From: Darcy Buskermolen <darcy@wavefire.com>
Organization: Wavefire Technologies Corp
To: gforge-admins@pgfoundry.org
Subject: Re: [Gforge-admins] PgFoundry Move
Date: Mon, 16 Jan 2006 13:51:48 -0800
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Cc: "Joshua D. Drake" <jd@commandprompt.com>,
 pgsql-www@postgresql.org
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On Monday 16 January 2006 10:26, Joshua D. Drake wrote:
> Hello,
>
> In the essence of being efficient I would like to suggest that we move
> Pgfoundry. I know we have been trying to "migrate" for what seems like
> forever but maybe it is time we just up and move the whole site :).
>
> I would like to again offer Command Prompt's services in hosting
> pgFoundry.
>
> Some key benefits to moving the system to CMD:
>
> 1. You can call us
> 2. You can call us at 3:00 am
> 3. We have service level monitoring
> 4. We have a lot of bandwidth
> 5. All our stuff is on natural gas conditioned power generators
>
> We have proven to be very stable with the Buildfarm and with the archives.
> With the only recent problem with either not being at the hands of CMD,
> (gentle poke at Andrew).
>
> The longest outage we have had in the last 24 months is four hours for a
> single
> machine that we had to recover from backup.
>
> The longest outage we have had that was global in the last 24 months
> (that wasn't
> scheduled) was 90 minutes when we lost a nic in one of our firewalls.
>
> We did recently have a scheduled outage of 4.5 hours but that was from
> midnight
> to 4:30 while we upgraded some power facilities.
>
> The only change that we would require would be to move the system to Linux.
> This should be a very minor change in general and will probably require
> very if any work on the Gforge end.
>
> Thoughts, Flames, better suggestions?


I'll weigh in on this because like Marc I'm a FreeBSD guy.  From my 
understanding  the FreeBSD requirement is there to allow for ubiquitist role 
sharing.  ie it's just a mater of moving (rsyncing) the VM from one box to 
another and away we go.  FreeBSD happens to be handy for this currently 
because that is what the rest of the pg cluster boxen run.  Beyond that I can 
not see a technical reason that requires FreeBSD.  

My concerns with a plan like this are:
A) I do not know linux as well as FreeBSD.
B) Can infrastructure be provided to allow for timely disaster recovery in the 
event of JD's hosting falling off the face of the earth, (much the same way 
the pg servers in panama fell off a while ago).
C) How do we settle on the distro/version of the month, this fundamental issue 
within Linux has always left me with a bad taste in my mouth. (this is a 
personal item and has nothing to say for the quality of FreeBSD or 
Linux/distro).
D) How does doing something like this affect -core in general (I'm not part of 
core so i have no idea) 


Other than those I'll take the standard Canadian fence sitting stance....


>
> Sincerely,
>
> Joshua D. Drake

-- 
Darcy Buskermolen
Wavefire Technologies Corp.

http://www.wavefire.com
ph: 250.717.0200
fx: 250.763.1759