Since we have some prospective new team members and leaders it's probably a good time to talk about community server issues that affect the website team. None of this will be news to existing team members but perhaps having it all together here may be of some use even to them.
Backups
Currently the entire system is backed up both locally and remotely via rsnapshot. The local backup is daily and we store 7 of these (1 week's worth). The remote backup is 4 weekly and 12 monthly backups. Rsnapshot uses rsync to transfer files.
One aspect of this is that the granularity of the backup is on the level of a file. So in the local backup for example if there is a file on the system that changes at least once daily then each backup will contain a full copy of that file. This results in 8 copies of the file, this is minor for small files of course but can become an issue with multi-megabyte files, for example image and changes files. Bacause of this it would be really helpful if the website were to use some other storage mechanism than image snapshots.
FTP site
In addition to www.squeak.org the webteam is also responsible for the Squeak FTP site at ftp.squeak.org. The webteam's responsibility is sort of as a backup for those parts of the ftp site that are not managed by someone else. For example each release team is responsible for their section of the FTP site. The ftp content can be accessed through a symbolic link in the webteam's account directory named 'ftpsite'.
Server Access
Primarily server access is via ssh and related tools such as scp. The website team shares a single account and everyone who needs access to it must provide a public ssh key which is added to the authorization list for the account. Additionally there is support for running application under a tightvnc server.
At the moment I can't think of any other information to impart. If anyone thinks of something or has any questions let me know.
Ken
webteam@lists.squeakfoundation.org