You may notice squeak.org a bit sluggish over the next few hours.

In the past board meeting, we all echoed and reechoed our concern that
squeak.org wasn't being backed up anywhere off box.  At all. For a very
long time.  Yes, isn't that crazy?  All of squeak.org on a single
spindle.

Finally, after much coaxing and promising of purchases of
fine single-malt scotch (just kidding about that last part, but I
wouldn't refuse it if offered), I volunteered some spare disk space and
bandwidth on the company server (red.stonehenge.com) to begin a series
of steps to modernize our platform.

Step 1 is happening now.  I'm cloning the image and changes and
datafiles that drive squeak.org.  I'll then set up a cron job to make
sure that is refreshed daily, perhaps even hourly.

Step 2 will happen WITH THE HELP OF SOMEONE FROM THE VM TEAM (nudge
nudge).  I need to build a VM that runs on FreeBSD.  If I can do that, I
can fire up a "hot spare" site that works like squeak.org although
you'll have to get to it with a weird URL.  My last attempt to do that
failed, and I'm not sure why, except I blamed it on a linux-ism.  So if
someone FROM THE VM TEAM will please give me precise build instructions
for FreeBSD, I'll be happy to give it a try again.

Step 3 is very likely (but still in the proposal phase) that the Board
will approve me to rent a new VPS (very likely at arpnetworks.com/vps)
to build a new home for squeak.org that is on RAID disk and redundant
power supply and IPV6 ready and running ZFS for point-in-time snapshots
(needed with Squeak for backups).  At that point, we'll decommission the
old squeak.org, and I'll be the defacto head of the Box Team, if not its
only member (since Ken wants to move on, and I don't blame him).

So, if squeak.org is a big sluggish while I grab the first 11.2GB
snapshot, please be patient.

-- 
Randal L. Schwartz - Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc. - +1 503 777 0095
<merlyn at stonehenge.com> <URL:http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/>
Smalltalk/Perl/Unix consulting, Technical writing, Comedy, etc. etc.
See http://methodsandmessages.posterous.com/ for Smalltalk discussion