James Bensley wrote:
I do agree about the one basket stuff. DNS with one person/company, hosting with another and mailing list with another would be good. Although I see no reason why Jonathan can't host our mail and website as he mentioned in the event he is abducted we can contact other earth.li members to seek assistance. Also he has a good track record AND everything is up and running, so lets just get on with it.
Well really assuming other members have a backup of the site and perhaps a list of subscribed members to the list, then really DNS *is* the one basket, as the rest could be recreated elsewhere. Hell I have a mostly complete archive of list posts going back to 2003 sitting in my maildir.
The issue is that, as discussed on IRC we need free (as in beer) solutions because we lack the structure to start taking contributions from members and pay for a hosted service. IMO adding this structure properly would be a minefield in terms of appointing someone to hold the purse, submitting statements of where the money goes etc. I've seen this go wrong (very wrong) in other groups.
Now the trouble with free (as in beer) services is that they tend to be donated by a single member and tagged on the back of services they already have which often makes them difficult to share access to.
In this case Jonathan is kindly giving up some space on a dedicated server he already has. He can't give out access to all and sundry because this machine does other things and he can't put all the ALUG bits in a VM on their own because he lacks the resources to create another VM on that host.
I see where you are going with separating responsibility for the various services and I'm sure Jonathan would thank anyone that could take some of this responsibility away. But frankly I think all that would happen is we would then be dependent on 3 or 4 people not one. There is literally nobody on this list I trust more than Jonathan to host these services.
I think without major changes the best we can do is formulate a plan where we always have access to the DNS record and make sure we have recent'ish backups of things like the wiki, current list members and the list archives, the rest just then boils down to being "a bit of a pain" if we lost it.