[Noisebridge-discuss] Virtualization resources

[Rachel McConnell]

So just to be clear: you want inexperienced people to set up our
infrastructure at NB as a learning experience, but you won't use it
unless it's as reliable, restorable, and trivial to use as a dedicated
external service?  I am not sure that means what you think it means.

Rachel

Josh Myer wrote:
> First, I'm worried that the best and most involved hackers at
> noisebridge are the ones who wind up building and running the
> infrastructure.  It's noble and all, but you guys could be doing
> cooler stuff that won't burn you out and makes noisebridge an even
> more awesome place.  Other people can do that work, too, and I'm sure
> they'd love the chance.  We just have to live with people in the
> learning curve setting up our stuff, which isn't so bad.
> 
> More inline below.
> 
> On Tue, Jun 02, 2009 at 03:23:55PM -0700, d p chang wrote:
>  
>> for the muralizer we're using bitbucket, but i (not speaking for josh or
>> the muralizer) think it would have been nice to have 'local'
>> infrastructure.
>>
> 
> If we can make things as reliable, restorable, and trivial to use as
> other resources, I'd be glad to use them.  Until then, I'm likely to
> continue farming out my projects to external providers, as it's less
> overhead and lower risk.  Noisebridge is an infrastructure provider,
> but it's best to focus on our strongest points and outsource the rest.
> 
> If git/hg/mailman/wiki is our strongest point, great!  I believe that
> there are people willing to do most of those things incredibly cheaply
> (usually free), but who still feel accountable to their customers
> (even freeloaders).  That sense of stewardship is usually missing from
> volunteer sysadmins, which isn't unreasonable: it's a bit burdensome,
> and, honestly, anyone taking it on should be remunerated for it
> somehow.  (NB: I was a sysadmin at ibiblio for the last year and a
> half of college; any cynicism you might see here is basically realism)
> 
> For perspective: the noisebridge calendar.  A friend wanted to know
> when the space was going to be full of people, so I set it up for her.
> It took me about 15 minutes, most of which was spent scratching my
> goatee and trying to remember what happens at noisebridge.  I've used
> another 10 minutes or so adding 10 more admins to it.  And then I
> spent 20 minutes writing an email much like this one.  There's no way
> I could've gotten a mediawiki plugin installed, much less working
> anywhere nearly as smoothly as the gCal setup, in 25 minutes.  I might
> have gotten one installed in the full 45 mins that it took to keep all
> the NIH/local-pride folks happy.  But, since then, the overhead of
> gCal has been roughly zero, and there are almost a dozen people who
> can maintain the thing in full: add new admins, etc.
> 
> Call me lazy, but I prefer to outsource administrative hassles.