Quoting John Cowan (co...@ccil.org): > A basically volunteer agency like OSI "self-hosts" when someone volunteers > to host for them. When that volunteer loses interest, the "self-hosting" > goes away.
Failover is a thing, isn't it? Let me tell you a story. I'm a longtime volunteer with a local all-volunteer-owned-and-staffed annual convention for (mostly literary) science fiction -- that shall go nameless here -- in my Silicon Valley / suburban-San Francisco area. The convention had followed (bad) advice to move all of its Internet presence to a bottom-dollar WordPress-specialty hosting company, Bluehost, but found that (as I could have predicted) the firm was abysmal at everything but WordPress, and in particular seemed unable or unwilling to run a reputable SMTP operation that avoided being shunned on DNS blocklists as a spamhaus, where the Webmin-based customer WebUI required for all customer administration of hosted domains broke frequently, and where customers had no access to logfiles for solving problems. Anticipating the convention's 'What would you suggest we do, instead?' question, I built a prototype Internet server using Debian in a VM container, that did full smarthost SMTP with good spam rejection, Web-based administration of mailing lists, and MoinMoin (a simple Python-based wiki) for ancillary Web content. And, critically, I built in failover. And service monitoring and some degree of update-checking. The predicted question arose, and I said 'You could run _this_ [showing how it worked] installed on a junk 2010 box with half a gig of RAM from Weird Stuff Warehouse, running on a static IP in someone's garage. And you would have a second instance running on another junk 2010 box on static IP in a different person's garage. The first keeps the second updated, and if either fails, the other takes over, a concept called "failover". And then if necessary you find a third garage for a replacement failover.' They didn't like it. 'Whom would we get to run this?' 'Mostly nobody. It runs; you avoid fooling with it. Once a month of so, you find someone with enough clue to type 'apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade' as the root user. Otherwise: Just. Don't. Fool. With. It.' 'But I don't understand. Don't we need an expert to run it?' 'Not really. Just don't fool with it. If you need to, you're it freakin Silicon Valley; this really isn't difficult.' A suitable, boringly reliable soution didn't suit them. They wanted Someone To Sue (http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/lexicon.html#someone-to-sue). Last I checked, they were still suffering with Bluehost because it costs money therefore _must_ be good, and occcasionally outsource to Mailchip when the cognitive dissonance about poor Bluehost SMTP deliverability becomes too big a problem. And yet, failover actually _is_ a thing. _______________________________________________ License-discuss mailing list License-discuss@lists.opensource.org http://lists.opensource.org/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss_lists.opensource.org
