[CIMC-working] [Fwd: Re: Hosting Chicago IMC]

[Ian Bicking]

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-- 
Ian Bicking <ianb@colorstudy.com>

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Subject: Re: Hosting Chicago IMC
From: Scott Lewis <scott@bandwidthcoop.org>
To: Ian Bicking <ianb@colorstudy.com>
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Date: 15 Jan 2003 10:34:58 -0700

hi ian,

i'll give you brief answers to your questions. if you're still
interested, then i'll be happy to follow up with more info.

the bandwidth coop is currently something of a misnomer. currently it
has little organized structure. it consists of mostly me, with sporadic
help from a few other people. my goal is continue the organizational
work, bringing it to a true cooop or collective.

however, that work will probably have to be kick started by me, at least
initially. this last year has been a challenge. i've been raising my 1
year old son and dealing with some difficult family health problems. so
a lot of my work went into crisis mode, with little time for proactive
work.

> I noticed you just had a hardware failure -- is everything going alright
> with the system?  Do you feel you're in a stable situation to host more
> IMCs?

yes and no. after the HW failure we quickly brought up a new server.
however, we had no global backups, but a few of the sites had their own.
bringing up each site without backups is taking a lot of time, but we
are getting there.

i certainly knew we needed backups, but setting it up well takes time,
which i didn't have. so the crash highlighted a big problem that i was
already aware of, but didn't have time to correct: i was and still am a
single point of failure for the system.

my goal is to remove myself from that position. i envision the coop as
being a group that has a broader focus than IMC and deals a lot with
local issues (to new mexico). hosting other IMCs is a project that is
needed and has been largely successful. the coop donated the original
server for hosting IMCs and will probably donate a replacement.

i'd like to see a collective develop to own and manage that server. that
collective would be composed of the IMCs hosted on the server. the
organization, financing, etc of the group would be determined by the
members. i have some ideas, but i'm open to almost anything. there is
interest there, but i just haven't quite gotten time to kick start the
discussion.

with the exception of the lack of backups, the technical record of our
hosting has been good. the server is colocated at a facility with good,
stable bandwidth.

what software are you guys using? standard active? sfactive? currently
all of our sites use either dadaimc or freeform. i'm open to hosting
sites using other software, but can't promise any help installing or
maintaining that software, other than standard stuff like dns, apache
config, etc. 

my only hesistation to other software would be concerns about security
and resource usage. i have reservations about standard active in both
areas.

let me know how you feel about these issues.

take care,

-scott


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