My understanding from Kristin Darken is that Bob was hosting sites for a lot more than just the TG community. The following is the post I made on the Crystal Hall, which may be pertinent to the BCTS/TG Server/Site Rescue Taskforce.
If the servers for the non-TG sites are on physically distinct machines from "our" sites, our (narrow vision) end of things would be relatively easy, just get "our" machine(s) moved elsewhere.
From a broader perspective, if the BCTS taskforce could somehow coordinate with the other groups, the disruption to Bob's family could be kept to a minimum, with positive PR amongst a number of groups.
Question one: Did Bob keep a readily accessible list of the groups he hosted, with contact information such that someone could contact all of them to discuss options for transferring service, depending upon the physical configuration of the servers.
Question two: What is the physical configuration; are groups cohabiting physical machines, if so are these cohabitations such that natural alliances for maintaining them as they are currently configured will form, or will there have to be a split to physically distinct machines?
And the big question, of course, is who's going to deal with this? Does the BCTS taskforce have the requisite skill sets to handle all of this, or will they have to get someone else involved?
Remember, the least stress for Bob's family possible should be our goal.
Comments
No real answers
One: No, Bob did not keep a list except in his head.
Two: No, all of the TG sites are not on just a few machines that do not have other sites on them also.
Not the most ideal of situations. We've been debating strategies for dealing with this for days. At least, now the sites are back up, most of them.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
crystal hall
Crystal Hall / Whateley should be relatively simple, really. Warren has a full site backup including stories. What we don't have a backup for is the forums. I don't personally know what would be involved in migrating a forums to another system, but it doesn't strike me as a 'we need the hardware' sort of issue. As it is, the crash last month already rolled us back a couple years worth of forums posts. It would suck to lose the rest of it, but with a little time, we could probably transfer critical info to the wiki and backups offline and then start fresh.
Warren is the guy to talk to for Whateley details.
If worst comes to worst and
If worst comes to worst and rescuing the forum intact is impossible for whatever kind of reason (like not being able to copy the database due to not having access to the servers), one could still do a spider run over it and create a static copy to preserve the data, letting a new forum on different hardware replace it.
I remember the changes of comment system and forum downage, replacements and crashes on ToMU, and it's seriously annoying to not be able to find some of that comment content any longer at times (there were amazingly large WMG sessions there...). Some kind of static preservation is better than a wipe like that happening.
Crystal Hall forum is FUDD
FUDFORUM is nice forum software but a bear to move because it hardcodes things into the database that are not easy to change except by hacking the database with a tool like PHPMYADMIN. I've done it twice and I did not enjoy it either time.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Domain registrations
I don't know if anybody is discussing this, but there's also the comparatively minor (technically) problem of the domain registrations. For instance, the Crystalhall.org domain is registered in Bob's name, through Godaddy.
Now, it's not unthinkable to just give up on the domain and register a new one -- Fictionmania did that, a number of torrent search engines who had their domains seized by the U.S. Government did that, and it wasn't the end of the world. But it would be nice to keep the domains.
Does anybody know what's involved in transferring ownership of a domain from a deceased person to someone else? Would the executor be empowered to do so? How should the registrar be notified, since any passwords are likely lost? And so on...
Domains
Paperwork is being accumulated and forwarded on to those whom need to take care of it, or at least that is my understanding.
-P