A short status update: Yesterday 3 of the 4 disk drives in the RAID array on the server that hosts voip-info.org failed. The coloprovider is currently working to replace the drives and I'm hoping that the site returns to service soon. Tomorrow is looking most likely. I'd like to thank all those that have called or emailed to offer help and/or encouragement. I will definately be looking for an easy way to create a mirror site once voip-info.org is back up. This is made difficult by the dynamic nature of the site, but its been on my list of things to do for a while now. Thanks for using voip-info.org! support@voip-info.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.digium.com/pipermail/asterisk-users/attachments/20070314/f391d2d6/attachment.htm
Hard to expect the business community to take Asterisk seriously when this sort of stuff happens IMHO. I can't understand how 3 of 4 hard drives could just suddenly fail simultaneously. There must be more too it. No UPS? Someone spilled their coffee into it? Something! Either way, it's amateur hour! If I can't be confident enough in an important source of information like this then I can't be confident enough to provide an Asterisk solution to businesses. That's the way I see it. Yea, it's a wiki but it's the best source of info out there. _____ From: James H Thompson [mailto:jht@lj.net] Sent: Wednesday, March 14, 2007 5:02 PM To: asterisk-users@lists.digium.com Subject: [asterisk-users] voip-info.org status update A short status update: Yesterday 3 of the 4 disk drives in the RAID array on the server that hosts voip-info.org failed. The coloprovider is currently working to replace the drives and I'm hoping that the site returns to service soon. Tomorrow is looking most likely. I'd like to thank all those that have called or emailed to offer help and/or encouragement. I will definately be looking for an easy way to create a mirror site once voip-info.org is back up. This is made difficult by the dynamic nature of the site, but its been on my list of things to do for a while now. Thanks for using voip-info.org! support@voip-info.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.digium.com/pipermail/asterisk-users/attachments/20070314/37338cbe/attachment.htm
> Hard to expect the business community to take Asterisk seriously when this > sort of stuff happens IMHO. I can't understand how 3 of 4 hard drives could > just suddenly fail simultaneously. There must be more too it. No UPS? > Someone spilled their coffee into it? Something!Sure, there always is. For example, from our own little cache of stories: Bad component in the power supply blows, momentarily spiking voltages throughout the server. Colo cooling failed and temps rose ten degrees, baking the drives a bit. Someone let slip with a cart and banged into the rack. Drives were spinning continuously for several years, and then power went out. Two of four don't spin back up. Anyone who's been in the industry for any length of time will have stories. Some of them even interesting. I remember a few years ago when the roof/wall of an AT&T data center was destroyed during a storm.> Either way, it's amateur hour! > > If I can't be confident enough in an important source of information like > this then I can't be confident enough to provide an Asterisk solution to > businesses. That's the way I see it. Yea, it's a wiki but it's the best > source of info out there.If you're not smart enough to have a local snapshot of anything that is critical to what you're providing to customers, then, well, you're right, it *is* amateur hour. As for voip-info.org, I cannot comprehend why you would attack a very nice public service in this manner. Perhaps I am mistaken, but I thought that it was a general VOIP resource, not specific to Asterisk. While I have found it a very convenient interface to Asterisk information, you seem to be suggesting that it is the only source of information. It is not. We ought to all be thanking the fine folks at voip-info.org for their fantastic store of information. Hopefully, if there is any need for assistance to cover additional backup hosting, cash to cover the expense of new drives, or whatever they happen to need, they'll post here and let us all know. We're happy to make a no-strings-attached contribution of some sort, because the resource has been quite useful over the years. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net "We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.
> A percentage of all my profits go back to the community. > > What about you?I think we've been contributing various resources to various online Internet communities for about two decades, more if you go back into the BBS era. We're still dedicating more than a quarter of a gigabit of bandwidth to the free exchange of Usenet news, something we've been doing since the '80's. Challenging people on this list about what they've contributed to the community over the years is going to be a losing proposition. I guarantee it. Don't do it, you make yourself look silly. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net "We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.
I completely agree with the cheap hosting commments - my company competes against it all the time. Things go bad with the host in one way or another, sites move, and the cycle repeats. Is that how someone reputable wants to run a business moving their site around every couple months when things break ? Or do people want a company that is reliable and actually strives to deliver a decent SLA ? As for the hosting of voip-info, I don't see anything wrong with the model of providing something useful for free but sprinkling a few ads through it to help pay for the costs. Yes its annoying when something you rely on is not available, but what right has anyone got to complain that is not paying to have it available ? Maybe a better situation would be to partner with at least one more person or group that has hosting capacity, and split revenue in some manner to offset the costs, and have it hosted at at least 2 locations to guard against disaster, but with a wiki its not all that simple since its updating all the time, and straight mirrors won't work. Something to look into, but it would take even more volunteer hours to setup. A service my company offers (I am not trying to plug myself, but simply offering an alternative to the way it is now) is called "livebackup". Hosting is all setup for a mirror of the complete setup which is copied over at some interval. Should problems arise with the primary site that can't be fixed quickly, dns is simply changed to point to the backup site and it operates as if it was the primary. This is meant to cover these sorts of situations where a disaster is not quickly recoverable, but running two sites in parallel has other issues which make it too complicated for anything without a super high budget. Quoting shadowym <shadowym@hotmail.com>:> A percentage of all my profits go back to the community. > > What about you? > > -----Original Message----- > From: Gordon Henderson [mailto:gordon+asterisk@drogon.net] > Sent: Thursday, March 15, 2007 1:42 AM > To: Asterisk Users Mailing List - Non-Commercial Discussion > Subject: RE: [asterisk-users] voip-info.org status update > > On Wed, 14 Mar 2007, shadowym wrote: > >> Hard to expect the business community to take Asterisk seriously when >> this sort of stuff happens IMHO. > > I think you hit the nail on the head with one word: community. > > Asterisk is free, community supported, and the voip-info site has been > provided for free - with the support of the community. The site would appear > to be financially supported by a small number of quite unobtrusive google > ads, and therein lies the problem... > > Hosting isn't free. If you can't/won't pay for hosting, then you have to > support it by advertising. I can sell you web space/servers/co-lo facilities > with full disk/server/location redundancy, backups and so on, but would you > be willing to pay for it? Probably not. So you takes your chances with a > popular hosting company, put in a small number of google ads to pay for a > basic hosting package and go with it. After-all, there are millions of > websites hosted on millions of servers throughout the world - it's a highly > competitive business - there are offers of hosting for ?1 a month or even > less, but do you think it's a sustainable model? I don't. Well, maybe it is > when you have 1000s of clients with 10s of 1000s of websites (spread over > 100s of servers!) but with scale comes more issues. > >> I can't understand how 3 of 4 hard drives could just suddenly fail >> simultaneously. There must be more too it. No UPS? >> Someone spilled their coffee into it? Something! > > That does strike me as odd, but I've seen it myself with a bad batch of > disks. (IBM DeathStar, Hitachi, etc.) You usually get warnings, but if > you're employing monkeys & paying them peanuts, then they usually just treat > them as "fire & forget" once installed in the rack and plumbed into their > automated selling/billing system. > >> Either way, it's amateur hour! > > It's the way 99% of all co-lo facilities work. Buy big, sell cheap with > little or no SLA - hope that the hardware/premises/internet is reliable > enough, employ monkeys, pay peanuts. If you want quality, then be prepared > to pay for it, and ?1 a month does not give you quality IMO, and in my > experience as someone who runs a small co-lo facility, people will not pay > for quality hosting. A "quality" server costs me ?650, more if the client > insists on a Dull. Sure, I can put together something with pair of disks for > under ?300, but I know (from experience!) it won't last the 4+ years I want > it to last, nor deliver the preformance my clients (who are willing to pay > for such a service) demand. > > I'm not blaming James here because that's the way it is! I bet he's spent > 100s of hours (unpaid) setting it up, running it and maintaining it, and > resorted to google ads. purely to fund it. I don't envy him at all. > >> If I can't be confident enough in an important source of information >> like this then I can't be confident enough to provide an Asterisk >> solution to businesses. That's the way I see it. Yea, it's a wiki >> but it's the best source of info out there. > > So how much are you willing to pay to support such a service? > > Gordon > > _______________________________________________ > --Bandwidth and Colocation provided by Easynews.com -- > > asterisk-users mailing list > To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: > http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users >Jon Pounder _/_/_/ _/ _/ _/ _/_/_/ _/ _/ _/_/_/_/ _/ _/_/ _/ _/ _/ _/_/ _/ _/_/ _/ _/ _/_/ _/ _/ _/ _/_/ _/ _/_/_/ _/ _/ _/_/_/_/ _/_/_/ _/ _/ _/_/_/_/ Inline Internet Systems Inc. Thorold, Ontario, Canada Tools to Power Your e-Business Solutions www.inline.net www.ihtml.com www.ihtmlmerchant.com www.opayc.com ---------------------------------------------------------------- This message was sent using IMP, the Internet Messaging Program.
We had 2 of 3 SCSI drives fail in a RAID a couple of weeks ago - its hard to explain that to a customer! -----Original Message----- From: asterisk-users-bounces@lists.digium.com [mailto:asterisk-users-bounces@lists.digium.com] On Behalf Of cb Sent: Thursday, March 15, 2007 12:00 AM To: Asterisk Users Mailing List - Non-Commercial Discussion Subject: Re: [asterisk-users] voip-info.org status update On Mar 15, 2007, at 12:32 AM, shadowym wrote:> Hard to expect the business community to take Asterisk seriously > when this sort of stuff happens IMHO. I can't understand how 3 of > 4 hard drives could just suddenly fail simultaneously. There must > be more too it.It is drifting off topic, but if all the drives in the array where bought from the same batch, and it was a bad batch, they could all fail at about the same time. I've seen it happen in non-raid drives, I had a batch of drives all bought at the same time, that all went bad within about a week of each other. Each was in a different PC so they had slightly different up times and usage. I could see if those drives had been in a RAID array and were being stressed equally, they may have all failed within hours or even minutes of each other. -chris <www.mythtech.net> _______________________________________________ --Bandwidth and Colocation provided by Easynews.com -- asterisk-users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
James H Thompson wrote:> I will definately be looking for an easy way to create a mirror site > once voip-info.org is back up. > This is made difficult by the dynamic nature of the site, but its been > on my list of things to do for a while now.Hopefully this will happen before next crash :) -- Tomislav Parcina firstname.lastname@email.t-com.hr
Davis Sylvester III
2007-Mar-18 13:43 UTC
[asterisk-users] Re: Replacement Wiki - options (Formerly 'status of voip-info')
Michiel ten Hagen wrote:> I also see the need for an asterisk only wiki. > > That is the reason I have started one at http://www.asterisk-wiki.org/ > the information from voip-info.org is being added now as a starting > point. > > Ofcourse the success of this wiki will depends on the information > posted. > > Regards, > > Michiel ten Hagen > > On Thu, 2007-03-15 at 16:05 -0600, Ira Burton wrote: > >> I would take an alternative stance and say that an Asterisk only >> solution is needed. >> This is a wildly growing product with nearly limitless >> possibilities. >> Trying to cram too much on a site just causes confusion. >> >> KISS (no I am not calling anybody in particular stupid.) >> >> On 3/15/07, Davis Sylvester III <davis@5-9networks.com> wrote: >> Michael Collins wrote: >> >> I would suggest that we create a new wiki, make it solely >> for Asterisk >> >> topics, as not to offend or replace voip-info. Build >> mirrors to >> >> multiple sites and multiple domain names. This would give >> this >> >> community a second resource with redundancy which is what I >> think ALL >> >> >> > of >> > >> >> us are looking for. I have taken the pleasure, of >> registering the >> >> domain name ASTERISKONLINE.ORG. >> >> >> > >> > I would like to know what the community feels about an >> Asterisk-only >> > wiki. I can see pros and cons of Asterisk-only vs. >> > Asterisk/FreeSwitch/Yate/OpenPBX/etc. My gut says keep it >> open for >> > everything OSS/VoIP. (I have no logical reason for feeling >> that way - >> > it's just a gut feeling.) >> > >> > >> > >> >> I will donate a dedicated server with bandwidth to the >> cause. I am >> >> looking for additional people to help populate the wiki >> with useful >> >> information and to help maintain the site. I would suggest >> that ee >> >> >> > have >> > >> >> maybe 4 or 5 mirrors to start off and a core group of >> admins to help >> >> maintain the site. >> >> >> > >> > Thanks for putting your money where your mouth is! This is >> the kind of >> > action the community needs. >> > >> > >> >> I am willing to work with anyone else that is about >> providing a >> >> >> > solution >> > >> >> to our current issue. If you guys want to REALLY work >> toward a >> >> solution, here's the chance. For the individuals that are >> interested >> >> >> > in >> > >> >> helping e-mail me. >> >> >> > >> > I hope you get some respondents. In the meantime it might >> be good to >> > check out the fledgling wiki here: >> > http://www.voip-wiki.us >> > >> > It uses MediaWiki which has a nice, clean interface and >> seems pretty >> > easy to use. >> > >> > -MC >> > >> > >> > >> > >> I'm okay with OSS/VoIP. Just need confirmation that we all >> want to do >> this. I don't want to allocate a server to the cause and it >> just sit >> idle. I'm willing to work with the guys with >> www.voip-wiki.us. >> >> _______________________________________________ >> --Bandwidth and Colocation provided by Easynews.com -- >> >> asterisk-users mailing list >> To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: >> http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users >> >> _______________________________________________ >> --Bandwidth and Colocation provided by Easynews.com -- >> >> asterisk-users mailing list >> To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: >> http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users >>Guys, I understand the reasoning, but don't you think that we have had enough volunteers for a asterisk-Only wiki / site for information. It is my opinion that if we keep registering domain name and keep trying to keep multiple areas for resources, the community will have to idea where to look for accurate and up-to-date information. I will be the 1st to offer my domain name to support a single site/cause for asterisk only information. That doesn't mean we can't have multiple mirrors, but the information and site must be the same. I would suggest that we join forces and start putting this together as a team, instead of as individuals. If anyone wants to join forces to form this team, let me know and let's get it moving forward. It this point I don't care what the domain name is, lets just work together for a common cause.