[theforum] [Sysadmin] evolt dns: bad mx

David Kaufman david at gigawatt.com
Mon Sep 5 23:17:42 CDT 2016


Hi all,

On Thu, Sep 1, 2016 at 3:53 PM, Dean Mah <dean.mah at gmail.com> wrote:
> (I'm copying this to theforum. The future of evolt.org, in theory, is
> something for the community to decide.)
>
>
> On Thu, Sep 1, 2016 at 12:46 PM, William Anderson <neuro at well.com> wrote:
>
>> On Thu, Sep 1, 2016 at 6:56 PM, Dean Mah <dean.mah at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > What are you asking? Nobody can be arsed about what? I've been supporting
>> > the running of css-d since it migrated. I clear the mailman queues. I was
>> > going to do a Mailman upgrade but our python version is old so I need to
>> > upgrade that as well.
>>
>> I meant us generally, not you; I know you do a lot when shit breaks.
>>
>> > The reason that it should be shuttered is because the relevance of
>> evolt.org
>> > is passed. No one uses it anymore. I see my monthly donation going into a
>> > black hole.
>>
>> Has it passed?  Just because the list has gone quiet doesn't mean it's
>> irrelevant.

I don't think evolt's relevance has passed.  According to Adsense, leo
and beo (thelist archives and browser archives) got about 198,000 page
views last month! (August 2016)

Oddly most of the traffic is on the mailing list archives, but most of
the adsense earnings are from the browser archive.  Probably because
Adsense doesn't pay by impressions, but by clicks, and anyone who
google sends to the browser archive is actively looking for software
and maybe they find ads that are relevant to their search...


> I think that the lists have gone quiet for quite a long time now. Even css-d
> doesn't get nearly the same amount of traffic that it used to.
>
>
>> In fact, when the css-d list broke down recently, Eric was looking for
>> > other hosting options. Maybe we just get him to follow through with that
>> > and completely close it instead of migrating anything.
>>
>> If evolt the community can't/won't support a migration, I'll pay for it
>> myself.
>>
>
> I don't think that's an issue. I think we can support a migration. The real
> issue is below:
>
>> I've lit up two instances on Digital Ocean.  One is for mail and DNS
>> (it's in New York), one is for DNS only (it's in Singapore).  They
>> won't cost more than $10/mo in total, $15-25 if we decide we need more
>> RAM for the mail one.

I'm all for moving to a cheap virtual hosting provider.  I'd prefer
AWS just because I don't have any experience with Digital Ocean - we
use Rackspace and Amazon EC2 at the day job...

Both AWS and Rackspace offer free (or quite nearly free) DNS service
for virtual machines on their platform.  And CloudFlare offers very
reliable free DNS to anyone (along with DDOS protection web
application firewalls!).  Why run a second instance just for DNS?


> We're paying too much for what we need or are using at the moment. We have
> limited ability to keep the server up to date. The last OS upgrade was quite
> a while ago and felt painful.
>
> I think we can run more lean and efficient, either by the suggestion
> above or finding a dedicated listserv host whose job it is to keep
> the mail server up to date, deal with the spam, the inadvertent DDOS'ing,
> the sender verification, etc.

I agree.  I'm sure we can get the hosting costs down from the $45 /
month we're paying now to < $5 / month with an Amazon reserved
instance.

Actually though, I hear Google Compute Engine has recently become the
least expensive general purpose virtual server you can buy.  Would be
happy to give that option a try, too! (just looking for an excuse to,
actually :-))

>> We can then think about migrating mailman.  I'm unconvinced evolt (in
>> list form) needs to die at this point.
>>
>> -n

Me neither!

> I think that DNS was John's domain, so to speak. However, his email
> address was bouncing last time I sent anything to him.

I can make any changes we need to the DNS running on tron now,
including migrating it to the next virtual host provider, cloudflare
or whatever we need.  And I can remove the two ZENSOFT.NET
nameservers from the whois record (if necessary, and if John is not
responsive -- those are his, right?)

FYI: We are also still earning about $100 a year from the Adsense ads
on BEO and LEO so, that would cover the cost of virtual hosting I
think, so the handful of us still making monthly donations could
probably stop.

Let's do it.

Thanks!

-dave


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