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User:Dag
From Open Bioinformatics Foundation
Thoughs on the OSC offer:
My thoughts in no particular order:
- OBF infrastructure is generally solid, we have adequate server and bandwidth resources. We lack human resources ocasionally to respond to user requests in a timely manner.
- Should new servers/hosting be offered (ideally running off of a virtualization hypervisor) my wishlist or areas to discuss would include the following:
- A backup/replicated storage target system for offsite backups
- Dedicated machines (32bit Linux, 64bit linux, Mac OSX) for automated OBF software builds and unit testing
- An external Nagios server on a different network that can monitor our systems and network services
- Mirror FTP and anonymous CVS/SVN/GIT repositories
- Other resources worth talking about
- OBF site search has generally been sub-par, we use external google custom searches currently; google search appliance?
- My biggest infrastructure problem is email & SMTP hygiene. Simply put the open source mail cleaning and anti-spam technologies that we use (spamassassin, MIMEdefang, clamAV, greylisting) can not keep up with modern spam and malware distribution methods. The OFB email and discussion lists are our biggest and most active resources but the spam problem has forced us to close off lists and use mandatory moderation on all messages (a large human burden for our mail admins). Ideally we would outsource our SMTP stream for some upstream cleaning/scanning of incoming traffic but these companies typically charge by the domain name or individual email address (of which the OBF has many) so this becomes a cost problem. For my own business I outsource my SMTP stream to MailFoundry.com and have been very happy with how they screen out the "next-gen" malware and spam. I would *love* for the OBF to purchase and operate a dedicated email hygiene appliance such as the ones sold by MailFoundry here: http://mailfoundry.com/ -- owning our own appliance removes all per-address and per-domain limits. Having rock solid spam and virus scanning would make our discussion lists much more open.
- Our internal IT/sysadmin staff needs to be strengthened, additional sysadmin resources would be welcome, especially people who can help with:
- Multi-site MediaWiki integration and optimization
- CVS to SVN and/or GIT migration
