[Imc-uk-network] VERY IMPORTANT: server happenings

[yossarian]

Hi,

There are a number of outcomes from this past weekend that everyone
should be aware of.

First the good news: we agreed to buy a server, and to put it into
operation sometime after December 17th 2006.

Now the (extremely) bad news: Jebba, a server tech who has kindly
provided servers and bandwidth to the Indymedia network for many years,
decided just before the weekend to stop hosting Indymedia content. This
is the single biggest technical disaster that the global Indymedia
network has ever had, much worse than the earlier London server seizure
(of Jebba's server).

>From what we can tell, basically he has just gotten sick of Indymedia
process and how long things take to happen. Keep in mind that we in
IMC-UK have had enough money to buy two servers for about the last two
years, and that we have been unable to do so because our decision-making
processes are so poor. As a result of this situation, anytime somebody
from an IMC needs hosting, they go to Jebba, because he's a great guy,
he has the capacity, and it avoids process discussion because he simply
goes ahead and gets things done. When he complained about the
bureaucracy overheads recently, someone sent him an email pointing out
the existence of an imc-resolve email list for conflict resolution.

To put the situation in perspective, the new server that we have decided
to buy will serve about 1 Mb/second of data at a sustained rate. The
servers that Jebba is withdrawing from Indy service have been serving
roughly 70Mb/second sustained over the last week (this is currently very
high due to the volume of traffic from the Brad Will radio streams, but
it gives an idea of the data transfer capacity we are losing).

For the UK, the important thing to note is that we are losing 2 out of 6
high-capacity UK mirrors. We have not been working on getting more
mirrors very effectively recently.

The global network will be losing hosting or mirrors for the following
sites:

  *  Mir-based
          o Ambazonia
          o Armenia
          o Beirut
          o Bolivia
          o Brasil
          o CH
          o Ecuador
          o Euskal Herria
          o Galiza
          o Germany
          o Milwaukee
          o New York
          o Ottawa
          o Poland
          o Romania
          o San Diego
          o UK
          o US
          o WWW
    * SF-active based
          o andorra
          o antwerpen
          o bolivia-devel
          o italy
          o kenya
          o marseille
          o ovl
          o uruguay
          o wvl
    * Dada based
          o dada
          o prague
          o wmass
          o wmass-devel
    * Spip based
          o nantes
          o nice
    * Others
          o nimiq
          o portugal

If anyone gets an urge to send an angry email along the lines of "how
did so much power get into the hands of one tech", I would suggest that
they go stare into a mirror for a while. We are now going to be forced
to take responsibility for ourselves to a much greater degree, and
because of our collective failure to make decisions we're all
responsible for this turn of events.

In the next few days, there will probably be a proposal to buy another
server, call-outs to get more server space donated to us, and probably
some kind of proposed speed-up of the new UK server timescales.

I'd like to take a moment to thank Jebba for the years of technical help
and I hope that he continues to do stuff with the network if he can see
an improvement in process as we move forwards.

Yossarian