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

Mon Aug 2 16:17:34 MDT 2021

On Sun, 1 Aug 2021 at 10:29, Evilham <contact at evilham.com> wrote:

> \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?)
>

We only have a single server. It is  called "dornkirk"
I don't know if it's a VM or bare-metal... but it shouldn't matter.

- Are the resources allocated adequate? Can/should they be
>   increased/reduced?
>

I don't understand this question. Sorry.
Can you please rephrase ? Thanks.

> - Is currently something on the "wishlist" for this service? (e.g.
>   IPv6 support!)
>

Many things are on the wishlist.
The priority is to have the services up and running, even after dornkirk is
dead.

> - 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)
>

I don't know what is the current cost to cover the expenses for dornkirk.

> - 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.
>

No. Location is not important.

>
> > 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.
>

To coordinate migration and also day-to-day Twisted project things we use
the IRC Libera channel #twisted-dev

If you don't like IRC ... we are also experiencing with Gitter/Matrix
https://gitter.im/twisted/twisted

I start this to-do list https://github.com/twisted-infra/braid/issues/277

> This is the documentation that I am aware of:
> https://twistedmatrix.com/trac/wiki/Infrastructure

There is not much documentation... we need to rely on memories :)
So don't bother to search for documentation, and just ask :)

>
> Particularly braid: https://github.com/twisted-infra/braid
>
>
Yes. braid is our deployment as code thing... is the best we have in terms
of documenting the infrastructure.

"braid" is (was?) the Twisted customization on top of fabric for doing
primitive automated deployment.

> Is there anything else to look at? Something known to not be
> supported in braid / only partially supported?
>

The plan is to stop using braid and do all the deployment via images and
containers.

> 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?
>

We are split between Europe time zone (UTC -> UTC+2) and US ( something
like UTC-6.. but also UTC-7)
For now, we have done only ad-hoc meetings.

>
> > 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.
>

I think that the plan is to migrate the mailing list to the Python Org
mailing list hosting.

We will need some help with setting  up archive redirections.

---------------

I think the current problem is finding or deciding for the next hosting /
VM / container provider.

We have 150 USD per month from MS to spend on Azure, but this is renewed
any year without any guarantee that next year we will receive the free
credit.
The subscription was requested by Python Software Foundation and was
granted by MS, but it was associated to the Azure AD of my organization.

I have no idea how to create an Azure AD for Twisted organization, so that
I can transfer the subscription.

So...if anyone has any experience with Azure AD, it would help to get this
thing sorted.

For now, using Azure is plan B... so if we don't manage to migrate the
services somewhere else, we (I) can just create an Ubuntu VM in Azure and
migrate the existing dornkirk services there.

------------

The DNS was already migrated by Glyph. Thanks Glyph :)

The mailing lists will be migrated soon to Python Org... we only have to
see how to do it in a seamless way.

--------

So Evilham, if you want to help, try to see if you can hang out over IRC or
Gitter and we can see how you can help.
Thanks!

-- 
Adi Roiban
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