Alan manages our servers at Mapgears, including the Maptools.org server and services, so he is already quite familiar with Linux and the kind of environment/tools in which we operate. Frank offered to mentor him and get him up to speed with SAC's server environment. Aside from server admin work, he is also a MapServer committer and the current lead of the UbuntuGIS project.
I guess I should disclose the fact that I have opened a ticket a few days ago to request SVN, Trac and mailing lists for a new open source project that we are about to release (http://trac.osgeo.org/osgeo/ticket/490), and this ticket is blocked due to the lack of a volunteer to setup the services, so having Alan on board would obviously help move this forward, but I want to reassure everyone that there is a honest intention behind this motion to help share some of the load with the other primary admins in the long run (a few hours here and there and not full time of course).
Alan manages our servers at Mapgears, including the Maptools.org server and services, so he is already quite familiar with Linux and the kind of environment/tools in which we operate. Frank offered to mentor him and get him up to speed with SAC's server environment. Aside from server admin work, he is also a MapServer committer and the current lead of the UbuntuGIS project.
I guess I should disclose the fact that I have opened a ticket a few days ago to request SVN, Trac and mailing lists for a new open source project that we are about to release (http://trac.osgeo.org/osgeo/ticket/490), and this ticket is blocked due to the lack of a volunteer to setup the services, so having Alan on board would obviously help move this forward, but I want to reassure everyone that there is a honest intention behind this motion to help share some of the load with the other primary admins in the long run (a few hours here and there and not full time of course).
I would like to motion that we add Alan Boudreault as SAC member and Primary Administrator
+1 Frank
As mentioned, I'm happy to help Alan come up to speed on where OSGeo
stuff is.
Best regards,
--
---------------------------------------+--------------------------------------
I set the clouds in motion - turn up | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam@pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush | Geospatial Programmer for Rent
Um... only Frank and Arnulf voted, while their voice is important to me, I'm a bit uncomfortable with the silence of the rest of the committee. Should it be interpreted as "don't care", or "we don't need another primary admin but won't necessarily -1 it", or "it was a long weekend and the email got unnoticed"?
Or is the hesitation related to ticket #490 which I am also trying to push? If that's the case then please speak up... SAC has in the past accepted to host projects that are friendly to OSGeo as long as a primary admin was willing to support it... if we want this practice to change then let's state it openly, but not just ignore requests. (I am perfectly happy hosting and promoting our projects at Maptools.org, but feel that doing it at OSGeo is a win-win for the projects and for OSGeo itself... I'm not begging for anything, just trying to do what's best for OSGeo.)
I'll wait a few more hours before withdrawing my motion, just in case I had misinterpreted the lack of responses...
Alan manages our servers at Mapgears, including the Maptools.org server and services, so he is already quite familiar with Linux and the kind of environment/tools in which we operate. Frank offered to mentor him and get him up to speed with SAC's server environment. Aside from server admin work, he is also a MapServer committer and the current lead of the UbuntuGIS project.
I guess I should disclose the fact that I have opened a ticket a few days ago to request SVN, Trac and mailing lists for a new open source project that we are about to release (http://trac.osgeo.org/osgeo/ticket/490), and this ticket is blocked due to the lack of a volunteer to setup the services, so having Alan on board would obviously help move this forward, but I want to reassure everyone that there is a honest intention behind this motion to help share some of the load with the other primary admins in the long run (a few hours here and there and not full time of course).
+1 (Sorry Daniel, the original email was some how caught in my spam filter)
On 13-Oct-09, at 8:35 AM, Daniel Morissette wrote:
Um... only Frank and Arnulf voted, while their voice is important to me, I'm a bit uncomfortable with the silence of the rest of the committee. Should it be interpreted as "don't care", or "we don't need another primary admin but won't necessarily -1 it", or "it was a long weekend and the email got unnoticed"?
Or is the hesitation related to ticket #490 which I am also trying to push? If that's the case then please speak up... SAC has in the past accepted to host projects that are friendly to OSGeo as long as a primary admin was willing to support it... if we want this practice to change then let's state it openly, but not just ignore requests. (I am perfectly happy hosting and promoting our projects at Maptools.org, but feel that doing it at OSGeo is a win-win for the projects and for OSGeo itself... I'm not begging for anything, just trying to do what's best for OSGeo.)
I'll wait a few more hours before withdrawing my motion, just in case I had misinterpreted the lack of responses...
Daniel
Daniel Morissette wrote:
I would like to motion that we add Alan Boudreault as SAC member and Primary Administrator (http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/SAC:Primary_Administrators)
Alan manages our servers at Mapgears, including the Maptools.org server and services, so he is already quite familiar with Linux and the kind of environment/tools in which we operate. Frank offered to mentor him and get him up to speed with SAC's server environment. Aside from server admin work, he is also a MapServer committer and the current lead of the UbuntuGIS project.
I guess I should disclose the fact that I have opened a ticket a few days ago to request SVN, Trac and mailing lists for a new open source project that we are about to release (http://trac.osgeo.org/osgeo/ticket/490), and this ticket is blocked due to the lack of a volunteer to setup the services, so having Alan on board would obviously help move this forward, but I want to reassure everyone that there is a honest intention behind this motion to help share some of the load with the other primary admins in the long run (a few hours here and there and not full time of course).
Daniel
On Tue, Oct 13, 2009 at 08:35:09AM -0400, Daniel Morissette wrote:
Um... only Frank and Arnulf voted, while their voice is important to me,
I'm a bit uncomfortable with the silence of the rest of the committee.
Should it be interpreted as "don't care", or "we don't need another
primary admin but won't necessarily -1 it", or "it was a long weekend
and the email got unnoticed"?
To be honest, after being 'educated' that dissenting opinions are not
addressed with generous tolerance, I don't care any more,
Martin.
--
Unix _IS_ user friendly - it's just selective about who its friends are !
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
"it was a long weekend and the email got unnoticed"
+1 on both.
I would note that we have usually promoted existing SAC members to primary admin (which just means they have sudo on osgeo1) after they've demonstrated that 1) they're willing to work around and help document our mess, and 2) they look like they're going to stay around. Given your history with keeping MapTools alive, I don't see this as a problem.
Also, Alan's experience with Xen is going to come in handy for us pretty soon
On Tue, Oct 13, 2009 at 08:10:03AM -0500, Howard Butler wrote:
Also, Alan's experience with Xen is going to come in handy for us pretty
soon
That's interesting news. Are the Primary Servers going to get moved ?
Cheers,
Martin.
--
Unix _IS_ user friendly - it's just selective about who its friends are !
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
On Tue, Oct 13, 2009 at 08:10:03AM -0500, Howard Butler wrote:
Also, Alan's experience with Xen is going to come in handy for us pretty
soon
That's interesting news. Are the Primary Servers going to get moved ?
I think we've grown to the point that it would be desirable for us to start segregating things by "machine." I have been maneuvering to try and get the SAC at least two more servers with significant RAM that we can run Xen or something like it to start segregating our services and prepare for our move off of the very expensive Peer1 hosting. I'm also concerned that OSGeo's impending budgetary realities are going to mean SAC's going to have to run in low-power mode fairly soon too. Whether we host such machines at OSL or TeleScience makes little difference for me, but I think we need to have the following requirements met:
1) Remote power management so an admin can hard reboot the machine over the internet
2) Remote KVM would be nice
3) Enough RAM/cores to comfortably run four Xen instances on each box
Once we did that, I would like to see us do away with the primary admin concept and provide sudo shell to all of the Xen instances for every SAC member. I think the main reason the concept exists is because we're too scared to have people rooting around on osgeo1 (I'm scared myself, frankly). Informal service responsibility would also need to be formalized a bit more in this scenario, but I think it could "Critical" services that we have been running on the aging blades should be pulled onto the new instances, while leaving lower priority and/or high bandwidth ones like the buildbot or osgeo4w alone.
I was confident that I was going to get two servers that met my criteria donated to us, but it is looking more and more like that is going to fall through. My next hope is to either get an earmarked contribution or find some room in OSGeo's general budget to accomplish this.
Anyone else have any ideas for our future direction? I don't think we're so sustainable in our current situation, though we can continue to kick the can down the road for a little while longer...
On October 13, 2009 09:10:03 am Howard Butler wrote:
Also, Alan's experience with Xen is going to come in handy for us
pretty soon
My experience is with OpenVZ, not Xen unfortunately. We use OpenVZ on several
of our servers. I totally agree your idea to use virtual machines. Though I
don't know (yet) Xen, the concept is the same than OpenVZ and should not be so
"hard" to learn. Hovewer, I have to say that I'm getting used with OpenVZ and
really appreciated it. It's easy to create a vm, set the network, control
resources and even migrate a complete VM to another physical machine.
Obviously, further reading will have to be done to choice which virtualization
system to use.
On Oct 13, 2009, at 9:58 AM, Alan Boudreault wrote:
On October 13, 2009 09:10:03 am Howard Butler wrote:
Also, Alan's experience with Xen is going to come in handy for us
pretty soon
My experience is with OpenVZ, not Xen unfortunately. We use OpenVZ on several
of our servers. I totally agree your idea to use virtual machines. Though I
don't know (yet) Xen, the concept is the same than OpenVZ and should not be so
"hard" to learn. Hovewer, I have to say that I'm getting used with OpenVZ and
really appreciated it. It's easy to create a vm, set the network, control
resources and even migrate a complete VM to another physical machine.
Obviously, further reading will have to be done to choice which virtualization
system to use.
Ah, I thought it was Xen. Anyway, yes, we'll choose what we use based on our combined expertise and what people are comfortable with, not what the SAC chair says
On Tue, Oct 13, 2009 at 09:57:35AM -0500, Howard Butler wrote:
On Oct 13, 2009, at 9:58 AM, Alan Boudreault wrote:
Obviously, further reading will have to be done to choice which virtualization
system to use.
Ah, I thought it was Xen. Anyway, yes, we'll choose what we use based
on our combined expertise and what people are comfortable with, not what
the SAC chair says
I suspect, as with many 'religious' decisions in the IT domain, the
people influencing the final decision will be those who agree to carry
the burden of maintenance
Therefore it _might_ be best to let SAC chair collect 'packaged' offers
and decide upon what looks most reasonable to them ....
Best regards,
Martin.
--
Unix _IS_ user friendly - it's just selective about who its friends are !
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Anyone else have any ideas for our future direction? I don't think
we're so sustainable in our current situation, though we can continue
to kick the can down the road for a little while longer...
Just FYI - I have asked OSL to quote us on the cost of getting into a good
machine. Depending on cost, I expect that we could buy such a server, move
to OSL and actually save some money from our $1100 per month current
contract. The bonus is that OSL would be available to help admin our VM
instances - which means, in a way, we could have a bit more hands on support
than at present. Alternately, I've been told by a few people that there are
many cheaper hosting options out there these days but I'm not familiar with
them.
Alan manages our servers at Mapgears, including the Maptools.org server and services, so he is already quite familiar with Linux and the kind of environment/tools in which we operate. Frank offered to mentor him and get him up to speed with SAC's server environment. Aside from server admin work, he is also a MapServer committer and the current lead of the UbuntuGIS project.
I guess I should disclose the fact that I have opened a ticket a few days ago to request SVN, Trac and mailing lists for a new open source project that we are about to release (http://trac.osgeo.org/osgeo/ticket/490), and this ticket is blocked due to the lack of a volunteer to setup the services, so having Alan on board would obviously help move this forward, but I want to reassure everyone that there is a honest intention behind this motion to help share some of the load with the other primary admins in the long run (a few hours here and there and not full time of course).
