Plan B?

[Mojca Miklavec]

Hi,

I hate to ask that question and I'm not trying to suggest moving away
just yet, but what is our plan B in case of some critical server
failures?

While it is a bit annoying, it is certainly not critical if one or two
buildbots are broken and if there is nobody to set a new one for the
new OS. And there are no serious consequences if trac.macports.org/log
doesn't show any updates.

But what happens when trac goes down or becomes seriously damaged (to
the point of no recovery)? When the main website goes down? When SVN
stops working? Or the mailing lists shuts down or @macports.org
aliases are no longer accessible?

Do we have a backup plan or plan B? Are we able to move the services
elsewhere if the current hosting becomes seriously broken one day,
possibly without any prior notice?

I don't want to start panicking, but it would be nice to have a
backup/read-only mirror of trac and the main website somewhere. And
possibly backups of other services. Sure, we have never experienced
problems with any of these *really* critical components***, but what
if we do? Do we have any answer to offer users other than "switch to
the other package manager" when something serious happens? This is one
of the issues that would make sense discussing during the meeting.

Mojca

*** And just as I was thinking about writing this email, I saw the
other message about broken synchronization, meaning that we would not
be able to get any updates, not even the critical ones, to the users
until this gets fixed.