[Box-Admins] Achieving redundancy of the website

[Janko Mivšek]

Hi box team,

I subscribed to your mailing list to coordinate common goals and 
problems more easily. I'm sure that way we'll be able to make a whole 
Squeak infrastructure better and better.

What we need to do first in my opinion is to enhance the availability of 
the services, for me as from webteam the website is of primary 
importance. During the recent few days downtime I was thinking a lot 
about that and decided to propose you a solution, which will reduce such 
a downtime to few hours most.

Solution is a classical one: increase redundancy by making a mirror 
website, which is in hot backup mode, that is, it can be put online 
immediately, just by changing the DNS pointer. I'm actually having such 
backup in place for my servers and it works perfect. It is also not hard 
to configure, you put a rsync script in place to mirror the changes of 
website from time to time, say every day or even every hour.

We need an additional server for that of course, well, for a while I can 
offer my one (pingo.eranova.si).

Later we can mirror other services too, ok, mailing list could be harder 
to mirror I suppose. But at least we put instructions what to do on the 
our website first page in case of such a long downtime.

Best regards
Janko