[Twisted-Python] bad news about twistedmatrix.com's hosting

[Evilham]

\o

On dg., ag. 01 2021, Glyph wrote:

> Hello Twistors,
>
> Our venerable hosting provider, tummy.com <http://tummy.com/>, 
> will be terminating their business operations on September 30, 
> 2021.
>
>>>> datetime.date(2021, 9, 30) - datetime.date.today()
> datetime.timedelta(days=60)
>
> In addition to being a bit personally sad - Tummy has been an 
> avid supporter of the Twisted community since the very beginning 
> - this means we have just about 60 days to fully migrate our 
> website, mailing list, and DNS's hosting from Dornkirk, the 
> machine where it's been running continuously since 2013, to ... 
> something else.


it is sad indeed when friendly businesses terminate operations, 
but Twisted will go on :-).


> There are 2 problems here:
>
> We need a sponsor to help us find a new hosting or cloud 
> provider where things can be hosted.  We do pay tummy currently, 
> and we can probably ask the SFC to pay a different hosting 
> provider a similar price for equivalent services, but ideally 
> we'd find someone willing to donate something so as not to put a 
> drain on those resources.


Let's define this so I and others can ask around with various 
infra providers:

- What is the service currently? (e.g. VPS/Physical? Which 
  resources?)
- Are the resources allocated adequate? Can/should they be 
  increased/reduced?
- Is currently something on the "wishlist" for this service? (e.g. 
  IPv6 support!)
- Even if the goal is and should be for that expense to disappear 
  or go down significantly: roughly what is the compensation being 
  offered for this service? (it might be easier to convince 
  someone to offer it at cost/partial compensation than it is to 
  offer it for free)
- Is location important? E.g. if I asked around and it were 
  fruitful, it'd be EU or Switzerland-based and not US-based as it 
  is right now.


> I will need significant help with the operational aspects of the 
> migration.  I typically do a bunch of behind-the-scenes system 
> administration for twistedmatrix.com <http://twistedmatrix.com/> 
> to keep the whole thing clunking along, but after my brain has 
> been fried by a year and a half's worth of pandemic stress, I 
> simply don't have the time, energy, or mental capacity to do 
> this.  I know I've asked for help before and rarely received 
> any, but if I have to do this entirely by myself, the most 
> likely outcome is that I'll migrate DNS to some free cloud thing 
> so at least my email address doesn't break (I migrated SMTP, and 
> thereby everything associated with personal email addresses to 
> Mailgun some years ago, so Tummy is not in that loop for that), 
> and the website (and this mailing list) will simply stop working 
> sometime between now and October.  So if you'd like to keep 
> www.twistedmatrix.com <http://www.twistedmatrix.com/>, 
> speed.twistedmatrix.com <http://speed.twistedmatrix.com/>, our 
> IRC bot (which is offline anyway right now due to Freenode 
> shutting down), https://twistedmatrix.com/highscores/ 
> <https://twistedmatrix.com/highscores/>, this mailing list, or 
> our dogfooding instance for Twisted Names DNS, please volunteer 
> so we can start to coordinate.


Thank you for both doing this so long and so far and for being 
straightforward about not being able to do it as much now.

I'd like to help and would be particularly (aka more intensively) 
able to do so during August, even if that's just helping document 
what needs to be done and how.
On a day-to-day basis I do some other sysadmin work and if 
necessary would be able to accommodate taking care of 
Twisted-related things into that.

This is the documentation that I am aware of: 
https://twistedmatrix.com/trac/wiki/Infrastructure
Particularly braid: https://github.com/twisted-infra/braid

Is there anything else to look at? Something known to not be 
supported in braid / only partially supported?
Would you rather schedule some online voice session where I poke 
your brain at what needs to be done (IIRC something similar was 
done about 5 years ago) and take notes that can be used (also by 
someone else) while you let your mind flow happily?


> If you've been wanting to just use Github Issues and don't care 
> about preserving any of the data in Trac, congratulations, 
> you're about to win that argument by default ;-).
>
> In the worst case scenario, I will download a backup image 
> before things get turned off in case someone wants to deal with 
> this


I personally hope this doesn't happen; particularly the mailing 
list is a great low-bandwidth way of staying mostly up-to-date 
with the project.

Cheers,
--
Evilham