[squeak-dev] Re: Build.squeak.org and squeaksource.com in danger (was Re: [Box-Admins] Disk space usage on box3)

Ken Causey ken at kencausey.com
Mon Dec 9 20:02:31 UTC 2013


I want to respond to some comments made in this thread.

First I want to admit that my posting on Friday was a bit shrill.  I was 
getting frustrated that this was my third or fourth post on this 
increasingly problematic issue and little if any action had been taken. 
  Further there seemed a real possibility that over the next few days, 
possibly over the weekend when I had little time to provide assistance, 
that the file system for the server which hosts both build.squeak.org 
and squeaksource.com would fill up.  I have seen greater than 1% per 24 
hour increases on that server in the past.

Thanks to Frank the immediate issue has been addressed and hopefully we 
have a couple of weeks of breathing time now to consider how best to 
avoid the issue in the future.

There has been some discussion regarding my admittedly somewhat extreme 
comments regarding squeaksource.com.  One thing that has been mentioned 
is the idea that 'disk space is cheap'.  I think that is easy to say and 
true in general, but I'm not sure it is true in this specific case.  I 
will admit to possibly over-estimating the 'cost' but...  Keep in mind 
that we have no direct control over the configuration of either 
box3.squeak.org and box4.squeak.org.  These were contributed to us by 
Gandi.net at the request of the Software Freedom Conservancy.  Neither I 
nor anyone else in our community has any access to modify the server 
configuration and do things like add disk space.  At best we have to go 
through Software Freedom Conservancy for this.  They don't have a lot of 
time to spare to such issues themselves, further I don't think we should 
make assumptions that Gandi.net is going to be willing to donate more 
resources.  I'm not sure it is even easy to throw money at the issue 
given the fact that we are using donated resources.  But then, I may 
just be unreasonably pessimistic about this.

Someone kindly thanked me and gave the impression that I was the only 
one that 'cared' enough to monitor the servers for such issues.  Thanks 
but don't assign me too much altruism or think that I'm so interested. 
The minor amount of daily server checking I do is largely habit for me 
and is an easy way for me to trigger a few endorphins and feel like I 
have in some way contributed for the day.

To be honest my interest in Squeak and the community has been waning for 
some time and is quite low at this point.  Don't assume I'm going to 
continue to do what little I do indefinitely.  Someone else must step up 
to take responsibility for the Squeak servers.

Ken


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