[theforum] Again

[Jeremy Ashcraft]

full steam ahead.  glad someone's still looking after things

On Sun, Sep 11, 2016 at 5:08 PM, William Anderson <neuro at well.com> wrote:

> 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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>
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>