From owner-freebsd-hackers Sat Dec 9 13:44:40 1995 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id NAA16004 for hackers-outgoing; Sat, 9 Dec 1995 13:44:40 -0800 (PST) Received: from time.cdrom.com (time.cdrom.com [192.216.222.226]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with SMTP id NAA15995 for ; Sat, 9 Dec 1995 13:44:37 -0800 (PST) Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by time.cdrom.com (8.6.12/8.6.9) with SMTP id NAA06267; Sat, 9 Dec 1995 13:43:34 -0800 To: Charles Henrich Cc: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Setting up a FTP/WWW/SUP/DNS server for freebsd.org In-reply-to: Your message of "Sat, 09 Dec 1995 16:09:46 EST." <199512092109.QAA07979@crh.cl.msu.edu> Date: Sat, 09 Dec 1995 13:43:33 -0800 Message-ID: <6265.818545413@time.cdrom.com> From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" Sender: owner-hackers@freebsd.org Precedence: bulk > Okay now Im confused. According to your note you wanted a machine that could > do sup, ctm, mail, www stuff. I know nothing about sup or ctm. This was for > This was regarding the note on December 6 in -announce. Later you said drop > you an account and you would then set it up. [I'm cc'ing this to hackers since there are actually some important general points to be made here, and your comments above could actually be anybody's since the kind of confusion you're having is kind of generic] I was wrong. :-) Seriously, this isn't something I can do with just an account, I would need both an account and the root password to set up sup (or CTM, for that matter) properly. I was also being more than a bit optimistic when I made my offer to do the setup for folks. As I actually think about this a little more, it isn't really something that's a one-off task, it needs fairly active and ongoing administration to make sure it's working. Much of the time it's hands-free, that is true, but when these services break they really do require someone who knows the ropes to get them back online. I therefore would like to modify my original proposal: I won't do the actual setup myself since this is something best done by the person who'll be actually maintaining it and, for obvious reasons, this can't be me (one or two, maybe, but all of them would be insane). Going through the setup process, as annoying an extra duty as it might be, will leave the administrator a lot more clued-in about what steps were required and how each service actually works. It know that this will result in more startup pain, and some folks might bow out as a result, but this is actually good since we really only want and need sites who are definitely willing to be in this for the long-haul, and if someone is so understaffed or overloaded that they can't get someone to do this locally then they probably wouldn't be able to do it on an ongoing basis, either. I don't mean to sound ungrateful for the offers, far from it, but this is an ongoing committment and I want to be careful about minimizing the degree of difficulty involved. This something that requires genuine attention by a local administrator. As my previous mail has indicated, it also appears that my own sup knowledge is out of date so I'm not the best person to run around setting up sup servers anyway. What I therefore propose is this: We can't do the steps involved on the local sites, for the reasons outlined above, but we should do our best to provide detailed instructions to any administrator tasked with performing those steps. Since one person can't do it all, I would suggest that we break the problem into more reasonable segments: Sup - Justin Gibbs I have also asked Justin to update my somewhat buggy sup-server-kit on freefall, and if he has any other instructions I'm sure he'll post them here. CTM - Poul-Henning Kamp Poul-Henning has always been the god of CTM (and the only living being who actually understands it :-) so you can refer to him for help with setting up CTM services. WWW - John Fieber If you've questions on setting up a mirroring WEB server, please talk to John. FTP - admin@freebsd.org We actually expect you to set up FTP mirrors yourself since this isn't something that requires our intervention, and it's pretty straight-forward, but if you get really stuck then ask us admins. DNS - hostmaster@freebsd.org If you're setting up a name server for a local domain (.freebsd.org) then please send mail to this alias containing the NS record you'd like us to add to the freebsd.org nameserver. Again, we really do appreciate everyone's offer to help out here and, once we get through the teething troubles, I'm sure that the user base will benefit significantly from the additional distribution points. I was just being a little naive in my original suggestion that I do the administration myself! :-) Thanks! Jordan