Re: [tsc-devel] Transfer of secretchronicles.de domain to xet7

Chris Jacobsen | Sun, 18 Sep 2016 02:05:08 UTC

> xet7 expressed in IRC that he would like to have full control over the
secretchronicles.de domain so that moving and maintaining the
infrastructure is easier for him. Likewise, he would later take control
of secretchronicles.org if we ever register it.

Ideally, it would be best if we found a way for two or more people to
share control over the domain, in case one person became unavailable.  I
have little doubt that xet7 and Quintus will do their best to remain
available, but even then, what is something happened to one of them?  I
certainly don't want to see any harm come to anyone, but it makes sense
to have redundancy in infrastructure control.  Aside from that, it is
good to try to set something up that could last for decades, as long as
people continue to remain interested in TSC.  (Hopefully Quintus's
rewrite will make the code supportable in the coming decades.)

Apart from that concern it makes perfect sense for xet7 to be able to
control the domain and infrastructure, since he is our main system
administrator.  If only one person can control it for a while, handing
it over to xet7 would make sense, but I think we need to follow up on this.

> I would've totally agreed before yesterday, but then I read how the
libtiff authors lost the website because the guy who was hosting it just
stopped:

We've already had this issue ourselves with secretmaryo.org.  This is
what forced us to create secretchronicles.de.  It is a very real problem.

> I would not need own that secretchronicles.de domain, just edit the
DNS records. This can be also done so that Quintus saves the DNS records
information, that is copied to Namecheap FreeDNS, and
secretchronicles.de would be pointed by Quintus to use FreeDNS
nameservers, so I can edit those there. Being able to change DNS records
would make server upgrades easier.

Having only Quintus control the domain raises the same questions as
having xet7 control it.  It is always best to have redundancy, regardless.

> Also I do recommended that multiple TSC members have backups of server
files, at least those TSC members that have access to server.

Are the server config files checked into a git repository?  Is this
possible?  If implemented, it would only store the differences in the
files (less size), and everyone could run a git pull (through a script
in a cronjob possibly) periodically in order to get a local backup of
the server state.  It could be pushed to a private, free BitBucket
respository, preventing no visible security threat.  BitBucket should be
maintaining backups of its user data if they are doing good system
administration.

> That's one of the reasons why on the long term I would like to have a
nonprofit organisation for TSC that can be the legal body for all of this

This makes sense eventually, but, until then, maybe we can put some
resource(s) in two or three people's names.

-datahead