Too Dependent on One Person
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We should try to recruit a second volunteer who can do SSH stuff. If anything happens to me, the project is too vulnerable. In particular, having a scheme for regular data backups is crucial. I have set up some such scheme, but a second pair of eyes on it would make it more robust.
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@Jack-Waugh What is "SSH stuff" exactly? I'm familiar with using SSH to log into my home Ubuntu server and run commands remotely, etc.
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@Psephomancy That's it. Logging in and running commands.
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I'm familiar with basic SSHing if you still need someone.
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@BTernaryTau Would you have the time and interest to become aware enough of how things work that should I leave the picture for whatever reason, you could keep the data backed up and handle problems, or you could at least explain how they work to some new volunteer? Currently, the backup goes to a machine that I pay for. If I died or got too sick to respond, you would want to tell the council they need to rent a second machine for the backups, or use Linode's backup option. If it were another machine (to be offsite), you would rent it on behalf of the council, choose an operating system for it (currently they're on Ubuntu), boot it, and install the backup scripts, and make them work.
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@BTernaryTau It would be good to have a second technologist-volunteer (I mean one in addition to me) who would not only understand the backups and be able to maintain or replace them, but also would understand how the mailer, the DBMS, the reverse proxy (nginx), NodeBB itself, and the archive-presenting software are set up. I tried to more-or-less document these things in repos on Bitbucket, but some of the info is not as cleaned up as would be ideal. Sometimes I started documenting a procedure in one place and then rewrote part of it in another repo. https://bitbucket.org/voting-theory-forum/workspace/projects/VF
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@Jack-Waugh How involved would that be? I'm interested but I may not have the time, depending on how long it would take to learn everything and how urgent it is.
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@Jack-Waugh Likewise, I can't make a time commitment, and I don't have experience with that software, but could figure them out in an emergency, and could at least be a backup plan until someone more web-focused volunteers.
- I know: git, BitBucket, SSH, Ubuntu
- I don't know: mailer, DBMS, nginx, NodeBB, javascript
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[I don't know why replying to another thread posted in this thread]
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@Psephomancy and @BTernaryTau, if you are willing to be available in case anything happens to me, to try to help the forum council maintain technical control of the workings underlying the forum, please send your public keys for SSH in the format used on typical Linux-based systems. If you are used to using PUTTY (an SSH tool for Microsoft Windows), I think it uses a different format for the keys, and I don't know how to convert them.
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This issue is resolved, or at least, alleviated, as Eric Wilhelm has SSH access to the production and backup servers.
