[TAG] Changes

[Ben Okopnik]

On Tue, Mar 08, 2011 at 12:30:08PM +0700, Mulyadi Santosa wrote:
> 
> Congrats Ben and thanks for your hard work!

I appreciate your saying that, Mulyadi. It's been a bunch of hard work -
and although it's satisfying to have done it (not that it's finished yet
- still lots of tuning and real world testing coming up), I wish it had
come at another time; I have three major projects that I had to put on a
back burner to take care of this. Well, I should be able to get back to
them in the next day or so.

> Anyway, may I kindly
> remind you to do a good routine backup? perhaps better if the backup
> could take over the current VPS in high availability cluster style...

Actually, yeah - thank you for the reminder. I probably should have sat
down and written out a list of things to do as well as some kind of a
structure for the whole process; instead, I just dove in with a "damn
the torpedoes; full speed ahead!" attitude. "Set up regular backup"
would have been on that list, but since I don't have one, it may well
have been forgotten.

Joey also reminded me that I need to set up an SVN server. Heh... yet
another task with which I have only minimal experience. Other than that,
I think I only have rsync left to set up, and that will be it. Oh,
getting FTP fully configured wouldn't hurt either (got a server running,
just need to point it to the right place.)
 
> Please kindly discuss your problem during the setup in TAG and I'll
> try to participate to help...

[laugh] Problems during setup? I could write a book. Well, if I had the
time. :) I guess the biggest ones were DNS and sendmail related - no
surprise, right? A lot of things can be looked up on the Internet, and
most services simply don't have the scope of those two: in many cases,
one or two searches based on what you find in the logs, or see in the
errors when you try to run a program, and bingo - it's all done. Mailman
is several level more difficult than that, but still rather sensible -
and they've got quite a good Wiki and FAQ. But DNS and Sendmail... those
are full of hyper-weird syntax, mysterious odd corners, and highly
specialized and arcane skills. I guess you could say that understanding
those means understanding the bones of the Internet itself; the glue
that holds it all together.

It's definitely a different set of skills - a superset, really - from
typical home system administration. If I'd had a week or so to do it
in, it would have been a lot more fun (although it was quite fun as it
was.) Doing it in two or three days - that was pretty stressful.

I'll definitely ask here if I run into any problems I can't solve.
Although the really questionable stuff now is probably Sendmail
esoterica, like handling rate-limiting problems and so on. For the
moment, it all seems to be on track to working well, and settling down
to a reasonably steady state soon.


-- 
* Ben Okopnik * Editor-in-Chief, Linux Gazette * http://LinuxGazette.NET *