Re: [Chicken-users] Askemos again; … better news ; still: Needs some support/donation.

[ianG]

On 25/01/13 11:07 AM, Jörg F. Wittenberger wrote:
> On Jan 24 2013, Daniel Leslie wrote:
>
> > > To fix the case I rather urgently need to find at least two locations,
> > where I dare to replicate my notes wrt. to my personal privacy.


I can possibly get you shell accounts in Austria.  I can't guarantee the 
security or robustness, I don't use them myself because they tend to 
migrate faster than I can keep up.

> > One
> > already secured; so one more whom I can trust not to embarrass me by
> > leaking info taking as a "remembrance to myself".  Preferable outside
> > Germany.

I'm not sure if any of those are met ;)


> > Are you saying that you require access to a physical server outside of
> > Germany, on which you may bootstrap instances of Askemos to act as
> > replication peers?
>
> Yes, Dan.  Thanks for your consideration.
>
> Though I'd only need one user account, not the whole machine;
> any port would do. Needs about 100M virtual memory under load.


So shell access is fine?  No VM needed?  Do you need root?

> Also the immdiate need is fixed. The problem was a "not well
> considered business decision".


Speaking of well considered business decisions - I have been mucking 
around with servers on the net for decades now, and have suffered and 
suffered from their unreliability from all many continuous causes.  I 
recently made a break and did something a bit weird.  I purchased a Mac 
Mini and I now host that as my personal server from my desk.  This 
eliminates most all of my sysadmin, reliability, availability issues. 
The only issue left is whether I can host it on an IP# on the house 
connection.  Although this has been up&down, the availability of the 
data/service *to me* has trumped all.

> But that doesn't change the principled version of the problem:
> there's an SPOF, which can not force the cloud off, but it *can*
> prevent further updates until fixed.


There are two solutions to the SPOF:  replication, or buying a highly 
reliable machine and doing backups.  I'm using the second atm.

anyway, enough rambling, to work.

> > If so, I'm sorry to say that I'm stuck on a slow residential cable
> > line and
>
> this is in fact how most of the peers run. A plug computer behind
> customer grade aDSL. Currently there is a *single* chicken at a vhost
> rented from an ISP. This serves the web; other replicas now to be
> reenabled in dns.
>
> For my backup needs to wrt. personal data this is perfect because
> I know how to get this off the net if there was any sudden reason.
> Any phone call or email would do. Can't do that with a vhost visible to
> anybody who can access the ISP's backup.
>
>
> > haven't the cash to spare for the continuous operation of a server.
> > Between
> > my wife's tuition and the mortgage, we're rather tight for cash.


A friend has done the same as me with a Raspberry Pi, which is an order 
of magnitude cheaper, but is still a Linux box, so one trades capital 
investment for sysadm time :)




iang