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Tim Cronin wrote:
>
> how com the site isn't using lvs HA??? :^D
>
The LVS site until a year ago was hosted by a commercial
company who donated the box and internet access as thanks
for LVS which they were running at their site. Then one
day the machine crashed, and we never got any replies from
anyone at the hosting company.
Horms had been mirroring LVS on one of his vergenet.net
machines, and after a bit of fiddling, we got the DNS
changed over to Horms mirror. One of the problems
was that the e-mail addresses for all the domain name
contact people were all on a box that didn't exist anymore.
Some of the LVS pages were in people's home directories,
which the local httpd could see, but which rsync running
on the mirror machines, couldn't see. These pages were
reconstructed as we didn't have a backup anywhere of
the whole setup. (The hosting company said they were
doing the back, but maybe our contact person left the
company, we don't know what happened here). Looking
for backups, we found that many of the mirror
machines listed, weren't mirroring at all having copies
of the pages months or years old.
Clearly some things in this setup aren't the pinnacle of
good computing practice that we push in the mailing list.
It's times like this that I'm glad the mailing list machine
and the LVS website machine are separate machines. The
mailing list machine is one of Lars' private machines,
a co-lo site in Germany. Presumably Lars has physical
access to his machine. The LVS website machine is
in California, while Horms is in Japan.
The LVS website machine is one of Horms privately owned vergenet.net
nodes that are spread all over the world, as part of Horms
Supersparrow work. Horms relies on the good graces of friends
to help him fix nodes that are 1000's of miles from where he
is and for the co-lo. Horms also provides free access, disk space
and bandwidth for LVS (and possibly other projects) and to
people who he thinks should have it (including me).
Horms so far has declined offers of $/hardware to help with
vergenet.
LVS is a shoestring operation, run by a bunch of guys who rarely
if ever, meet each other. Ratz is the only one who has met
Julian. I've met Horms and Wensong once, but I do see Ratz at OLS
each year. Other than that everything happens by e-mail.
By fiat we've all taken responsibility for some part
of LVS, but it's not till a machine crashes that we find the
areas where no-one has taken charge. We don't have an
annual general meeting or a budget, we don't plan hardware
aquisitions for the year and we don't have a backup plan.
The only reason we have a website right now is that Horms had
the best backups of the LVS website when it went down a year
ago and was happy to let us use one of his vergenet machines
as a replacement. I expect Horms is backing up the LVS website.
I expect Lars is backing up the mail machine and that Hank Leninger
at "theaimsgroup" (who I've never met and have no idea how he
fits into LVS) is doing another archive of the searchable mailing
list.
So we don't have Linux-HA because no-one has stepped forward to do it.
Joe
--
Joseph Mack PhD, Senior Systems Engineer, SAIC contractor
to the National Environmental Supercomputer Center,
ph# 919-541-0007, RTP, NC, USA. mailto:mack.joseph@xxxxxxx
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