[dvlug] Registered dvlug.org

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Grant Bowman (grantbow at gmail.com):

> I talked to Rick.  His mail server is in need of an upgrade and is
> presently running out of space.  It may be better for us (least
> disruptive) to host dvlug.org on Phillip's server with its own
> mailman and apache installation.

It's always good not to put all your eggs in one basket, and you should
certainly use Phillip's server for various functions if that works for
DVLUG.  (By the way, you can and should merge the mbox and subscriber
roster from this Mailman list, even as tiny as it is, into any successor
mailing list.  I can show you how to do that.)

However, you might have gotten a little wrong the context of what I was
saying.

The current machine does need to be replaced -- which has happened
before.  The earliest linuxmafia.com server, starting 1995, was a 486
DX2/66 EISA motherboard with 64 MB RAM and a 2.1 GB SCSI drive.  That
was replaced by an AMD K6/233 with 128 MB RAM and a _pair_ of 2.1 GB
SCSI drives.  The current PIII / 500 with 256 MB RAM and pair of 9 GB
SCSI drives went into service around 2001/2002.

However, in all that time -- since 1995 -- I've had a total of maybe
three days of downtime, most often on account of hardware failure.
Because the machine has _my_ (almost entire) Internet presence on it,
I'm motivated to keep the machine going.  Work comes first, so the
time-honoured system of Benign Neglect<tm> applies, and I cannot (will
not) guarantee no interruptions in service, _but_ will point out that=20
any downtime for you is also downtime for _me_, which I don't like in
the least, don't tolerate, and strongly tend to fix even if it means
getting back from client sites and pulling an all-nighter.

The /var filesystem is the most constrained as to HD space. =20

[rick at linuxmafia]
~ $ df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda5             895M  176M  671M  21% /
tmpfs                 126M     0  126M   0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda1              90M  4.3M   81M   5% /boot
/dev/sdb1             895M  751M   97M  89% /home
/dev/sdb5             268M   11M  244M   5% /tmp
/dev/sdb8             2.8G  821M  1.9G  31% /usr
/dev/sda9             4.6G  1.6G  2.8G  37% /usr/local
/dev/sdb7             1.8G  1.6G  139M  92% /var
/dev/sda8             895M  251M  597M  30% /var/log
[rick at linuxmafia]

The mailing lists and system HTML tree are within /var.  Occasionally,
it has approached 100%, at which time I have to move something else off
/var, usually something big that's been inside /var/www/pub .

Having only 256 MB RAM is a bit of a crunch, too, but we get by, for
now.  We'd actually be fine on that front, except that both I _and_ my
friend Karsten Self are RAM-greedy users of GNU screen, keeping a number
of large shell processes running simultaneously under it.


I do _have_ candidate replacement hardware, by the way.  The reasons I
haven't yet done the big push to migrate everything is that (1) work
comes first, and (2) very often, when I come home, I don't want to see a
computer at all.  This past weekend, for example, I could easily have
done the whole migration smoothly, but instead spent most of both days
gardening.


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