[codespeak-ann] major codespeak move / background news

[holger krekel]

Hi codespeak users and developers, 

some of you have already noticed that the codespeak 
machine had some hardware problems as of late.  
I think we have fixed them now by pulling out 
a faulty RAM bank. However, there were also separate  
problems related to hanging processes (basically a 
'ps aux' would lead to such a hanging process). Those 
problems seem to have gone away by using a newer kernel. 

However, we are now planning for a major move of 
codespeak.net to a new hosting environment which will
be accessible 24x7 by system admins down to the BIOS console. 
Connected to this move we want to implement failover mechanisms 
to a second machine especially for subversion and probably
basic web-serving access.  Codespeak.net services are planned to 
be served from a virtualized XEN-based host environment to ease 
mirroring of the whole machine's state, apart from other advantages.  
(Did you know that XEN hosts are managed by a twisted daemon? :-) 

The move is scheduled to take place in August and will 
be announced separately. If you know of someone (including yourself) 
who is interested in such kinds of high-availability admin and 
python-glueing code work, please drop me a mail privately.
There may even be some money in it because my company (merlinux) is 
interested in the mentioned technologies and there would be 
related synergy effects.  Also note that a small part of my own work 
is actually sponsored by the European Union through the PyPy project. 

Nonetheless, codespeak continues to be a mostly developer
driven voluntary effort. Actually at some point i'd like
to setup a non-profit neutral association that drives and expands
codespeak services, given enough interest.  A starting point
could be a sprint meeting of 4-6 people, discussing, designing and
hacking together to bring codespeak to new levels. 

Last, let me especially thank Helios (http://www.helios.de)
which provided free hosting for the codespeak machine for more 
than two years and Infrae (http://infrae.com) which contributed 
much of the current hardware about a year ago!

cheers, 

    holger