Re: Minutes of the GNOME Foundation Board meeting 28 November 2000

[rms39 columbia edu (Russell Steinthal)]

On Wed, 29 Nov 2000 23:45:48 +0100, Daniel Veillard wrote:

>On Thu, Nov 30, 2000 at 03:01:23AM +0500, JP Rosevear wrote:
>> On 29 Nov 2000 20:29:58 +0100, Daniel Veillard wrote:
>> >  - gnome.org hosting
>> >   3 machines at a colocation near RH.
>> >    there have been occasionnal downtimes 2-3 weeks in average
>> >    some software seems to eat all resources and get it down
>> >    there is a couple of technical solutions:
>> >     + process limits
>> >     + getting hardware raid + LFS
>> >     + getting a serial <-> VGA
>> >    Problem is people commiting when not appropriate
>> 
>> I'm unclear as to what this last line means.
>
>  One of the most common problems which led to the discussion whether
>we should add ACL (Access Control Lists) to the CVs base is that there
>have been case of people who were granted access to do a specific
>action on the code base and who extended that priviledge and made
>unappropriate changes to the code.

That may be, but I think part of the confusion is that the desire for 
ACL's is a distinct issue from the reliability of the hardware setup. 
>From the minutes above, it appears that the access issue was somehow 
related to the issue of downtime.  As far as I can tell, there is no 
relationship between the two, other than that both would 
theoretically be eliminated by moving to Sourceforge.  (Or one or 
both could be made worse.)

>> As well, should there be a "technical" committee overseeing the hardware
>> and such?
>
>  The current view point was that we should try to find and fix the
>few problems we had with the current state of the servers. This doesn't
>prevent looking for different hosting or hardware solutions but this
>was considered less urgent (if needed at all.)
>
>  My personal opinion on this last point is that the bandwidth and hardware
>capacity of the servers is just fine for their current use, there is just a 
>need to fixe a couple of problems (and Owen promised to look at what could
>be done to fix the couple of weak points.).

For what it's worth, I agree.  And if some resources need to be 
thrown at new hard drives or a new machine, I think that would be a 
reasonable use of Foundation funds (but, then again, so would a lot 
of things...).  

But I don't really think that was the point of the original question, 
which asked about a "technical committee."  In my opinion, that would 
be an unnecessary level of bureaucracy.  We already have the 
gnome-sysadmin team, who basically handle day-to-day issues with the 
systems.  And for overall "policy" supervision (do we need to buy a 
new server, should we move, etc.), I think the Board is perfectly 
capable of handling this; most GNOME hackers, certainly those on the 
Board, have daily exposure to the gnome.org servers, so I don't think 
there's a large issue of specialized knowledge...

-Russell


-- 
Russell Steinthal		Columbia Law School, Class of 2002
<rms39 columbia edu>		Columbia College, Class of 1999
<steintr nj org>		UNIX System Administrator, nj.org