Re: [pgsql-advocacy] Server unreliability

On Wed, 29 Sep 2004, Robert Bernier wrote:

> Could somebody explain to me how panama came to be chosen. Those reasons
> may have changed since then.

Client requirements ... and, quite frankly, the issues that Bruce is
bringing up are in the works of being fixed by getting some remote
management hardware so that I can deal with 99% of the problems from here
...

> I'm very comfortable using Debian and would be willing to remote admin
> using that. As for sticking with FreeBSD its the better choice if
> there's somebody up to speed with security. The best resource person I
> know is OReilly's FreeBSD columnist Dru, dlavigne6.sympatico.ca. She
> might be convinced to "advise" what to do.

the problem isn't a security issue ... the problem is that the unionfs
creates these 'zero length directories' all over the place in the normal
course of operations.  fsck was never coded to handle them properly, so
when it does do the fsck, it goes through a removes them all (not harmful,
just time consuming) ... one of the developers was recently able to come
up with a patch to correct the behaviour, but is rightfully nervous of
putting it into the source tree, so is doing some more testing on it first
...

As I also mentioned in the other thread, we've setup a hot failover option
that I'd like to put on the VMs, but haven't had any good feedback on the
-www lists about doing this ... for www.*, I don't believe there is any
risk with doign it, but for stuff like pgfoundry/gborg and mailing lists,
those VMs all have a cvsroot, so am a bit afraid to have it hotfailover
and potentially lose someone's commit ... if ppl feel that is an
acceptable risk to avoid the lengthy downtimes, I can enable it on all of
the *.postgresql.org VMs right now ... but I need some feedback on that
first ...

> How does the archives work i.e. what's running it? I hate to state the
> obvious but can we have an itemized list as to what's wrong with them.
> I've got my own ideas but I'd like to be on the same page as everybody
> else.

I'd love to see a list as well ... I thought that John/Dave and I had
addressed all of the outstandings, but obviously Bruce doesn't feel the
same way ... or, of course, he could be doing like the last time and
rambling off past problems that have since been fixed :(

----
Marc G. Fournier           Hub.Org Networking Services (http://www.hub.org)
Email: scrappy@hub.org           Yahoo!: yscrappy              ICQ: 7615664