challenge: end of life for 6.2 is premature with buggy 6.3

[Paul Schmehl]

--On June 6, 2008 11:53:49 AM +0200 Manfred Usselmann 
<usselmann.m at icg-online.de> wrote:
>
> What you are saying sounds like a contradiction to me. On one side it
> is just a hobby site and generates no income and on the other hand it
> is a critical server with millions of hits and the box can't even go
> down for a short time.
>
> What happens in case lets say your harddisk crashes? Something which is
> not an exactly rare case...
>

Actually, that happened to us a couple of years ago, on the old server 
while it still the only server, and I was on vacation 1600 miles away.  We 
ended up having to pay the hosting company to fix the hardware problem and 
reinstall FreeBSD (which they unfortunately did a lousy job of), and then 
I rebuilt the server and restored it to service over a dialup account 
while on vacation.

Many of our users are retired old guys who can barely figure out how to 
use a computer.  When the site goes down, some of them claim to go into 
withdrawal.  The total downtime for that incident was about two days, and 
they "suffered" greatly.

> If the users are not paying for the service they should be able to
> accept a downtime, may it be scheduled or even completely unexpected.
> Or pay / donate for a more reliable service (Redundant server as hot
> standby / testbed etc.).
>

Actually, it was the owners who had to be convinced to accept donations 
from the users, who were all too willing to help.  The new server was 
purchased with those donations.  Maybe some day we *will* be able to 
afford redundancy.

Paul Schmehl
If it isn't already obvious,
my opinions are my own and not
those of my employer.