Coinyear everybody,
Hope you had fun and good food/drink. We wish you plenty of pleasant
things for 2011.
=== Plans for the Future ===
==== Backup / Stats Machine ====
As the current backup process is done through Duck's personnal ADSL
connection, borrowing a huge bandwidth, slowing down backup times a
lot, it is not a very funny situation. Moreover, as data size is
increasing slowly, we reached a point where the current capacity is
not enough to keep up with the previous backup granularity. Before
X-mas, we had to reduce the backup frequency of the big sources of
data (www, ftp…).
We recently acquired some hardware from a sponsor, which would be
suited to build two small machines. We plan to use one of them to
build a machine dedicated to backup and stats, hosted in a datacenter
in order to get a proper network connection.
For this, we need to buy disks, and find housing.
==== Free Party Machine ====
Currently, DC focus in providing managed services, for users who do
not care about technical matter, or do not want to bother taking care
of an infrastructure. We've been suggested that some people might want
to go a step further and handle some kind of services themselves.
That's why we plan to acquire a bigger machine in order to provide
several virtualized hosts.
This is of course a big investment and also requires housing.
=== Call for Help ===
There are three main areas in which you can help us:
* apply for being an administrator (the selection is harsh and not
only based on technical skills): this is the obvious way for
non-financial help. A few less-sensitive tasks may also be delegated
to "admin-helpers".
* give a bit of money: we don't need much, and the goal is to survive
without a huge recurrent investment. However, once in a not-so-often
while, we need some to repair or improve things, and currently this is
the right time for a helping hand
* help us find sponsors: the best way to run smoothly without too much
financial load, is to find kind and reliable sponsors; so, if you know
dicks we can suck, please tell us ;-). This is mostly for housing
purpose, but hardware donations may also help.
Well, this said, and even if DC has no trace in its history of acting
democratic in any way, you can express yourself and suggest
improvements. We don't have much feedback, so sometimes it's hard to
figure out what we could do better.
=== Misc Late News ===
==== Thorfinn Reboot ====
2010-12-27 afternoon, after a long network outage (~1h30) affecting
Thorfinn, we took advantage of the resulting mess to reboot the
machine on a new kernel. It should be a bit more secuuuuuuuuuure now.
==== Roaming SMTP Fix ====
Sending emails through GPRS/3G connections using IPs without reverse
was problematic. Now, when SMTP Auth is used, many such checks are
lifted.
Have a Lot of FUN !
--
Marc Dequènes (Duck)
