As many of you already know, we've been looking for sponsors for providing hosting for some of our ancillary services (mailing lists, wiki, forums, et al). I put out a CFP to hosting providers a few months back, and with ample help from Ryan we've received a couple good offers.
I'm currently in discussion with the Software Freedom Conservancy to get the legal/administrative bits sorted out, so not everything is 100% nailed down just yet. However that's proceeded to a point that I'm starting to turn attention to the more technical end of things.
To refresh your memory, here's the background statement from the CFP:
""" We currently have various services hosted at a number of different locations with widely varying administrative capacities. We would like to centralize the administration of these services, such as consolidating them onto one platform. We also want room and flexibility to easily install additional services as we grow.
Services high on our priority list to migrate soon include mailing lists, Mattermost, and wiki. Bug tracking, web forum and gitlab are potential secondary priorities. Our Django-based main website may also be worth consolidating at some point in the future. """
Mailing list migration will be the first focus, possibly also with some DNS services. This would finally get us off SourceForge, allowing us to close that down. After that, I'm pretty open to what comes next; we can play it by ear depending on opportunities and manpower availability. If you have something you wish to put time into setting up and/or administrating, contact me to sort out details.
While in the CFP I had preferred physical hosting, the virtual hosting provided by the cloud service providers offering sponsorship to us does have some advantage in terms of flexibility - being able to spin up VMs on a per-service basis, or temporary ones for development and testing.
One common industry best practice I'd like us to adopt is to switch to use of automated scripts for setting up the systems and services. I.e., using cloud-config to bootstrap the raw VMs, and then something like Ansible or Puppet to do automatic configuration management. We can then consolidate the service setup scripts in a git repository. More on this later.
I've added a new "Inkscape Infrastructure" subgroup for holding this configuration management repository. This will be a sysadmin-oriented repository - i.e. more focused on the setup/administrative end, not so much on the data or code. I'll work up some policy/procedure for membership management of this group, for now I'll handle it manually.
I'm also going to move our 'credentials' repository into this Inkscape Infrastructure subgroup. Last board meeting we discussed migrating the credentials git repo, so that it's not hosted as a branch of the inkscape codebase (which causes it to take a long time to checkout). So this will implement that change.
Bryce
This effort has been progressing well, and finally is coming to fruition.
The two hosting offers I mentioned are thanks to Cloudscale.ch and DigitalOcean, both reviewed and approved by SFC. We've signed with the first, and will be signing for the second once I get some credit card administrivia sorted out.
Cloudscale is providing Inkscape with up to 32G RAM of virtual hosting, which will be divvied up as 2G and 4G vm instances. As I alluded earlier, we'll use Ansible scripts to automate the provisioning of the vm's, to allow us to handle development, staging, and production deployment of services to hosts. These are being hosted in the new 'services' repository on gitlab.
Already, a mailman3 service is under development, which when done will enable us to migrate our existing mailing lists off of SourceForge. I'm hoping we'll start migration within a few months and complete it some time this year. Mailing lists are the last bit of our infrastructure remaining on SF, so this will enable us to finally retire it. Yay.
Other services (mediawiki, mattermost, forums, planetplanet, et al) can also be hosted here. If you're interested in working on setting up a service for Inkscape or migrating an existing one, and are either conversant in ansible or interested in learning, please let me know and I'll help get you started.
I'm also setting up a temporary web host that won't be managed through ansible, that we can use to bootstrap and to host trivial things. This will have a basic apache web server and ample bulk storage space, but otherwise will be extremely no-frills - no PHP, no CGI, no apache mods/ It should be suitable for static HTML and basic http-based file sharing. More on this to come, or drop me a line if you can't wait.
Bryce
On Fri, Jan 12, 2018 at 06:14:57PM -0800, Bryce Harrington wrote:
As many of you already know, we've been looking for sponsors for providing hosting for some of our ancillary services (mailing lists, wiki, forums, et al). I put out a CFP to hosting providers a few months back, and with ample help from Ryan we've received a couple good offers.
I'm currently in discussion with the Software Freedom Conservancy to get the legal/administrative bits sorted out, so not everything is 100% nailed down just yet. However that's proceeded to a point that I'm starting to turn attention to the more technical end of things.
To refresh your memory, here's the background statement from the CFP:
""" We currently have various services hosted at a number of different locations with widely varying administrative capacities. We would like to centralize the administration of these services, such as consolidating them onto one platform. We also want room and flexibility to easily install additional services as we grow.
Services high on our priority list to migrate soon include mailing lists, Mattermost, and wiki. Bug tracking, web forum and gitlab are potential secondary priorities. Our Django-based main website may also be worth consolidating at some point in the future. """
Mailing list migration will be the first focus, possibly also with some DNS services. This would finally get us off SourceForge, allowing us to close that down. After that, I'm pretty open to what comes next; we can play it by ear depending on opportunities and manpower availability. If you have something you wish to put time into setting up and/or administrating, contact me to sort out details.
While in the CFP I had preferred physical hosting, the virtual hosting provided by the cloud service providers offering sponsorship to us does have some advantage in terms of flexibility - being able to spin up VMs on a per-service basis, or temporary ones for development and testing.
One common industry best practice I'd like us to adopt is to switch to use of automated scripts for setting up the systems and services. I.e., using cloud-config to bootstrap the raw VMs, and then something like Ansible or Puppet to do automatic configuration management. We can then consolidate the service setup scripts in a git repository. More on this later.
I've added a new "Inkscape Infrastructure" subgroup for holding this configuration management repository. This will be a sysadmin-oriented repository - i.e. more focused on the setup/administrative end, not so much on the data or code. I'll work up some policy/procedure for membership management of this group, for now I'll handle it manually.
I'm also going to move our 'credentials' repository into this Inkscape Infrastructure subgroup. Last board meeting we discussed migrating the credentials git repo, so that it's not hosted as a branch of the inkscape codebase (which causes it to take a long time to checkout). So this will implement that change.
Bryce
Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot _______________________________________________ Inkscape-devel mailing list Inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/inkscape-devel
On Tue, 2018-02-06 at 17:45 -0800, Bryce Harrington wrote:
This effort has been progressing well, and finally is coming to fruition.
Yay, thanks bryce.
Already, a mailman3 service is under development, which when done will enable us to migrate our existing mailing lists off of SourceForge. I'm hoping we'll start migration within a few months and complete it some time this year. Mailing lists are the last bit of our infrastructure remaining on SF, so this will enable us to finally retire it. Yay.
This is a long term dream.
Other services (mediawiki, mattermost, forums, planetplanet, et al) can also be hosted here. If you're interested in working on setting up a service for Inkscape or migrating an existing one, and are either conversant in ansible or interested in learning, please let me know and I'll help get you started.
I'm interested in a setting up a staging site for the website, athough I'm not ansible literate although it doesn't really need much. Just nginx, python and a few libs.
I'm also setting up a temporary web host that won't be managed through ansible, that we can use to bootstrap and to host trivial things. This will have a basic apache web server and ample bulk storage space, but otherwise will be extremely no-frills - no PHP, no CGI, no apache mods/ It should be suitable for static HTML and basic http-based file sharing. More on this to come, or drop me a line if you can't wait.
Shouldn't it be nginx for consistancy? Apache's a bit of a beast for just simple file hosting (even though it's CentOS default httpd) are you planning on Ubuntu machines or CentOS machines? (or does it not matter?)
Best Regards, Martin Owens
On Wed, Feb 07, 2018 at 12:57:08AM -0500, Martin Owens wrote:
On Tue, 2018-02-06 at 17:45 -0800, Bryce Harrington wrote:
Other services (mediawiki, mattermost, forums, planetplanet, et al) can also be hosted here. If you're interested in working on setting up a service for Inkscape or migrating an existing one, and are either conversant in ansible or interested in learning, please let me know and I'll help get you started.
I'm interested in a setting up a staging site for the website, athough I'm not ansible literate although it doesn't really need much. Just nginx, python and a few libs.
Yeah I'm extremely novice with ansible myself, but it's said to be pretty newbie friendly so probably just a matter of a tutorial or two. Ian's ansible code has been fairly easy to follow.
I'm also setting up a temporary web host that won't be managed through ansible, that we can use to bootstrap and to host trivial things. This will have a basic apache web server and ample bulk storage space, but otherwise will be extremely no-frills - no PHP, no CGI, no apache mods/ It should be suitable for static HTML and basic http-based file sharing. More on this to come, or drop me a line if you can't wait.
Shouldn't it be nginx for consistancy? Apache's a bit of a beast for just simple file hosting (even though it's CentOS default httpd)
Perhaps it should, yes, but I have Apache experience but no nginx to speak of, and like I mentioned this is temporary and I'm doing what's expedient more than what's long term supportable. Later maybe in a year or so, once we understand needs more precisely we'll replace it with something fully ansibled and nginxed down the line.
are you planning on Ubuntu machines or CentOS machines? (or does it not matter?)
These will be Ubuntu 16.04.
Bryce
I'm definitely interested in setting up an "official" forum. If Ansible is not too hard to learn, I'd be willing to try to learn. But note that currently the only code I know is some simple html. I have some experience admin-ing 2 SMF forum portals, and for a few months now, I've been managing my own server. But there's just SO much to learn.
But prkos is also interested in the new forum, and she has way more coding skills than me.
I think Courtney would be willing to hand over InkscapeForum.com, once we have a server or server space, and the new forum installed and waiting to accept the DBs and other files. prkos has put some time into learning how to migrate a forum. The last we chatted, I might even watch over her shoulder so I could learn more about it too.
All best, brynn
-----Original Message----- From: Bryce Harrington Sent: Tuesday, February 06, 2018 6:45 PM To: inkscape-devel@...6... Subject: Re: [Inkscape-devel] Update on Inkscape ancillary services hosting
This effort has been progressing well, and finally is coming to fruition.
The two hosting offers I mentioned are thanks to Cloudscale.ch and DigitalOcean, both reviewed and approved by SFC. We've signed with the first, and will be signing for the second once I get some credit card administrivia sorted out.
Cloudscale is providing Inkscape with up to 32G RAM of virtual hosting, which will be divvied up as 2G and 4G vm instances. As I alluded earlier, we'll use Ansible scripts to automate the provisioning of the vm's, to allow us to handle development, staging, and production deployment of services to hosts. These are being hosted in the new 'services' repository on gitlab.
Already, a mailman3 service is under development, which when done will enable us to migrate our existing mailing lists off of SourceForge. I'm hoping we'll start migration within a few months and complete it some time this year. Mailing lists are the last bit of our infrastructure remaining on SF, so this will enable us to finally retire it. Yay.
Other services (mediawiki, mattermost, forums, planetplanet, et al) can also be hosted here. If you're interested in working on setting up a service for Inkscape or migrating an existing one, and are either conversant in ansible or interested in learning, please let me know and I'll help get you started.
I'm also setting up a temporary web host that won't be managed through ansible, that we can use to bootstrap and to host trivial things. This will have a basic apache web server and ample bulk storage space, but otherwise will be extremely no-frills - no PHP, no CGI, no apache mods/ It should be suitable for static HTML and basic http-based file sharing. More on this to come, or drop me a line if you can't wait.
Bryce
On Fri, Jan 12, 2018 at 06:14:57PM -0800, Bryce Harrington wrote:
As many of you already know, we've been looking for sponsors for providing hosting for some of our ancillary services (mailing lists, wiki, forums, et al). I put out a CFP to hosting providers a few months back, and with ample help from Ryan we've received a couple good offers.
I'm currently in discussion with the Software Freedom Conservancy to get the legal/administrative bits sorted out, so not everything is 100% nailed down just yet. However that's proceeded to a point that I'm starting to turn attention to the more technical end of things.
To refresh your memory, here's the background statement from the CFP:
""" We currently have various services hosted at a number of different locations with widely varying administrative capacities. We would like to centralize the administration of these services, such as consolidating them onto one platform. We also want room and flexibility to easily install additional services as we grow.
Services high on our priority list to migrate soon include mailing lists, Mattermost, and wiki. Bug tracking, web forum and gitlab are potential secondary priorities. Our Django-based main website may also be worth consolidating at some point in the future. """
Mailing list migration will be the first focus, possibly also with some DNS services. This would finally get us off SourceForge, allowing us to close that down. After that, I'm pretty open to what comes next; we can play it by ear depending on opportunities and manpower availability. If you have something you wish to put time into setting up and/or administrating, contact me to sort out details.
While in the CFP I had preferred physical hosting, the virtual hosting provided by the cloud service providers offering sponsorship to us does have some advantage in terms of flexibility - being able to spin up VMs on a per-service basis, or temporary ones for development and testing.
One common industry best practice I'd like us to adopt is to switch to use of automated scripts for setting up the systems and services. I.e., using cloud-config to bootstrap the raw VMs, and then something like Ansible or Puppet to do automatic configuration management. We can then consolidate the service setup scripts in a git repository. More on this later.
I've added a new "Inkscape Infrastructure" subgroup for holding this configuration management repository. This will be a sysadmin-oriented repository - i.e. more focused on the setup/administrative end, not so much on the data or code. I'll work up some policy/procedure for membership management of this group, for now I'll handle it manually.
I'm also going to move our 'credentials' repository into this Inkscape Infrastructure subgroup. Last board meeting we discussed migrating the credentials git repo, so that it's not hosted as a branch of the inkscape codebase (which causes it to take a long time to checkout). So this will implement that change.
Bryce
Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot _______________________________________________ Inkscape-devel mailing list Inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/inkscape-devel
------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot _______________________________________________ Inkscape-devel mailing list Inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/inkscape-devel
participants (3)
-
Bryce Harrington -
brynn -
Martin Owens