[theforum] Again

William Anderson neuro at well.com
Sun Sep 11 19:08:24 CDT 2016


Good evening, gentle evolters.

In the spirit of transparency, and knowing that everyone doesn't look
at the archives for the sysadmin list every day, here is some
information.

Mail to @evolt.org was knocked out for a while due to a DNS snafu.
Mail to the lists (such as it is these days) wasn't affected.  This is
why there was a wee flurry of mails earlier in the week between Dean,
Dave, John and myself.

We've corrected the fault, and it's brought back to the fore that
we're still running on antiquated hardware on a dedicated server in
Texas.

We're formulating a plan where we finally move away from this server
to some cloud instances, which are cheaper to run, and have more CPU
power available to them.

The current plan (and status) is as follows:

* Set up alternate server(s) to begin migration (done: a Digital Ocean
virtual machine has been set up in their New York region to handle
list mail, list archives and secondary DNS, another is in their
Singapore region to handle primary DNS; the geographic location is for
the sake of redundancy).
* Move the lists themselves and the archive/signup web parts to the
NYC server (being planned)
* Move the browser archive to another server (TBD: may end up moving
to another instance donated by myself to keep evolt's monthly costs
down)
* ... um, that's it.

At that point, we'll be able to decommission the old dedicated server.

The main website with the article archive will remain at GitHub, as it
costs us nothing to host it there.  I'm thinking at some point we need
a content refresh for the main page to draw focus back on the lists
rather than the fact that evolt turned 15 three years ago (has it been
that long? evolt will be 20 in 27 months?!?), but that's a low
priority action.

Everything else that's legacy will remain in mothballs (i.e.
dir.evolt.org, etc).  I'm thinking evolters.org really has had it's
chance, and we should let the domain expire when it's due next June.

The outcome of this will mean the lists stay running, evolt cuts its
costs by over half (including the annual domain renewal), Dean gets a
nicer, more modern environment to manage the lists in, and stuff keeps
working.  Oh, and the new servers have sweet names (cerf, after Vint
Cerf, and postel, after Jon Postel, both Internet pioneers ... just
like evolt, but admittedly more cool).

Unless anyone has any particularly strong feelings about the above,
this is ze plan.  And on that note, I'm off to bed :)

-n


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