Re: Contingency planning for move

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Thu, 2009-12-10 at 13:52 -0800, Sriram Ramkrishna wrote:

> On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 11:52 AM, Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>
> wrote:
>         Spent a little time thinking about contingency plans if
>         servers don't
>         survive the move. (Actually, this should be turned into a
>         standing
>         contingency plan - almost nothing here is specific to the
>         move, I'm
>         just worried about jostling during a move triggering latent
>         hardware
>         failures.)
>         
>         Of particular concern are the four old servers that don't have
>         active
>         service contracts; if these suffered a failure, we wouldn't
>         have a
>         easy path to getting them repaired in a timely fashion. We
>         might be able
>         to cajole someone in Red Hat IT into putting in a replacement
>         drive if
>         we mailed one out there, but that's about all.
>         
>          container.gnome.org (Sep. 2003, HP donation)
>          window.gnome.org    (Apr. 2004)
>          menubar.gnome.org   (Apr. 2004)
>          button.gnome.org    (Apr. 2004)
>         
>         (Clearly in the near future we need to look into replacing
>         these
>         machines; it might be possible to recertify them but I doubt
>         it makes
>         sense.)

> blah, these are the ones that Intel gave you right with no
> accompanying service contract?  (sorry about that, my bad.. I should
> have negotiated something better with them)  I should see if I can
> cajole new servers with service contracts.
> 
Actually these are machines that are just so old that they've fallen out
of service contracts.

(One of the things that the sysadmin team should be doing is tracking
the service contracts, and making sure that they get extended if we
aren't replacing the machines...)

The Intel machines are:

 box.gnome.org: mainboard failed about a year after we got it
 torrent.gnome.org: racked at OSU, to my knowledge unused for anything
   (it's a bit of an unbalanced system)

> Actually, maybe we need to think about what is our policy towards
> donated machines like the above for.  Machines are easy to donate, but
> now that we're a mature project there are real IT costs that we have
> to deal with.
> 
We certainly appreciate the donations (and understand that Intel isn't a
server company.) But yeah, we've gotten to know the need to look gift
horses in the mouth with experience.

We need to work with the GNOME board and advisory board soon to get a
couple of servers to replace the old ones, and it's going to take a bit
of figuring out exactly how to handle that - do we want to limit
ourselves to asking for help from the tiny fraction of the advisory
board that actually is server companies? or ask for cash and have the
foundation procure the hardware, or...?

- Owen

(Hmm, I'm sure there's something cool we could with an X25-E or two if
 you have an inside track for a donation there.... :-) Well, actually,
 no, not so sure, I would want to see someone come up with a real
 proposal first.)