LoCo team website hosting

[Henrik Nilsen Omma]

Matthew East wrote:

>Sounds fine, however I think that having a number of people with root
>access on a server is asking for trouble to some extent, not because
>people will be malicious (I'm sure they won't be), but because admins
>will not know what others admins are doing, installing, configuring etc.
>This might lead to confusion. I think a single admin is the way forward,
>as Matthias currently does on his server. Locoteams with even quite
>ambitious requirements (wiki, web, forum etc) don't actually need root
>access to a server IMHO. However if bigger teams need their own server
>(although the only ones that would come into this category at the moment
>currently have private hosting), in that case I think root access would
>be sensible.
>  
>
OK, but here is the problem: we have made it one of our requirements 
that LoCo teams perform all the admin of their own servers. The reason 
for this that we simply don't have the capacity to do that, esp. as the 
number of teams grow. I'm responsible for allocating the servers and can 
set them up in a basic way, I'm much less skilled at system admin than 
most LoCo team contacts :)

The awake reader will already have realised that we are heading for 
trouble here, because we are first asking teams to do all their own 
admin and then we are asking them to share, so the question arises, who 
exactly will do the admin? One option is for the 3-4 teams sharing a 
server to agree on one person from one of those teams being admin for 
everyone, though that might get complicated. Another option is that we 
set up a LoCo Team Team (as there has been talk about) and that as part 
of this team would be 2-3 experienced system admins selected from the 
LoCo teams generally who would admin all the servers for everyone and 
coordinate amongst themselves and confer with me.

A slightly related topic is backup: We have basically no backup on these 
servers! We have access to 2GB/server of off-machine backup, but this is 
not much compared with our total capacity. Basically if a HD dies, we 
are toast :)  We should obviously find a solution to this, and the 
obvious thing seems to be to dedicate one of the servers (for now) as a 
backup server. I would suggest we set it up with separate FTP accounts 
and allow teams to push backups onto it with cron jobs. I don't think we 
need to keep many different versions, as the wikis do their own 
versioning for example, perhaps just a weekly and a daily backup (where 
both over-write)

- Henrik