Hi guys, For those who have all but given up on me, I'm still alive and haven't abandoned LFS though I know it has seemed like it due to circumstances beyond my control.
It's Canada Day to happy Canada Day to you fellow Canuckians (that finally includes myself. The process is finally finished and I'm an official Canadian Citizen as of two weeks ago). I also managed to get the next three days off so I can finally play catch-up with regards to LFS. One major area of concern has been, and still is to a certain degree, system administration of the LFS server. I've noticed spam went out of control and other issues weren't properly taken care of. I am very grateful for those of you who have taken over this role and managed to keep things afloat in my absence. I'll remain lurking in the background for a while longer as I need to plan and execute some administrative things. One of them being the LFS server migration. I emailed about this several months ago but let me quickly rehash it: Belgarath is slowly dying. Both from lack of active maintenance and also due to heavier demand on its rapidly aging hardware. The solution: move it to better hardware. I can replace the current hardware with better stuff I have here in stock but I also want to cut the montly colocation bill. So, I came up with a viable alternative. Since I'm the IT Manager of an ISP, I can simply pick a server and have LFS co-exist on it. The server I finally decided on is our ISP's main server/router. There's some good and bad things to this: The bad things: 1) well, we're talking about our main core router/server. Most ISPs you see might install a Cisco router as their backbone entry point, but I opted for an LFS server instead. It's much cheaper so my boss is happy, it's just as secure if properly maintained, and it actually works and is very flexible in terms of routing, customer DHCP. 2) the server isn't dedicated to LFS only as the current one is. This means I can't arbitrarily create user accounts anymore and I need to adhere to my own stringent security policies I set in place (it defeats the whole policy if I violate my own rules). After some consideration and discussion I decided LFS can co-exist on our core router just fine. The LFS server has a proven track record of being secure and the people who have access to it are trusted by me. A few things will change with regards to freedoms, root and other admin type access, but those sacrifices outweight the cons: The good things: 1) The server is three hops away from the North American Backbone inter-connect in the city of Calgary. Depending where you are going to, you either jump on Bigpipe Inc.'s backbone, or MCI's. The first two hops from the sever are Enmax Envision that we partnered with. They provide us the connectivity to the backbone. People in Canada and particularly the province of Alberta should be familiar with this company (and you either love them like us, or you hate them for the energy bills they send you ;) 2) As our bandwidth needs increase for our customers on that segment of our network, this server will have more bandwidth available as time goes by. Currently I've made available 10 Mbit for it and future plans will increase this to 40 to 50 Mbit. 3) The hardware I chose for this server when I deployed it are pretty decent. The compare: Belgarath contains: Intel P3-750 MHz 512 MB RAM 2x 9 GB SCSI Ultra160 7200 RPM Raptor (the server's name, short for Velociraptor) contains: Intel Xeon 2.8 GHz 1 GB RAM 2x 36 GB SCSI Ultra320 10K RPM (in RAID1 config. so effective avail disk is 33 GB after partitioning and formatting) The server is dual-cpu capable so if the need arises it can be upgraded down the road. So that's the highlights. As you can see, better hardware and everybody will be happier using that kind of server. It also doesnt' take ages anymore to compile anything on it. The server of course runs an LFS system and this one is actively maintained by me since it's used by work. -------------------- Okay that ends that section. Timeline of migration isn't exactly sure yet. As some of you know, my work has placed an increasing demand on my time. We have some high profile work projects that I'm working which make me work 12 hours a day and i'm on-call the other 12 hours of it. Hardly any time to eat and sleep, let alone actively work on LFS. As these projects near completion I'll have more time for LFS as well. If you guys will bear with me for a bit longer, these things will start to be taken care of properly soon, and then also maintained properly. I will post more details as they become available. Ciao, -- Gerard Beekmans /* If Linux doesn't have the solution, you have the wrong problem */ -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/lfs-dev FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/faq/ Unsubscribe: See the above information page
