Many of you know, I use linux full-time and fully embrace the "open source" philosophy. The best thing, in my opinion, about that philosophy is that if something changes or if you begin to disagree with how something is going, you can take that and run with it in your own version. I believe that philosophy applies to things like this server; if I were to get hit by a bus or something, everything should be available for someone else to take the publicly shared info and re-create the server with minimal interruptions. It's much like the service model of software, the entire software and map library should be available to anyone...what I (and all the owners that have participated over the years) do that's special is run and host it, make sure it's up, etc.

From the time that I joined the server until now, I think we've done a pretty good job making things available, but I think we can do a lot better. As many of you know, we're getting ready to deploy some donation-funded hardware to get the server in a more stable place. With this move, I'm gonna be cleaning up some pluginconfigs, some of the backend scripts and such, and changing some big-level configuration. I am gonna start a blog series to document some of the things I'm doing. Now that this blog isn't making us any ad money, this is just me dicking around, but my hope is that all the Owner's Corner posts will basically be come a guide for how to run a server from actual hardware, to maintaining the website, etc. All of these skills should be able to be translated to other type of server hosting; for example, some of the BASH scripts we use for backup management could EASILY be used to automatically backup projects on a linux box.

Feel free to submit questions for future topics in the comments, but I probably have about 5 ideas to get started.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 10th, 2012 at 7:03 pm by  surfrock66 and is filed under Owner's Corner.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.