to pay for, so I think it something that OSGeo should 
help support directly.

That being said, I'll be first to admit that mixing money and people in 
a non-profit organization is always complicated. So, short of 
outsourcing everything, how can we handle funded sysadmin time in a fair 
way vs volunteer contributions? Are there good examples to follow in 
other non-profit orgs? (These are open questions to everyone, I don't 
have the answers)

Daniel


On 14-04-18 7:50 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
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>
>
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-- 
Daniel Morissette
T: +1 418-696-5056 #201
http://www.mapgears.com/
Provider of Professional MapServer Support since 2000