[Deganawida-sysadmin] Re: [zero] Re: IMC Cyprus hosting / Zero server changes

[Brian Keith Szymanski]

Petros:
> Hello Brian,
>
> Thanks for the offer!

You're quite welcome.

> Can you give us an idea of what it would involve to move to
> deganawida.indymedia.org ?

Basically we're talking about an hour or two of downtime (people will be
able to see the frontpage, but all publishing functions shall be broken),
then up to 2 days of people having to click on a link to get to the new
site (this is unavoidable due to the way DNS works), and that's it. We can
arrange it so that the downtime starts when people in cyprus are asleep
:-)

> Things that would help us:
>
> Where is it?

Pittsburgh, PA, USA.

> Who manages it?

It is in the name of Quinten from Pittsburgh IMC, and there are 2 local
techs (Matt and Quinten) who have access to the server and can help us
out. In an emergency (e.g. if we need a reboot) we can also call the
person who works on site.

> Who will have access to it?

At present, myself, Christopher (same Christopher from zero), Matt Toups
(pittsburgh IMC, global tech), Quinten (pittsburgh IMC, tech), and Spud
(the author of dadaIMC). Also, Aaron from Arkansas IMC, Jonhattan from
Canarias IMC, and Elaine from Santacruz IMC have accounts on the machine.
I suspect we will be adding a few more accounts as other IMCs trickle in.
Arc from IMC-Ithaca will not have any access to the machine.

> Who would be a "tech- ally" for us, someone to ask for help who will be
> available?

All of us ;-) I guess I'm "bottom-lining" the project, but the first line
of support should be the list we have setup at
deganawida-sysadmin at lists.indymedia.org. That way, whomever is around can
hopefully take a look at any problem and fix it, instead of having to wait
for me to be around (which was the problem on zero, except with scott
instead of me ;-)

> What kind of financial arrangement, or other mutual- aid kind of exchange
> would we be considering?

No financial arrangement, really. So far we are self-sustaining and
getting hosting for free. It would be nice if people would contribute tech
parts if we need them, but I think we're set for the immediate future - I
have access to a large stockpile of spare parts which can be brought to
Pittsburgh in an emergency, and there is another similar, but smaller,
stockpile there.

> Which other imc groups are hosted on deganawida.indymedia.org ?

Sonora, Santacruz, and Arkansas have already gone live on dega. Tennessee
will be migrating soon. I am also trying to contact imc-japan and
imc-mumbai (the two remaining live imc's on zero). Fuurthermore, we have
sites set up for canarias (a potential new imc), cleveland (which is
considering dada migration), and twincities (which is considering dada
migration). I think I got all of 'em... :-) Oh, and Richmond IMC, which is
being migrated from Stallman.

> Does anyone involved with deganawida.indymedia.org know any of us from
> the Cyprus IndyMedia collective?

Unless you have met any of the people I listed above, probably not - at
least not in the real world

> Is it compatible with dadaimc?

Yes, it is almost the exact same setup as zero.indymedia.org - same
operating system (FreeBSD, although a newer version), same software, etc.
This was done in part to make migrations from zero even easier.

> (Arc seems to have some technical concerns about that regarding the Zero
> server)

Zero might not be around for much longer, at least not for free. We
believe that dega will be. It is hosted at an educational institution, and
as long as Pittsburgh IMC (which started off as college kids) keeps
college students involved, we should be ok.

> Other things we should know or think about?

As we move your site to dega, we also will be upgrading it to the latest
version, 0.97 (if applicable). This is positive because it means you get
new features and more stable code, but it has the potential to break your
site design (not the functionality, just the colors, fonts, etc.). We can
work together on getting this working again, as I did with sonora. It took
me about an hour to get the style looking pretty much the way it used to.

Also, dega will be using paranode for multimedia content, which means
multimedia files will be hosted on a high-bandwidth server instead of a
regular www-server like dega or zero. This keeps load on dega low, and
should result in faster site browsing for your clients.

Dega has slightly less memory than zero (192M vs. 256M), and a slower cpu,
but cpu has not been a factor on zero (system load has averaged less than
0.1), so I doubt we will have a problem on dega. We will be upgrading the
system to a faster cpu and larger memory as soon as there is any need for
it - I have a 512M sdram memory module which I can contribute, besides
that we just need a case, motherboard, and cpu, which we could get for
about $100 these days and be in the amd athlon 1500+ - 2000+ range (which
would be at least twice as fast as zero). Dega has almost twice as much
disk space as zero, as well.

Also, there is a seperate database server called walesa which dega uses to
offload the io requirements to a seperate machine, which will give us more
disk space and faster access time.

Wow, that was a lot of boring technical detail ;-)

> Thank you very much for your kindness and your offer to help us out.
> It's true that since Scott and Christopher announced their difficulties
> with maintaining Zero, we've had a dilemma. There has not been any
> disucssion on the Zero email group about it. What are the other imc
> groups doing?

Most that have been contacted have decided to move to dega from zero. We
haven't been able to contact everyone yet, though.

Peace,
Brian