State of the archive

[Stuart Anderson]

On Wed, 10 May 2006, Egbert Eich wrote:

> There was a cleanup process under way in the release directory on fd.o.
> With this pretty much completed we can start the mirroring process.

Maybe I missed something, but I haven't seen an email that states that it's
all complete to everyones satisfaction.

> This however is different from the 'who gets access to those machines?'
> question.
> The mirroring would remedy the problem of not having latest releases
> (especially security) available on the box - even without anyone needing
> to access the machines.

The security fixes were put in place at least a week ago.

> The access question touches on other issues:
> 1. The present situation of having a single admin for the machine was
>   requested by the admin. He'd be better qualified to comment on the
>   reasons than I am.

Predating this, is a request from some members of the board to provide a
machine that is 'private' to the board so that some documents and such
can be kept there. Expo.x.org is that machine. Enforcing this privacy policy
seemed easiest if there were not a lot of people (with possibly different
goals), trying to admin this one machine.

We have always believed that additional machines would be arriving within
a couple of weeks, so keeping expo private did not seem like a problem. These
other machine would be admined by the normal group of those that know how to
do such things.



Part of this thread which has not yet occured, is a desciption of how the
additional machines will be administered. I think that several people have
an idea of how they will be used, and feel that such usage should be obvious.
Unfortunately, becasue there are humans involved in this, I'm afraid that
there are just as mant different ideas as there are people with ideas. Thus
far, no one had enumarated how the machines should be used.

What OS should be run on each machine? What services should be run on which
machines? How will users have access to what parts of what machines? What
filesystems/archives will be copied from which machine to which machine. What
is the policy for add-on software? Build & install from source, or only use
packages that are available? Who is watching for security announcements for
the add-on packages that are being used?

Getting some of these things worked out before the other machines show up
would be a constructive use of time.


                                   Stuart

Stuart R. Anderson                               anderson at netsweng.com
Network & Software Engineering                   http://www.netsweng.com/
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