On Thu, Mar 17, 2011 at 05:52:46PM -0700, Randal L. Schwartz wrote:
> 
> 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.

Bravo! Thank you.

> 
> 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.

Well, I don't happen to have a FreeBSD box, and my time is going to
be really limited over the next week, but what the heck, how hard
can it possibly be? ;) So yes I will be *more* than happy to help
you with this. Can you give me a pointer to where you left off in
the previous attempt (I think I recall it being on one of the mailing
lists)?

Dave

> 
> 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.
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