[ubuntu-za] Ubuntu-ZA Moving Forward

[Stefano Rivera]

Hi David (2010.04.11_20:01:02_+0200)
> 1) one person is burdened with the task of all the maintenance
> 3) responsibility of all the costs involved with hosting.
> 2) any thing else that might crop up.

To some degree, things are a lot simpler when there's only one active
sysadmin, but this breaks down when they no longer have the time.

> 1) Wiki  (media wiki, our base website) -- Hosted by Jonathan
> 2) Planet (Aggregation of ubuntu-za bloggers) -- Hosted by Jonathan

As the chairman of CLUG, I can offer you hosting on our servers.
http://wiki.clug.org.za/wiki/CLUG_Servers
Options that may be of interest:
1. soda, our (donated) Xen machine at Frogfoot running our mediawiki and
   planet
2. dreamcoat, a beefy old box in UCT Chemical engineering that hosts the
   CLUG mailing lists and www.leg.uct.ac.za, but otherwise sits very idle.

Pros:
* CLUG already has multiple sysadmins (although I'm probably the only
  reasonably active one, and we could use more help).
* Shared sysadmin load between ubuntu-za and CLUG+LEG.
* No cost to either party
* You'll be locked into CLUG's hardware upgrade cycle (very slow)

Cons:
* Our webserver at frogfoot only has 256 MiB of RAM, which may be a
  problem. Maybe you should ask Frogfoot for sponsorship of your own Xen
  instance?
* UCT's IT department are a pain and they sometimes cause trouble with
  their traffic shaping equipment and firewalls. They also routinely
  break the University's internet connection for a whole day during
  their monthly Sunday maintenance.

> We are going to switch over to a proper  CMS for our home page. In the
> past we have mainly used our wiki as a CMS -- this way it allows us to
> have a nice pretty home page linking to other things (planet, mailing
> lists, forums, wiki ie moving our wiki related stuff to
> http://wiki.ubuntu.com/ZATeam) The pretty home page is something that
> I feel strongly about since it is the first thing new users see.

Sounds sensible. Drupal isn't fantastic for Photo gallery type stuff at
the moment, but the next release should be a lot better. It also has
pretty crummy wiki plugins, so using Ubuntu's wiki for wiki tasks is
sensible.

You may want to try the planet plugin for Drupal.

Can I suggest asking Frogfoot, Webafrica, IS, etc. if they'd be prepared
to donate hosting? Frogfoot has always been very helpful to geeky
causes.

SR

-- 
Stefano Rivera
  http://tumbleweed.org.za/
  H: +27 21 465 6908 C: +27 72 419 8559  UCT: x3127