[FC-discuss] [meta] freeculture.org online, lately

[Asheesh Laroia]

Hey all lovely freeculture.org people,

I've been pretty quiet on the lists lately, but I've still been active 
behind the scenes a little bit making sure nothing goes too terribly wrong 
with freeculture.org's Internet presence. Most notably, when 
freeculture.org had our last online catastrophe in late 2006 (suffering 
pretty massive data loss due to our host's hard disks dying and us having 
no backups), I decided I'd take a more direct role in maintaining 
freeculture.org. Since early 2007, freeculture.org and its services have 
run on a virtual machine on my personal server.

That's been going decently well. There have been a few hiccups, like one 
that took place last weekend. The outage lasted from Saturday 9 AM 
US/Eastern and ended about Monday 8 PM. We updated the freeculture.org 
status blog <>http://fcostatus.wordpress.com/> as we had updates.  Parker 
and I put a temporary conference website up during the outage.

I've been very busy lately and haven't been putting a lot of time into 
freeculture.org. When the outage happened, I was particularly disheartened 
to see my nightly backup job that backs up all freeculture.org data had 
stopped on May 3, 2009. (That happens co-incides with me moving out of San 
Francisco.)

I've started that up again, and it's taking a snapshot now, so in case 
there's another emergency on my personal machine we can move the services 
somewhere else pretty quickly.

The years last couple of years have seen stability and progress for 
freeculture.org tech. That's because of a lot of people who are not me. I 
want to give massive thanks to Parker Phinney, who has taken over a lot of 
day-to-day work on the web team. Tony Biondo deserves a huge thanks too 
for his contributions, especially setting up new chapters with web space. 
Joichi Ito deserves a hug for letting us have the rack space in Tokyo 
(where my machine is physically located), and Yukitake Kuriyama 
("Kuri-san") deserves a round of applause for administering the network 
and helping us out with reboots in emergencies. I'm blessed to know such 
great people. Oh, and thanks to Greg Grossmeier for calling me Saturday 
"morning" to notify me out of the outage.

If you're interested in finding out how you can help, send an introduction 
email to the webteam list -- http://lists.freeculture.org/webteam .

Email at freeculture.org has just come back online as of a few hours ago, 
which explains the long delay in Ben's post about how you can be funded to 
attend the conference in DC. I'm planing to be there, so hopefully I'll 
see many of you there!

My own record of web team leadership has had its ups and downs, so I want 
to take a moment to apologize to everyone whose awesome projects have been 
slowed down by my unresponsiveness. It's been fun being involved with 
freeculture.org -- some of you remember me from conference calls in 
2004-2005, and maybe there's a person or two still on the list who 
remembers OPG v. Diebold. I stick around because it's heartening to know 
the various Students for Free Culture are still active, and to see our 
illustrious alumni go on to do great things. I wish I were more active, 
and one day I may need to retire.

But until then, I'm your Chief Web Wrangler.

-- Asheesh.

-- 
See, these two penguins walked into a bar, which was really stupid, 'cause
the second one should have seen it.