[axxs-sysadmin] proposal: hosting torun on axxs

[boud]

hi cam, all,

On Tue, 16 Jan 2007, Cameron Gregg wrote:

> boud wrote:
>> hi axxs-sysadmin,  (cc: imc-pl-torun)
>>
>> PROPOSAL: This is a proposal for the going-through-new-imc-process IMC Torun
>> to be hosted on one of the axxs community servers - initial hostname
>> would be  torun.axxs.org  pending completion of the new-imc process.
>>
>
>
> Sounds good to me.
>
> Not sure about postgres/ruby on the current box. You may have to install
> them. Will that affect performance? Have we got enough RAM? Or maybe
> wait a little longer for the new box?

i'm happy to install whatever's needed.
* i guess apache is already installed ;)
* postgres seems to be installed
* ruby seems to be installed as dave said.


i don't expect the whole setup would affect performance much - except
during early June 2007 when the G8 when people from Toruń (and maybe
other polish-speaking people) will probably be reporting back live. 
G8-2007: http://www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/agp/g82007/

But to make up a 100,000 crowd from Toruń would require 50% of the
whole population to go to Heiligendamm, and to be honest, i think the
activist community here is not *quite* that big. On the other hand, if
the German cops do something extreme like shoot dead an activist from 
Toruń, like the Italian cops did in Genoa, well, that might lead to 
pretty high activity on the site. i'd rather hope that doesn't happen,
of course. Better would be discussions about what the G8 is and why
it doesn't have much to do with anything resembling any reasonable notion
of democracy or citizen participation in decision-making.


RAM:
axxs at the moment (right now) seems to have about 211M RAM free

samizdat using apache/postgres/ruby on a live server with two different
websites is using:

- apache (apache2) 30Mb  - but i don't know how much of this is extra
                for samizdat, someone who understands apache better
                might know - my guess is very little extra is needed
 	       for an additional vhost.

- postgres 11Mb  - this is from two web sites each running actively
                  for about a year

- ruby 67Mb - this is mostly a cache - if this becomes a problem in
              competition with other processes, it should be easy to
              hack cache.rb - part of samizdat - until a systematic
              solution is found - the main two parameters are a timeout
              parameter - default 3600s = 1 hour, and a maximum number
              of "objects" max_size= 5000; we could set max_size = 2500
              so that we take up at most about 33Mb or so - assuming
              typical object (message) sizes similar to those on other
              samizdat sites.

So my guess is we should be able to limit RAM usage to 40-50Mb for two
samizdat sites (torun.axxs + samizdat.axxs).

Something important i forgot :( - being able to send and receive email
is strictly speaking optional for samizdat, but would be very useful,
especially for:
- users who forget their passwords (and had the sense to give an email on
             registering)
- mobile phone to samizdat gateway (the unofficial IMC Piter (St Petersburg)
             already does this - but not using samizdat)

- it looks like qmail is installed on axxs.


Captchas and anti-wiki/blog/link-spam filters are planned for 
samizdat-0.6.1 (present version is 0.6.0):
http://cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewcvs/samizdat/samizdat/TODO?rev=1.99

i think it's unlikely that this will be needed urgently, but i'm sure
it shouldn't be difficult to make a hack solution while waiting for a 
"clean" (meaning elegant, well-organised, efficient ruby style) solution.

horizontalidad
boud