Sat, 15 Jan 2005

One year

I just realised this blog made its first year online quite recently, after my first stage at Advogato. I wish I had more time to think about interesting stuff to talk about, though. Sometimes, this feels like the Debian GNOME team's announcement board. :)

Catching up on Sindominio

Lately, my mail problems have not been only my pure lack of time to read it. My main e-mail address is jordi@sindominio.net, provided by Sindominio, an organisation which aims to create a space in the net for social and antagonistic organisations which don't want to directly depend on a company to do this. Some members of the more than 130 collectives that are in Sindominio participate in the Sindominio virtual assembly, which rules how the project works and what it does. Sindominio has celebrated its 5th anniversary just a few weeks ago.

My lack of time has prevented me of spending time on Sindominio work (mostly admin stuff), and recently, I stopped reading the lists on a daily basis, but on batches every few weeks. This has the big disadvantage that when there's a crisis (it's not that uncommon to have the Police call someone in the assembly to ask for some suspicious content in one of the hosted websites), I might not know about it until two weeks later.

Today I catched up on really old Sindominio mail, and learned a few things. It seems that ECN, one of the Italian organisations on which we based our project, is about to shut down. As Miquel explained in his post, hopefully the end of ECN will mean that people start other projects with the same spirit in Italy, or join other existing projects to make them better. I've also learned that YOMANGO keeps going without problems. That was great to read about!

Currently, Sindominio has two servers hosted at the Infoespai in Barcelona. Unfortunately, the servers don't grow but Sindominio keeps adding more and more content, and during the last few months we've been having big scalability issues with our older machine, fanelli, despite we moved the mail processing out to the more powerful box a while ago. Right now, it receives mail after it's been cleaned out of viruses and spam in the other box, ada, and runs an imapd for our users and collectives. It hosts the static web pages server, and other minor services like jabber and IRC. Still, the load is too big for this box, and during the last days, it seems to have crossed the line and we are facing OOM killer genocide every few hours.

The other box has suddenly become quite busy, and results in clamav dying every now and then, which makes our mail get stuck in a huge queue. Thus, I've been getting my mail in batches and in weird ordering, which makes it even more difficult to read. While we work on finding out what's going on with these boxes, there's talk about buying a really good box for Sindominio, which will require some serious fundraising as we've never done.

It doesn't help that on Tuesday, when I got home, I discovered that my main desktop box had died. Luckily, it was just a burned power supply, which I could replace in a few hours.

I assume I have missed some mails lately. If you are waiting for a reply from me and it's not happening, please, send it again. Currently, the amount of stuff in my main mailbox is over 1000 mails waiting for action to be taken. Ugh!