[clue-admin] The Future of Hosting Clue

[Crawford Rainwater]

Folks:

The history goes something as follows.  Originally the CLUE server was some "hand me down" parts that Jeff Cann scraped together into the original RH 7.x server it was (I want to say it was a P2/350MHz with 256MB RAM).  Over time though, it was becoming trouble some to support the system and find replacement parts.

Linux ETC uses Spry's VPSLink division on a regular basis with our clients at roughly $12/month (prepaid annually) for what CLUE has.  This is more than adequate and minus Spry's maintenance time, the CLUE server has been going 24/7 for the past 2-3 years.  

Since then Spry has also enhanced its services, hardware, and such so that both OpenVZ and Xen based VPS's are available.  However, one draw back is that since the CLUE server has been done in CentOS v4, there is not an "easy" way to upgrade to v5.x.  The same holds for Ubuntu and Debian based VPS's with VPSLink since both OpenVZ and Xen use the Dom0 or "host system" kernel information in the DomU or "virtual machine" system.

The overall cost of having VPSLink host things with Jeff and I discussed this way back when was acceptable since trying to find hardware to "keep things running" plus power to run the system was becoming a PITA.

Linux ETC is still doing the system administration of the server at no cost at this time.  I would like to see the system upgrade to Xen versus OpenVZ (professional preference here) and to have things go "as is".  If CLUE wants to see about getting some donated funds, I can look into having the CLUE account combined with Linux ETC so that it would be easier to manage down the road as well.

Thoughts, comments, and questions are welcomed.  Also to note, I get this list in Digest format, so pardon any delayed responses in advance.

--- Crawford
CLUE server admin