[squeak-dev] Box-Admins Team Report for September, 2008

The box-admins team is reponsible for seeing that the community shared
server is maintained and setting up any new features to be hosted on
that server.

For September, 2008:

Well it's been a tumultuous month for the community server.  Between
September 12th and today (October 8th) the server has stopped responding
and had to be rebooted 7 times.  The reason why the server has become
non-responsive is currently unknown.  Each time I have looked through
the logs and found nothing relevant.  Marcus Denker has contact our
hosting company to try to determine if they can provide an explanation.
I delayed this report hoping to have some information on that, but I've
waited long enough.

With the exception of the unavoidable downtime there has been little
disruption.  Marcus setup a monitoring service also provided by the
hosting company so now he (and I) get email if the server can't be
pinged for more than a moment.  So now, in general, the server is
rebooted in about an hour.  All services have started up automatically
and cleanly every time (with an exception I will note below).

I'm confident that with a little time we will resolve this problem.
Hopefully I will have some good news in the next report on this issue.

Janko Mivsek and the WebTeam have been working on a new replacement
website for http://www.squeak.org/ for a while now and we finally
installed it.  The older Smallwiki based site can still be found
temporarily at http://old.squeak.org/ .  The site is still under
considerable development and while that is the case it is useful to run
it 'headful' under VNC.  However it is at best awkward to automatically
start it in that configuration using the system we use (daemontools).
Since this is just temporary and not worth a lot of time it is
configured to startup headless and then once I notice the server has
restarted I shut down the headless instance and manually start it under
VNC.  At one point though I was fiddling around trying to see if I could
get it to start under VNC automatically.  I then set it aside as not
worth the trouble.  Unfortunately I left the startup script in a
half-modified state.  As a result after one reboot the website did not
startup properly.  Once I realized what had happened and my mistake I
fixed the script.

I want to thank the community for the monetary support needed to fund
the box and remind them that the bills continue to appear and that
you can currently contribute to the hosting bills by going to

http://www.squeak.org/Foundation/SupportSqueak/

and purchasing a Squeak badge. Note that a donation here may be used for
other Squeak Foundation services including but not limited to
development, development infrastructure, and promotion of Squeak.

The services being hosted have continued to grow and include (but are
not limited to):

http://www.squeak.org/

SqueakMap - http://map.squeak.org/

http://ftp.squeak.org/

http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/

http://discuss.squeakfoundation.org/

http://source.squeakfoundation.org/

http://map.squeak.org/

https://svn.squeak.org/

http://update.squeakfoundation.org/

http://wiki.squeak.org/

http://bugs.squeak.org/

and DNS services for squeak.org and squeakfoundation.org domain names.

Ken