AhimsaMigrationWhy

Table of content :

What happened?

(draft email to UK Network about Ahimsa)

Hi,

There are a number of outcomes from this past weekend that everyone should be aware of.

First the good news: we agreed to buy a server, and to put it into operation sometime after December 17th 2006.

Now the (extremely) bad news: Jebba, a server tech who has kindly provided servers and bandwidth to the Indymedia network for many years, decided just before the weekend to stop hosting Indymedia content. This is the single biggest technical disaster we have ever had, much worse than the earlier London server seizure (of Jebba's server).

From what we can tell, basically he has just gotten sick of Indymedia process and how long things take to happen. Keep in mind that we in IMC-UK have had enough money to buy two servers for about the last two years, and that we have been unable to do so because our decision-making processes are so poor. As a result of this situation, anytime somebody from an IMC needs hosting, they go to Jebba, because he's a great guy, he has the capacity, and it avoids process discussion because he simply goes ahead and gets things done. When he complained about the bureaucracy overheads recently, someone sent him an email pointing out the existence of an imc-resolve email list for conflict resolution.

To put the situation in perspective, the new server that we have decided to buy will serve about 1 Mb/second of data at a sustained rate. The servers that Jebba is withdrawing from Indy service have been serving roughly 70Mb/second sustained over the last week (this is currently very high due to the volume of traffic from the Brad Will radio streams, but it gives an idea of the data transfer capacity we are losing).

For the UK, the important thing to note is that we are 2 out of 6 high-capacity UK mirrors. We have not been working on getting more mirrors very effectively recently.

The global network will be losing hosting or mirrors for the following sites:

  *  Mir-based
          o Ambazonia
          o Armenia
          o Beirut
          o Bolivia
          o Brasil
          o CH
          o Ecuador
          o Euskal Herria
          o Galiza
          o Germany
          o Milwaukee
          o New York
          o Ottawa
          o Poland
          o Romania
          o San Diego
          o UK
          o US
          o WWW
    * SF-active based
          o andorra
          o antwerpen
          o bolivia-devel
          o italy
          o kenya
          o marseille
          o ovl
          o uruguay
          o wvl
    * Dada based
          o dada
          o prague
          o wmass
          o wmass-devel
    * Spip based
          o nantes
          o nice
          o paris
    * Others
          o nimiq
          o portugal

If anyone gets an urge to send an angry email along the lines of "how did so much power get into the hands of one tech", I would suggest that they go stare into a mirror for a while. We are now going to be forced to take responsibility for ourselves to a much greater degree, and because of our collective failure to make decisions we're all responsible for this turn of events.

In the next few days, there will probably be a proposal to buy another server, call-outs to get more server space donated to us, and probably some kind of proposed speed-up of the new UK server timescales.

I'd like to take a moment to thank Jebba for the years of technical help and I hope that he continues to do stuff with the network if he can see an improvement in process as we move forwards.

Yossarian
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