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Well, it's been a bit of time since the last time I posted, and well, I had to think a fair bit on the comments I received. It's become very clear that while I'm still willing to at least help in technical matters, the effort to reforge SN is much higher than I expected. In addition, given the, shall we say, lukewarm response I got to my posts and journal entries, well, I'm clearly not the right person for the job.
I think at this point, it's time to figure out who is going to lead SN going forward. After my de facto stepping down in 2020, the site has, for want of a better word, been a bit listless. At the moment, no one on staff really has the cycles to take that position on. A few people have expressed interest in the position, and I've talked with Matt, who is co-owner of the site about this. By and large, whoever fills the seat will have to figure out what, if anything, needs to change in regards to moderation policy, content, and more.
If you're interested in potentially fulfilling the role, drop me an email at michael -at- casadevall.pro, with the subject of "SN Project Leader", and include the following:
- Who you are
- What you want to do with the site
- How you intend to do it
- Why do you want to get involved
I'll leave this call for candidates open until December 14th, at which point Matt and I will go through, and figure out our short list, I'll talk to editors, and solicit more comments from the community. I'm hoping to announce a successor in early January, and formalize the transition sometime in February, which will be the site's 9th anniversary.
(Score: 3, Informative) by RS3 on Monday December 05 2022, @05:28PM (9 children)
Please see my other post in this discussion regarding mysql backup. It's pretty easy, and it'd done by cron.daily scripts. It could be done cron.hourly, or any other desired time increment.
As I mention in the other post, the sql dump is then gzipped. Since sql is text, it compresses extremely well.
I have many more thoughts on this, but no time. Basically I'd want to make very frequent incremental backups... Again, the backup file is literally sql, so super compressible, so it's not going to fill up drives / media (even full backups are tiny).
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Monday December 05 2022, @06:51PM (4 children)
My suggestion is to put the configuration (best as CMS scripts like ansible)/dockerfile online to spin up an instance of soylentnews on github/lab etc. Then you don't have to do the work yourself.
(Score: 3, Informative) by janrinok on Monday December 05 2022, @07:48PM
Containerisation is exactly what NCommander is intending to do.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by janrinok on Monday December 05 2022, @07:58PM (2 children)
Of course, we cannot provide docker containers with all the personal database data already inside them. That would hardly be way of keeping everybody's personal data private, now would it? There is also a series of privileges that need to be allocated to specific users depending on their role or function.
However, generating fake data is possible - we do it on the development system so that we can create reproducible data for testing. It is quite time consuming for the first time though. But it gives anyone a chance to spin up a system and debug/play with the code.
(Score: 2) by fliptop on Monday December 05 2022, @09:54PM (1 child)
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but can you not include the data in the container? Just the code and DB schema that runs the site, spin that up, then load the data from backup?
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Tuesday December 06 2022, @01:08AM
Yes - WE can. That is the whole point of doing this. But we are not going to provide the docker package complete with personal data to other people.
One of the benefits of the container is that is can be transferred elsewhere and run. If someone thinks that they are going to be able to simply ask for a docker installation and it will arrive complete with data then that is incorrect. They could have the container without any data so that they do not have to build a new system complete with all the same versions of software in order to test or debug software - which is what we have to do today. Several people have tried this path, including myself, and simply found the the effort was not justified.
However, I will happily take the docker container and create my own fake data in order to do bug squashing or testing changes to the Perl code.
At least that is my understanding of it.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Tuesday December 06 2022, @10:51AM (3 children)
> It's pretty easy, and it'd done by cron.daily scripts
Implementing backups is usually pretty easy. But unless you regularly test for a disaster recovery, the backup procedure will go mouldy. So it needs someone to regularly check that cron is running the job properly, the backups are going still somewhere sensible and the data is recoverable. That's a waste of an afternoon every few months, so you need someone to volunteer for that (not me).
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Tuesday December 06 2022, @06:16PM (2 children)
Yes, and I do that now for the servers I admin (occasional work- not full-time).
It takes very little time. Maybe an hour if I'm super thorough, make extra manual copies, etc. But just looking at the directory lists of backup files takes maybe a couple of minutes.
Oh- almost forgot- "logwatch" and "anacron" logging programs email summaries of the processes and files that were backed up, so that's pretty good indication that all went well. Of course, that is not logically definitive, but so far, it's never failed (14+ years).
I've rarely needed to do a restore, except one major time when one webserver failed- something in hardware, and in failing somehow the mirrored drive pair (not my build- previous person's) got severely corrupted. Being an efficiency-bound person, I had another machine on standby, ready to go.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Wednesday December 07 2022, @08:38AM (1 child)
Okay - once upon a time we had a situation where backups were all made as intended, but due to a misconfiguration/misintention we could not restore from backup when needed. So I would go through the restore procedure.
(Yes, the sysadmin did screw up. People are fallible, not everyone who is asked to sysadmin in a small outfit has enough experience/knowledge to get it right.)
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Wednesday December 07 2022, @06:15PM
No question, people and things and procedures are imperfect. Restore testing is critically important. Of course, that done onto a copied image of the system.
I'm curious- what are some of the specifics of the situation you encountered? OS? FS? Backup software, or scripts running things like mysqldump, gzip, tar, ftp, etc.? Media onto which the backups were stored?