Big changes underway
Honoring our tradition of not bothering you with boring news about trivial things like server downtimes, line maintenance and the like, we proudly present the first newsitem since, uh, back then. So, what's up? Well, basically it boils down to this:
We're changing everything.
And for those of you who are (or pretend to be) interested in the nitty gritty details, here's the full story:
Chapter I: The Dark Depths of History
Back in ye olde days, in 1995 AD, Sun Microsystems had a sponsoring program called "SunSITE" (Sun Software, Information & Technology Exchange). They teamed up with universities and students around the world to create hosting sites for the common good (and to spread the "Sun" brand of course). Sun provided servers and diskspace, the universities added server rooms and bandwidth to the mix and the students sacrificed their precious spare time administrating the things. And one of these hosting groups was called sunsite.auc.dk (a.k.a. SunSITE Denmark). Life was good.
A few years ago however, life started to become seriously interested in experimenting with that "bad" thing people kept telling about. Sun closed down the SunSITE program, which meant no more hardware upgrades. Which was indeed kind of bad because our users (er, "You") became more and more demanding (which is of course exactly what we originally wanted) while the server already had reached its limit.
Your stalwart band of heroes (hint: that's us) became really adept at tweaking things and inventing rolls over rolls of virtual duct tape. They learned that administration over ssh is tedious when the system load never falls below 40 and discovered that their Solaris box stays responsive up to a load of 600 ("responsive" :"echoes ssh input within 10 minutes or so"). They experienced the spicy smell of lightning-fried power supplies and watched in astonishment at how many hard disks can die of old age within a short time. Thankfully Aalborg University, Cisco and APC always helped out with replacement parts (thanks a lot, folks), but it still wasn't pleasant.
About 1.5 years ago we were pretty fed up with that situation, started approaching other companies & organizations for hardware donations and at the same time dreamt of what we would -- could -- finally do when we got that hardware.
Chapter II: Step by Step
Let's step from former ages into the "now" and see what steps we already took to improve the situation as well as what's happening right now:
First the most important, the most drastic change: We are renaming ourselves from "SunSITE.dk" to "dotsrc.org". A more international name, more independent, more descriptive. And about the best we could come up with ;-) This means we have a shiny new website http://dotsrc.org/ (including a new logo) and over time everything will be moved to that domain. Some parts are already done (see below), and we'll notify you about the rest of course.
Note to project owners: Of course nothing about your projects will be changed without your explicit "OK". Everyone will be contacted individually for each change. So -- Don't Panic ;-)
On a more subtle note we are busy moving individual services to their own machines. Usenet news (which is free for everyone BTW) was first -- it's running on a very nice server (donated by Aalborg University) since May 2004. See news.dotsrc.org for details.
Next came IRC. Our IRCNet node is now officially running as irc.dotsrc.org (danish users only, sorry). If you're connecting to IRCNet via our server, please point your client to that new host, as the old one will be deactivated the next days.
Mirrors are now also served by a dedicated machine, listening on mirrors.dotsrc.org (HTTP / FTP) and rsync.mirrors.dotsrc.org (RSync). For now this is a dual-1GHz P-III (anonymous sponsor) attached to a 1TB SCSI RAID (sponsored by HP), of which we use about 850 GB for mirrors so far. This is only a temporary solution however, as the disk array is actually meant to be used for project data and the mirrors need some more diskspace anyway. But no matter what hardware we'll actually use, the hostnames will stay the same for at least some years, so go ahead and give them something to do ;-)
Next in line is Mail (hopefully really soon), which will also get a complete overhaul with nice things like more powerful spam / malware filtering and much more flexibility in regard to project mail handling. Details will be announced when it's ready ;-)
As you can see, we did manage to get some new hardware. There's the pretty powerful news server (dual-Xeon 2.8 GHz, 3G RAM), a bunch of used servers (2x dual-PIII-800, 1x dual-PIII-1000, 1x dual-PIII-900), a fast 1TB RAID array and (so far unmentioned) a dual-Itanium2 server sponsored by HP (more on it later).
Chapter III: Of Wishes and Dreams
(Apologies to Nightwish for stealing that title)
The things described above are of course only the beginning (they certainly don't qualify for "changing everything"). So what's happening on the horizon? Quite a bit. First off there's a rework of our existing services. Storage of project data will be completely changed, with a clear separation between public / private data as well as between the website, the download space and the projects' homedirs. Every project will get its own CVS repository instead of the single module currently offered by default. SSH will be used for basically all developer access -- your choice of scp, sftp or rsync-over-ssh for file uploads, a full shell for organizing your files and cvs-over-ssh instead of the insecure pserver.
We also want to offer some new services. Subversion repositories are very high on the list, as are developer email adresses. A standard bugtracker would also be very nice, but we don't have any detailed plans on that yet (suggestions?). And finally there's that dual-Itanium2 box mentioned somewhere above. It was donated to us as compile server for hosted projects, and we fully intend to use it that way ;-)
Note: There are also quite some under-the-hood changes, most of which need to be done before the visible ones, so progress might look a bit slow from the outside. But rest assured that we are busy working on all that :-)
Apart from project hosting we also want to greatly expand our mirror service. Plans are to have about 3 TB of space filled with mirrors and to enable public rsync access to all of that.
Of course there is a catch to all that: Some things simply won't be possible unless we get additional powerful hardware. The expansion of the mirror service is the obvious thing, but we'd also really like to retire or trusty old main server after 10 years of faithful (and stressful) service. We're talking to potential sponsors, but progress is very slow (as you can judge for yourself if you consider that we've been doing that - intensively -- for over a year now). This means we'd greatly appreciate some help in this area -- pointers to potential sponsors and maybe even referrals to inside contacts would be very valuable. For our "dream setup" we'd need a storage system (e.g. SATA RAID) with 3-4 TB usable capacity (for mirrors) and three modern dual-CPU servers with at least 2 GB RAM each (for mirror HTTP/FTP, mirror rsync and project websites respectively).
Chapter IV: Happily Ever After
Anyway, before we come to the conclusion of this little tale, we'd like to say "thank you". Thank you not only for making it through this wordy text without falling asleep, but also thank you for making our work great fun despite all hardships and setbacks.
Much has happened, and much more will happen in the (hopefully near) future. We'll of course keep you updated on any important developments. If you have any questions or suggestions for us, feel free to ask. We're always reachable via e-mail (staff@dotsrc.org) and IRC (IRCNet, channel #dotsrc).
See you on IRC, maybe meet you in the big blue room someday and of course Happy Hacking :-)
Your dotsrc.org staffers