[Imc-tech] Re: Hosting Chicago IMC

[Ian Bicking]

On Tue, 2003-01-14 at 21:38, Zachary C. Miller wrote:
> Ian Bicking wrote:
> > But anyway, we're very interested in doing something together with other
> > IMCs.  Actually, we were planning on moving to St. Louis, but then there
> > was all sorts of weirdness with their server, and it kind of spooked
> > me.  I just noticed they have a note on their website that they lack a
> > UPS and that caused the problem.  I believe they are also sorely lacking
> > tech support.  I'll CC St. Louis on this as well.  I believe their
> > server is colocated.  
> 
> My server is located at my house (which I own, so it is a more stable
> location than our IMC space which we rent, when we buy a building
> we'll eventually move the server to the IMC).
> 
> We have a ton of good techies here. I have plenty of disk space. I
> have a UPS and run my disks as a mirrored software RAID and do nightly
> backups. But a lot of people use my server right now so I'm not sure
> if I could support another full blown IMC without a net upgrade. I
> don't think I've had downtime lasting more than a few hours since 2000
> and I've only had a couple of those.
> 
> Since our IMC has space, techies, experience running an IMC server,
> and computing resources already located here, I think we'd make an
> excellent location for a midwest regional server but we've gotta kick
> in some funds to do that. I'm pretty sure with some effort our IMC
> could kick in $200-$300/month and a thousand or so up front for
> equipment. What kind of resources do you'all have that we might be
> able to pool? Are folks interested in organizing around a goal like
> this and trying to do some serious fundraising?
> 
> I think that initially a single T1 (~$600-$800/month with a
> $2000-$4000 setup cost) would be ideal for a midwest regional
> server. Then we'd have the option of just tacking on additional T1s as
> we need and can afford them.

>From a practical perspective colocation is a much more affordable way to
get bandwidth and can handle bursts much better.  There also are some
resources in St. Louis that are underutilized, while also not entirely
fleshed out.

I'm not sure what Chicago could contribute -- honestly we aren't being
very active in our fundraising efforts, in part because we don't have
any particular plan in mind that requires money.  So I don't know what
we could do in terms of a sustained effort if we really tried.

Our own technical aspirations seem perhaps more modest than what you're
thinking of -- just some bandwidth and a setup that's robust.  And a
situation where the administration is a bit clearer -- I really have
only a vague idea about who does what on Stallman.

Another issue to consider is robustness in the event of legal problems,
which may come to be more of an issue than technical problems.  If we
spend effort (technical, fundraising, etc), it might be more wise to
spend some of that effort to set up mirroring or other techniques to
defend against legal attack (and indirectly against technical problems
or attacks).

Another option is a colocated server far away from us --
communitycolo.net in San Francisco seems to be asking just a $50/month
donation.  If we purchase a rackmounted server this could be an
excellent option.  What we really want for our IMC isn't particularly a
Midwest-located server, but a server located anywhere where the
administrators know each other, it's on a scale that's manageable,
resources aren't too tight, and the people involved are consistent. 
Working with geographically close IMCs seems like a good idea, but I
don't think it actually matters where the server itself is.

-- 
Ian Bicking           Colorstudy Web Development
ianb at colorstudy.com   http://www.colorstudy.com
PGP: gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys 0x9B9E28B7
4869 N Talman Ave, Chicago, IL 60625 / (773) 275-7241