On Wed, Jan 12, 2011 at 06:47, Mel Chua <m...@redhat.com> wrote: > We need sysadmin cycles we can allocate to ironing out these sorts of > burrs. Maybe we need a ticket queue where we can request these sorts of
I know this sounds like cheating... I got tired of maintaining these kinds of tools on a virtual machine (that I have to keep up to date... especially after getting rooted in the recent Exim worm), and recently switched to a point-and-click webhost for many of my needs. Now, with a few clicks, I can: 1. Create a new shell user. (SSH is supported) 2. Create a new Wordpress blog. (DB tables created automatically, in the background.) 3. Create a new SVN repo. 4. Create a new Trac instance. 5. Setup (if I want) Jabber on my domain (haven't done this yet). 6. Install Mediawiki on any given subdomain. 7. Manage mailing lists (mailman). 8. I've managed to compile and install one or two things on the host, install custom Python libs, etc.; annoying (no write access to /usr, etc.), but it worked. Basically, at $10/month, I get point-and-click admin of everything that used to take "real work." The tradeoff? Something might go dark for some period of time, and things will get fixed when the service provider gets to it. (But, that has not yet been an issue.) The host provides enough power that I can use a cron job to back things up to Amazon's S3, and I have no idea if the backups are good enough to recover quickly from... but I think they're good enough to recover from with a bad all-nighter. The alternative is managing a box from the ground up, and I've done that for a number of years, including supporting my own classrooms with it. It isn't fun. I don't think I'm disagreeing or agreeing with anything you said, Mel, but I think I'm asking "what is the cheapest, easiest way to provide these services, and can an existing service do it better than <insert some poor sysadmin person>?" The answer for myself was that $10/month solved 95+% of all of my problems. If the needs are: 1. Weblogs 2. Subversion 3. Trac 2(a) and 3(a). The ability for the faculty to edit the access lists for SVN/Trac, so I don't have to. 4. Mediawiki instance then this can be done easily with a Dreamhost account. I can help manage doling those out, and they already have a lot of documentation on the tools they provide, so it would cut the admin overhead greatly. There may be other hosts that are preferred, or perhaps we prefer to do everything from scratch, but that was how I solved this problem for myself. Cheers, Matt _______________________________________________ tos mailing list tos@teachingopensource.org http://teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos
