First I would echo what Davor said in the responsse to Steve. Although I think he was being rather modest and restrained.
> On 2/12/08, Björn Lindström <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> Your idea that the fact that you are paying in money to the coop would >> imply some additional obligations for the admins is invalid. They are >> after all members of the coop just like you. > > I am not assuming this. But those who volunteer to be an admin, need > to treat it like a job, just because it is a volunteer position, does > not mean it is not important. Our admins have all, for the most part, treated their responsibilities as volunteers as very important and have devoted a lot of energy to resolving downtime in a timely manner. You cannot expect them to treat it just like a full-time job, because our admins have full-time jobs. We are not paying them, and as you yourself mention you have (or claim to have) the skills to volunteer as an admin but would rather not contribute. We all agree that this downtime was unacceptable. Davor spent more than half of a day working pretty much continuously on it. Much of the delay (other than some hours last night where people were sleeping, but which was precipitated in any event by this delay) was due to a password change for security purposes after one of our main admins resigned, which had not been fully propagated to all of our current, understaffed admins. In fact Adam Megacz actually did jump in to help out a bit even though he is no longer serving as an admin. But in any event it was not only a simple problem of grub configuration. It was exacerbated by unfortunate timing of the KVM password change for security reasons and by keyboard BIOS problems with Mire. That doesn't make this unacceptable, but it has to be put in perspective. When we were just on fyodor or abulafia we had situations like this where we had to put a new kernel or hardware in and we ended up with downtime for days on end, and ALL services were down. We have improved this. Deleuze was up, email and DNS were served with no interruption, the portal and all mail services were accessible throughout. We have solid plans to provide more redundancy in the future. So while complaints are justified, individual blame without suggestions for improvement or offers of assistance (colloquially, "bitching and moaning") is not terribly helpful here. Also worth noting is what Davor pointed out about our openness. As is well known, purely commercial providers have problems too. Just yesterday there was a system-wide, multiple hour total outage of RIM's Blackberry service. They must have hundreds of full-time, well-paid engineers, but they had a total outage to millions of customers for hours. All we know is that they had unspecified "hardware problems" that they promise will "not be repeated" (although that was heard twice before in the past year). So I wish that I could promise that this incident will "never be repeated," but instead I will say that this specific incident has been solved, that our volunteers put a lot of work into getting it solved, for free for our members benefit, that we have definite plans in the pipeline for making such issues less likely in the future and easier to resolve, and that we are still looking for additional admins to take on some responsibilities. When we do grow to the point where we have hired staff, it will be appropriate to "blame" such persons for lack of zeal in the performance of duty. I don't think that is appropriate for our admins who not only put in the amount of work they do for no compensation, with a good deal of competence and diligence, but also in the process set themselves up as targets for these complaints when they donate their time. I don't think you can point to a place where we claim to current or prospective members that we have paid staff available at all times, because we don't. If we did, we would be billing at a much higher rate for our size now. -ntk _______________________________________________ HCoop-Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.hcoop.net/listinfo/hcoop-discuss
