[Imc-summaries] IMC Tech Summary - July 25th 2001

[evan@protest.net]

Summary:
        Genoa Issues: Squid & Round Robin
        Monitoring Daemons
        Ruckus Update / Plea
        Tech Wish List
        New people in imc-tech
        Webby Award Nonsense
        Images.indymedia.org
        irc server and backup irc2
        Persistent Connections


Genoa Issues: Squid & Round Robin
        Durring the Genoa protests we saw the biggest spike in traffic
        in indymedia history. To handle that first we setup squid
        to http_acell traffic from apache like we did for A20.
        We were still having the traffic overwelm stallman and cause
        the dreaded death by postgres. So we setup squid on several
        other servers and pointed it a the stallman squid and setup
        round robin dns to load ballence between them. This mostly
        worked. We had update problems and some squid errors which
        plagued us. Also we had problems with some servers
        going off line and still being in the round robin.
        We do not know how much traffic we got, it will take some
        effort to figure that out. I think we were getting between
        50 and 100 hits (not pages) a second. Stallman peaked
        at over 500K a second transfer, not counting the up
        to 5 mirrors. As of 2 am PST July 25th I've turned the
        round robin off, and we are back to just stallman with
        squid running.

Monitoring Daemaons
        Kendall and Andy discuss various ways to monitor servers
        daemons and keep them happy. Interesting and importiant
        stuff
	http://lists.indymedia.org/mailman/public/imc-tech/2001-July/004713.html


Ruckus Update / Plea
        Ok, if we're going to do the indymedia portion of the
        ruckus camp we need to be working on it! For workshops
        to be presented at the ruckus camp they need to have
        been done at least once, perferably several times.

        Ruckus wants help working on the following tracks:
        emedia           for independent media topics
        eorganizing      for electronic organizing topics
        esecurity        for secure collaboration topics
        ecomm            for tactical communication topics
        etopics          for "policy and topics" topics
        egeek            for "geek-to-geek" topics

        Contact Sheri@indymedia.org to get involved and
        help out! Please we need people to step up on this!


Tech Wish List
        Sheri also has asked if we could come up with a tech wish list
        for people who've offered to donate equiptment or money.


New people in imc-tech
        We've had a number of new people asking to get involved,
        we need to reply to their emails! I tried to write up
        a very quick little, how to get involved with imc-tech.
        Andy is working on revising my email into a more extensive
        how to get involved email/doc.
	http://lists.indymedia.org/mailman/public/imc-tech/2001-July/004721.html


Webby Award Nonsense
        Indymedia and protest.net were both beat out by the oh so
        activisty site, volunteer match, then i stole the news
        award yelling "fuck the corporate media!" Sorry about the
        reposts to this and other lists which got a little out of
        control.
	http://lists.indymedia.org/mailman/public/imc-tech/2001-July/004629.html


Images.indymedia.org
        Akb reminds us to move images over to the loudeye
        based images.indymedia.org server and not server images
        off of stallman and other indyservers
	http://lists.indymedia.org/mailman/public/imc-tech/2001-July/004689.html


irc server and backup irc2
        We have irc2.indymedia.org setup as a secondary irc server
        it's linked with the main indy irc server, so you get the same
        conversations. Durring the Genoa actions we nearly 200
        people on the irc servers. If you can't get to irc.indy
        try irc2.indymedia.org, it's hosted on the phillyimc.org server.


Persistent Connections
        More discussion about how to elimate persistant connections.
        Please don't use them in your code, also try and get
        all the database stuff in to the main db class and not
        scattered around! I'm guilty of this too... It's bad news
        and makes our servers choak.


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