October 18th:
LOCHAC.SCA.ORG DOMAIN
The changeover of the main Kingdom web server last month went rather
smoothly - minor glitches arising were addressed soon after they were
reported. Lord Raoul and Don William de Cameron deserve great credit.
Many thanks for the problem reports to date - please continue to
report any issues to masonry@lochac.sca.org.
A Masonry project which William has been steadily working on for months
is the adoption of the lochac.sca.org domain for all "in game"
websites, mailing lists and email addresses.
That is, instead of using seneschal@sca.org.au or lko@sca.org.au, we
can now use seneschal@lochac.sca.org and lko@lochac.sca.org . And
instead of examples like these:
* http://www.sca.org.au/riverhaven
* http://sg.sca.org.nz
* http://aneala.sca.org.au
* http://www.sca.org.au/marshal
* http://www.sca.org.nz/equestrian
* seneschal@ildhafn.sca.org.nz
...we can now use:
* http://lochac.sca.org/riverhaven
* http://sg.lochac.sca.org
* http://aneala.lochac.sca.org
* http://lochac.sca.org/marshal
* http://lochac.sca.org/equestrian
* seneschal@ildhafn.lochac.sca.org
These "lochac" domain names do not fully supplant the earlier ones,
they parallel them. The old forms can all still be used. And, for
"Inc"-specific addresses, e.g. registrar@sca.org.au or
http://sca.org.nz , there is no reason to ever change.
But: for published in-game domains, please use the lochac.sca.org
forms in preference from now on. That means gradually amending your
newsletters, websites, introduction cards in coming weeks and months.
NB: If you are responsible for maintaining web sites, please DEFEND
"something@lochac.sca.org" email addresses on web pages from spam by
instead using this form: "something@lochac.sca.org". This obfuscated variant
works in your browsers just fine, and helps create a small but long-term advantage for us
all by reducing harvesting by spambots.
Please report problems to me, via masonry@lochac.sca.org.
In service,
Bartholomew
Lochac Kingdom Seneschal
Masonry Deputy pro tem
Applications are invited for this new Deputy office to the Lochac Seneschal, detailed below.
The first year's budget is in place, contributed jointly by Kingdom, SCAA and SCANZ,
and a transition to the new approach to supporting the Kingdom's various web servers is
all but completed. This means the next officer will be able to take over a relatively
settled operation with a lot of initial support.
Note: this is not a server administration role! While some relevant technical skills and
background will certainly help, the key aspects of the role are communication, planning
and working with volunteers.
Key responsibilities:
Manage the annual budget for supporting the Kingdom's key Internet
servers and hosting operations
Justify each year's subsequent projected budget to the funding bodies and obtain their contributions at the agreed ratio (1:4:5 SCANZ, SCAA, Kingdom)
Minimise the direct costs to the Kingdom (especially hosting costs) by maximising the
recognition, communication, coordination and active support among those volunteers
providing such services to the Kingdom
Provide direct funding for receiptable costs relevant to the Kingdom's needs such as
domain names, secure certificate and replacement hardware
Offer annual ex-gratia payments towards shared costs (such as hosting/bandwidth),
assessed in a way which relates to their relative contribution to the Kingdom's needs
Encourage key server administrators to implement redundancy and load-sharing where
possible and reasonable
Track and plan for key equipment, service or software needs to keep the infrastructure
running reliably
Be prepared to step in if the need for urgent action or new funding needs arise, e.g. in
the event of a hardware failure or loss of a hosting provider.
Please send your application with a mundane and SCA resume to:
masonry@lochac.sca.org. Questions are welcome.
For reference, the full proposal which led to the establishment of this office is available here.
Projects
Known projects in the works, with relevant champions are:
Getting lochac-announce back in shape once the new server and a newer mailman are in place (Bat)
Confirming that regular sitewatch/email notification of server outages is in place for key servers (Masonry Deputy)
Emailing common/officer @lochac.sca.org addresses to see if they are "live" and documenting the results (Svartr)
Future Projects
These options are listed here so they aren't lost in the traffic, but have no particular timeframe
Backup strategy - see Del's notes, some of which apply pre-installation
See if secondary (Dell 1750) server can be made operational, if so, upgrade to at least 1GB RAM before setting it up as a backup server (Raoul)
Set up backup server for sca.org.nz (William)
Establish occasional data-swap between sca.org.au and sca.org.nz to increase redundancy (Raoul and William)
Repeating Tasks, typically annual
sca.org.nz domain renewal (William and Masonry Deputy)
sca.org.au domain renewal (Raoul and Masonry Deputy)
Next year budget forecast and negotiation with Kingdom/SCAA/SCANZ (Masonry Deputy, from about October each year - 2010 underway)
Servers and Administrators
The following servers and administrators are known to be supporting two or more sites or activities in the Kingdom of Lochac. Not all receive direct support from the Masonry budget. If there's a significant server not mentioned here, please get in touch.
Lochac Main Server (Masonry Deputy) - SCAA and Kingdom home site, most Continental groups, Kingdom offices and guilds, many mailing lists. This server was bought with Masonry funds to replace the one once managed by Del. The chief technical administrator is Raoul. A backup server was also bought but is not yet operational.
SCA NZ Server (William de Cameron) - SCA NZ home site, most Crescent Isles groups, some Kingdom offices and guilds, many mailing lists. A backup server for this one is being assembled.
Lochac Peers (Asbjorn) - private forums for each Peerage Order, Shire of Darton's website
Webcentre Ltd (Bartholomew) - membership/registry system for SCA NZ and soon SCAA, booking sites for Festival, Canterbury Faire and some other large, recurring events
Budget
Lochac (Kingdom Exchequer), SCA Australia and SCA New Zealand all contribute funds to support this office. Under the original proposal, the first-year funding was double what is expected in future years, to allow for purchase of a new sca.org.au server and other potential hardware catch-ups. The total allocated for 2009 was $A2,000 and $NZ500 respectively. Expenditure to date has been:
January 2009: $A909.49 to buy the replacement primary sca.org.au server and an inexpensive secondary server which can be used as a near-live backup in case of failure
July 2009: $NZ206.61 for a replacement UPS for Asbjorn's server, used to host several sites including darton.sca.org.nz and the Lochac Peerage forums.
October 2009: $A500.00 contribution towards new sca.org.au server hosting costs
October 2009: $NZ250.00 contribution towards sca.org.nz hosting costs and new drives for backup server
2009 $A Balance remaining: $590.51 (held in Kingdom account, managed by Exchequer) 2009 $NZ Balance remaining: $43.39 (held in NZ Kingdom "01/11" account, managed by NZ Deputy Exchequer)
Technical Data
Herewith some technical information for the key servers receiving support (or likely to) from this office:
New Primary sca.org.au and lochac.sca.org server, "Bob": IP# 59.167.228.29 DELL POWEREDGE 1850, 2xXEON 3.2GHZ CPU, 4GB RAM, 293GB HDD, 1RU, second-hand in 2009, connected via Aerocare's 100Mb/s link through a 2Mbit/s artificial choke (lightly used), Sydney. OS is CentOS Linux 5.3 running Kernel 2.6.18, mailman 2.1.11. Known issue with this server: has a Dell Remote Access Connection card whose password cannot be reset, thus denying access to some handy but non-essential remote access features
Secondary (backup) server, if can be made operational: DELL POWEREDGE 1750, 2xXEON 2.4GHZ CPU, 512MB RAM, 146GB HDD, 1RU, second-hand in 2009. KNOWN issue with this server, Mar 09: Seems to lock-up when detecting the video adapter during install. text-mode install gets further, but still does a pci-enumerate, and gets the same lockup).
Sca.org.nz (William's) server: Pentium D (dual-core) 2.66GHz, 1GB RAM, 2x300GB SATA disks in a software RAID-1, connected to the Telstra-Clear core, mostly new in 2008, Linux (Debian), Mailman 2.1.11, transfering about 50GB/month and growing, Auckland
People with administrator access to sca.org.au: Raoul, William de Cameron, Will of Rowany. People with administrator access to sca.org.nz: William de Cameron, William de Wyke. People with sca.org.au DNS access: William de Cameron, Raoul, Bartholomew. People with lochac.sca.org and sca.org.nz DNS access: William de Cameron, William de Wyke.
