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 !