On 6/16/2014 9:49 AM, Joe Quinn wrote:
On 6/16/2014 9:42 AM, Dave Pooser wrote:
On 5/30/14 11:11 AM, "Kevin A. McGrail" <kmcgr...@pccc.com> wrote:
Good time for an update to the users list about the issue. The box
that
processed the updates at the ASF collo failed catastrophically during a
power surge that took down some other boxes as ell. Unfortunately,
while
the project requested backups in 2009, they were not implemented.
Now that the update box is back online (and thanks for all your hard
work
on that! Systems archaeology is no fun at all), is there anything useful
the community can do to help prevent another such catastrophe? I'd be
willing to contribute hardware and/or VM space at $WORKPLACE for an
offsite replica as long as we wouldn't need to sync more than 2-4GB/day
after the initial setup completed.
If you have access to any SA boxes, make sure they have a scheduled
backup (and make sure the backup works and has all important data!).
If any systems do not have backups, report it to the appropriate list.
Also make sure every task the box is designed to handle is
appropriately documented, including user accounts required, libraries
required and their versions, what crontabs should be, etc.
I think Joe's answer is correct but at the same time doesn't answer the
question of what the community at large can do to help.
First, the overall takeaway for me is that documentation is important.
This was a hard task when it was just a box failure. When it became a
box failure with missing backups and large documentation issues, it
effectively became a personal mission to get the box working. A little
documentation on things went a long way for me and especially in the OS
world, people burnout or go on to other projects so it's helpful if you
try and document.
Second, to answer your question less philosophically, from the community
we always need:
- Masscheckers - You run code nightly and automated against a hand
sorted spam/ham corpora to improve our rule scoring. Once you get it
setup and get good, sorted email, the system is very automated.
- Rule writers - Spam evolves and we need people to write rules. If you
like balancing your checkbook, doing SoDoKu, see patterns in gibberish,
this might be perfect for you. And what I love doing is evolving the
rule writing from manual to automated processing. It's quite a science
really!
- Coders - The life blood of a project really. If you want to help
write code, become a committer and help drive this project on the PMC,
speak up!
- Testers - People who will use trunk on production systems and give
constructive feedback on real-world mail flow. NOTE: trunk is usually
in good shape and runs on many of the committers systems. Because of the
way the system is plugin based, the experimental stuff is usually not
enabled by default.
- RBL Stuff - I'm also still working with the ASF to see if we can run a
distributed RBL under the projects Umbrella so stay tuned on that...
Regards,
KAM
