Notes from Ad Hoc backup group
Date: 2011-04-29
Present: Jamie, Amy, Ana and Daniel present
Next meeting: Friday, May 13, 11:30 am Eastern using MFPL conference number
Introductions.
We established that we will operate as a non-technical body to guide the implementation of the proposals made to improve our backup procedures.
Jamie reviewed steps so far:
- A lot of work has been done by the support team in moving our servers into the puppet system (which makes our configurations, like backup configuration, automated). All servers are now controlled by puppet and we should be done with adding backup to this process by the end of next week
- The support team is working on making all mysql database dumps directly accessible to members in directories controlled by members
- The support team proposed making a brief log of backup status (and potentially other information) accessible via a standard web address so that both an independent audit tool and any member can access it to find out if their server's backups are running properly
- The support team discussed making a control panel feature that would allow members to automate an offsite backup.
Ana asked which of these were more resource intensive than others. Jamie responded that all are fairly do-able in the next month except the last one (control panel feature).
Ana suggested education first, over spending a lot of resources on the control panel option. Drupal has Backup and Migrate - there are many other ways people can do this themselves.
Daniel agreed - CP idea sounds great, but would be a huge amount of work. Likes idea that, as a community, people working on a solutions that are then available.
Amy - what can Amy, Ana and Daniel to do help via email. Better to focus on tasks with for see-able timeline. Amy likes idea of web presence that people could see the status of their server.
Ana suggested adding some third party modules to profile - including backup and migrate.
Ana - intermediary level on website - separate infrastructure. Create a forum separate from the ticket system where people can talk to one another. Jamie expressed concern about having two discussion forums and suggested making the ticket system easier to use if that was preventing people from using.
Idea - way to show on mayfirst.org certain highlighted tickets from support.mayfirst.org
Idea - way to show all tickets on a given server.
Idea - add option to pick a server when creating a ticket
Next meeting: discuss more the support change ideas.
Interim: work on backup page: https://support.mayfirst.org/wiki/member-backup
