Jimmy Wales wrote:
Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:
The one thing that came to my mind is: why does anyone log into zwinger in the first place? Since it's this horribly frightening SPOF, ought we to not avoid even _looking_ at it funny?
One reason is that some things are installed on it that aren't (afaik) installed anywhere else, like dsh(1) which is required for scap(1) and sync-file(1)
*nod*
This doesn't sound like a particular hard technical challenge to solve. ;-)
dsh is already installed on albert, and I've got a cron job set up to synchronise the node group files. I did this based on the theory that if zwinger fails, we'll use albert instead. Trouble is, albert is a SPOF too. We could set up another host as a bastion, but as Mark said on IRC, zwinger is fine as a bastion, but it's underpowered for an NFS server (no RAID). Once the next batch of DB servers arrives, we can move one of the old DB servers (e.g. bacon or suda) into NFS duty, and thereby relieve zwinger of that task.
-- Tim Starling