Puppy response team works

[Lobster]

John Murga has hosted very successfully our forum (even paying for extra bandwidth)

Lately the forum has been slowing - maybe the database is too big
Yesterday it slowed to halt

In typical Lobsterian fashion I ran about thinking we were under attack from Redmonds "black ops" aka the marketing and legalised theft department . . .




First I went here and confirmed with Anacari that the forum was down
http://puppylinux.org/wikka/PuppyLinuxIRC


then I created an emergency forum here:
http://tmxxine.com/forum/


Puppian reminded me that we have two existing emergency and backup forums

Includes a Chinese language forum
http://puppy.makes.it/

and this one created by Barry and used as a short lived developers forum
http://puppy.mypunbb.com/


We do have spare capacity
and disorganised response seems to work quite well . . .

Does anyone have comments?

[raffy]

Our host servage.net has been announcing its "cluster" approach to hosting, and unless people have opinions on the contrary, the Wiki has been performing smoothly.

So if JohnM will have time to backup the forum data and restore in puppylinux.org (database and directory), we can transfer the Forum to puppylinux.org. This would require: (1) a spare database and FTP account to be created by Barry for JohnM; and (2) URL rewriting at murga.org/~puppy to redirect links to the new site.

Am assuming of course that JohnM would still like to maintain the Forum As to URL rewriting, maybe JohnM can handle it, too. So JohnM's host will still be busy after the transfer, redirecting links to puppylinux.org.

[kethd]

The Wiki continues to be usable, but frustrating -- often many attempts are needed to get an wiki page edit to "take".

If the Forum were ever down for an extended period of time, an announcement should be made on the main Wiki page, pupweb.org and the other main Puppy Portals. And the wiki announcement should point to a wiki page just for keeping track of the status of the issue, allowing discussion, etc.

The Forum works well for me, and I can easily live with the troubles I have experienced there so far. The most important priority for Forum infrastructure is that the whole thing be backed up by more than one person and standardized-portable. The Forum is the most valuable resource the Puppy community has generated together. The Puppy releases will never be lost, no matter what happens; but this giant hair-ball of accumulated discussion COULD be lost!

[Flash]

If the Forum were ever down for an extended period of time, an announcement should be made on the main Wiki page, pupweb.org and the other main Puppy Portals. And the wiki announcement should point to a wiki page just for keeping track of the status of the issue, allowing discussion, etc. ...

... The Forum is the most valuable resource the Puppy community has generated together. The Puppy releases will never be lost, no matter what happens; but this giant hair-ball of accumulated discussion COULD be lost!

I too think the forum is a valuable resource for the Puppy community. (Of course I do, or I wouldn't spend so much time maintaining it. ) Yesterday when I couldn't access it I looked on other Puppy websites but saw nothing about it. Perhaps there could be a little newsbox on the home page of all Puppy websites, which tells the status, to the extent that it is known, of any Puppy community website, such as the forum, that is in trouble. It might not be much but it would be better than nothing.

[Ted Dog]

A number of sites were 'slow' or did not reply fast during the day yesterday. Google, Microsoft (I keep trying to download files using linux and SeaMonkey, most are not allowed) even the main site of GoDaddy had timeout problems.
The Google one was the most conserning.

[jmarsden]

The Wiki continues to be usable, but frustrating -- often many attempts are needed to get an wiki page edit to "take".

I've never seen this. It simply works for me. Admittedly I use it over generaly reliable high-bandwidth DSL connections in a relatively hi-tech area of the world (Southern California)... but this suggests that the frustration you are experiencing may not in fact be purely the fault of the wiki software or its server or connectivity. Or I've just been amazingly blessed?

If the Forum were ever down for an extended period of time, an announcement should be made on the main Wiki page, pupweb.org and the other main Puppy Portals. And the wiki announcement should point to a wiki page just for keeping track of the status of the issue, allowing discussion, etc.

This is a good idea. A status page for all Puppy-related online services could/should be maintained. I suggest something easy to remember, such as http://puppylinux.org/wikka/Status .

The most important priority for Forum infrastructure is that the whole thing be backed up by more than one person and standardized-portable.

Since it runs on phpBB, its database format is non-standard, but is at least somewhat portable to other LAMP-stack equipped servers. I have no idea how well or badly it is currently backed up, nor how easy it would be for someone other than John Murga to resurrect it on a new server following catastrophic loss of www.murga.org. Has anyone attempted this as a "disaster recovery" excercise? The same question should of course also be asked of the Wiki data at puppylinux.org.

If "standardized-portable" backups and disaster recovery are important to this community, we should probably be selecting our online tools with that goal in mind -- mailing lists with archives in old-fashioned mailbox format are one obvious way to get much closer to this than phpBB

One further idea: would some kind of automated status checking setup be of value? I could probably set up Nagios to monitor the various Puppy-related online services and alert appropriate people when it detects problems.

Jonathan

[jmarsden]

A status page at http://puppylinux.org/wikka/Status has been created. All registered wiki users can edit it. Please do so if you discover a problem with a Puppy-related web site or other online service, or have better or more recent info than the Status page shows.

Jonathan

[babbs]

In addition to the status page just created, if anyone finds a problem with my site, please PM or email me too.

[raffy]

Thanks, JM.

JohnM regularly backs up the data, but I wonder who he would choose to share the database access with?

[jmarsden]

In addition to the status page just created, if anyone finds a problem with my site, please PM or email me too.

It has been suggested that we add contact email addresses to the Status page. Yours is already public via whois puppyfiles.us -- so do you mind if we add it to the status Page next to your services? Obfuscated to prevent automated harvesting, if you wish. Ora clickable mailto: URL if that's OK with you.

The idea is that people noticing an issue can go to the status page and from there easily find out how to contact the admins of a service that is experiencing difficulties.

Jonathan

[kethd]

I think we are married to phpBB for the Forum -- we just need to get a full back-up infrastructure in place with due deliberation, hopefully over the next few months...

[Lobster]

Have added my most checked email address to the status page.
We need people to check and update 3 pages regulary

The status page - the news page on the wiki and the official docs news. I believe these pages should be combined. I suggested to Barry we have one page for News. He asked me to keep the News page on the wiki going as a separate entity.

[jmarsden]

Have added my most checked email address to the status page.

Good. This gets a bit recursive... if the Wiki is down, noone can view the (wiki) Status page to see your contact address anyway

But the idea is right. Should we consider "the Wiki" as being distinct from the puppylinux.org web site in general, for Status purposes? I tend to think of them as one and the same from that perspective.

We need people to check and update 3 pages regulary
The status page - the news page on the wiki and the official docs news.

Status is a technical page with a very specific function, and is not really the same as news. Having two (or more) news pages is a separate question... not directly related to emergency response. The Wiki Status page can be updated by anyone who is a registered Wiki user. So far it has been updated by at least four different people. That's a good start!

Jonathan