Hello,
as you know, the 4.0 release will most likely happen next week on
Wednesday. At the same time, we have been experiencing load issues on
kermit, our main webserver, leading to slow web sites and a slow wiki
from time to time.
For 4.0, we expect a strong interest and therefore more access to our
websites than usual, and at the same time, since it's a PR-relevant
release, where any bad impression on our web site should be avoided.
I am therefore working hard to migrate the first websites to the new
server soon, and making good progress. However, especially for the web
server documentation, a lots of things have happened, done by many hands
in the past, but severely lacking documentation. Lots of improvements
and tweaks have happened in the early hours of September 28th, 2010,
when we went live and had to cope with a high server load.
I have collected every piece of information from early on, but it's
tedious to incorporate everything, and chances are something got missed.
To avoid missing documentation in the future, we already have set up a
new rule to only accept properly documented new productive services, but
then, we still have to cope with the legacy of the past. (And that being
said, we couldn't have done otherwise anyways, since in 2010, we had to
act quickly to make a good impression on day #1, and not spend time with
documentating instead of dong.)
Luckily, Alex Werner and Christian Lohmaier, both infra experts and
valued members of the admin team, have time on the release date, and
join forces with me to provide a stand-by team to react on high load
situations in time. All three of us have worked in this area in the past
already, so we bring in some experience.
Thank you so much, folks, this is really appreciated!
We are reachable on the usual channels, ideally on #tdf-infra at
irc.freenode.net, or via email to the hostmaster list.
Maybe having three people as "hot standby" is exaggerated and all runs
well, but then, I feel more comfortable if nothing happens, rather than
it does, and we cannot react quickly.
The infra team wants to support the 4.0 release as good as it can.
Florian