Site issues, plans

[Brian Rice]

Hello all,

The Bespin website that hosts http://slate.tunes.org/ has had some  
issues of late (it's been offline twice this week), which I assume to  
be a continuation of ongoing disk space shortages. The Slate project  
is hosted for free by a great volunteer, but we're sharing space with  
two many others without a suitable backup hosting setup.

This has been bothering me for a while, and I've already bought a  
rack-mount server that a friend has offered to host for free within  
the space that his company has for his clients. Unless/until our  
bandwidth reaches some substantial proportion, there won't be a need  
to help him cover his fees, since the space is already paid for and  
unused. So right now I have a 1U dual-processor server with a  
mirrored two-disk RAID setup that will be dedicated to Slate and a  
few related projects.

I will keep a tight leash on the use of this server (no file-sharing,  
no shell accounts without some purpose), but will be able to run  
contained hosting setups and user accounts for as many people as want  
them. Right now, the OS plan is FreeBSD with isolation using Jails,  
which is kind of an improved setup over chroot environments, but not  
as sophisticated as a VM like UML or Xen. However, the guy who runs  
this is very familiar with them and can keep us set up really easily.

I'm still building the software setup for it and will do test  
deployments of the full Slate site before I ship it off to the  
hosting facility. I will probably keep, with permission, a site  
mirror on the existing website and use it as a fallback in case there  
are service issues. Since I will now have full access to server  
configuration, I'll be able to install and manage software more  
easily. Let me know if you have any ideas you'd like to try out, or  
like to see done.

I'm also looking for an independent domain name to register for the  
system. Ideas about that are welcome.

Thanks!

--
-Brian
http://tunes.org/~water/brice.vcf

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