[NCUC E-team] Hosting the NCUC E-Platform

[David Cake]

On 06/03/2013, at 2:48 AM, Tapani Tarvainen <ncuc at tapani.tarvainen.info> wrote:
> On Mar 05 10:22, David Cake (davecake at gmail.com) wrote:
> 
>> 	How are we going to deal with changes to config files?
>> 	Rather than document individual changes, source code control
>> seems sensible (though locally hosted would be fine, as long as
>> there is some backup). Preferences? Git?
> 
> It'd have to be some system everybody is comfortable with -
> we don't want things people need to learn just for this.
> If people aren't using git (or whatever) regularly,
> and only step in here irregularly, they're likely to forget
> it when something needs to be done urgently.
> 
> So, if we go with real version control I'd indeed prefer git,
> but for config files I think we could make do with just
> emacs backups (using its version control and "indefinite"
> number of backups in a dedicated directory).
> (If there're heretics among us who don't like emacs, I've got 
> a little hack to make vim, nano and whatnot use same backup scheme.)
> This has worked well in a number of places where sysadmins with 
> different levels of experience come and go.

	Sorry, I am indeed an editor protestant, and I don't use emacs. I use vim when I have to, but my preferred editing option is, being an old-school Mac guy, editing documents remotely in BBEdit via SFTP - and I can integrate that with version control, or command line hacks if I have to, but not usefully with editor macros. 

> But, if everybody here's a git lover, I'm fine with it.
> Show of hands: who uses git regularly enough to remember
> not only how to use it but also to actually use even when drunk? :-)

	I'm still only transitioning to git from svn, but it seems ok to me. 
	There are GUI clients for most OSes too. 

> As for backup, we could use part of our Gandi disk space
> for that (Gandi provides especially for that, allowing
> some disk space to be allocated on a different location,
> so it'll be safe even if one rack explodes).
> Something like rsnapshot should work well enough.
> I could also make an extra backup on my own
> backup machine as an emergency fallback.

	rsnapshot to a partition on a different rack sounds like a great solution to me. 
	Cheers

		David