Hi Paul and others,
On Mon, May 07, 2012 at 12:53:15AM +0400, Paul Fertser wrote:
> For the community to be able to deduce a way to manage this situation
> i would like to ask everybody involved to clarify these questions:
>
> 1. Who owns the servers and who pays which bills? How to get a proxy
> or transfer the responsibility for the openmoko.org domain and
> infrastructure to other person in case the original owner becomes
> unavailable? Whom can you propose to take this role?
The servers are rented from Hetzner in Germany, the bills are paid by
Sean Moss-Pultz / Openmoko Inc.
> 2. Who actually has admin credentials, is supposed to care about
> things like server outages, and what is the suggested procedure to
> contact that person?
roh, gismo and myself (at least) have root on all the boxes.
There is no prescribed contact procedure, and there is nobody who is
even officially supposed to maintain the machines and/or the software
and configurations on them.
roh and gismo used to be doing paid syssadmin work for Openmoko Inc.,
until the company pulled out of mobile phones. After that, roh and
gismo have still been able to continuing to donate some of their spare
time to it, but with a lot of other involvements, the amount of time
available for that is probably just the bare minimum to keep things
alive, and not any major migrations.
As it is a considerably complex setup involving about a dozen of virtual
machines on outdated Linux distributions (without security updates),
maintenance probably is a nightmare.
As it seems, while all of us still feel extremely sympathetic about
Openmoko, none of the poeple with admin privileges are still actively
invovled with the Openmoko community.
If I wasn't involved in a gazillion of other projects and constantly
overworked and behind any possible schedule, I would even jump in myself
ot help. But I simply can't :(
> Is there a proxy for this position? How to transfer the credentials to
> another person in case the original maintainer becomes unavailable?
> 4. What suggestions do you have to improve the status quo?
>From my point of view, in order to proceed, what would need to be done is:
1) to remove/split any data that is openmoko proprietary/internal from
the public information. Traditionally, there was a clean separation
of such data in different virtual machines, so I think this is more
or less a hypothetical problem. Does any of the ex-openmoko guys
disagree?
2) finding somebody with the required skills, dedication and trust by
all involved entities/people to actually maintain/upgrade those
systems for the time to come.
3) ensure that Openmoko, Inc. still has an adequate amount of "last
resort control" over what happens there, as it (after all) still is
their trademark. So if somebody sues them over content on those
sites, they need to be able to take action by removing such content
without having to go to anyone else.
4) migrate the VMs or at least the content to new, more reliable (and
also less expensive) rented server hardware.
I would like to use this opportunity to thank Sean for continuing to
fund the server hosting / traffic, and roh + gismo for what they have
done so far in keeping things alive.
Regards,
Harald
--
- Harald Welte <lafo...@gnumonks.org> http://laforge.gnumonks.org/
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