[volunteers] Speaker Coordinator Introduction

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Mehma Sarja (mehmasarja at gmail.com):

> Let me ease into that slowly and with some hand-holding. We should
> talk about backups at the least.

The main thing that desparately needs backup is the mailing list
archives on lists.svlug.org, which go back to around 1997.

$ ssh rick at lists.svlug.org
rick at lists.svlug.org's password: 
Linux svlug.svlug.org 2.4.26-grsec2.0-marc1 #1 SMP Sun Apr 25 10:04:32
PDT 2004 i686 unknown unknown GNU/Linux


rick at svlug:~$ sudo bash
Password:

root at svlug:~# du -hsc /var/local/mailman/archives/private/*.mbox 
8.0K    /var/local/mailman/archives/private/carpool.mbox
4.1M    /var/local/mailman/archives/private/jobs.mbox
548M    /var/local/mailman/archives/private/mailman-owner.mbox
16M     /var/local/mailman/archives/private/officers.mbox
11M     /var/local/mailman/archives/private/smaug.mbox
2.5M    /var/local/mailman/archives/private/speakers.mbox
1.2M    /var/local/mailman/archives/private/svlug-announce.mbox
178M    /var/local/mailman/archives/private/svlug.mbox
119M    /var/local/mailman/archives/private/svlug-old.mbox
184K    /var/local/mailman/archives/private/test.mbox
14M     /var/local/mailman/archives/private/volunteers.mbox
9.6M    /var/local/mailman/archives/private/volunteers-old.mbox
4.7M    /var/local/mailman/archives/private/web-team.mbox
905M    total
root at svlug:~#

That is the bare minimum that is useful to backup, the cumulative mboxes.
Given that ~1 GB of mbox files, it's possible to fully regenerate the 
contents of the mailing list archives.



Until recently, I personally was unable to backup that much SVLUG data
for two reasons.  One was shortage of disk space on my server
linuxmafia.com.  That problem is now fixed.

The other reason is that my household bandwidth is very constrained:
My server is on a static IP address in my garage, and the entire house 
is on a slow aDSL line.  

I already have the membership rosters automatically exported and
e-mailed to me and to Don Marti, every Sunday night.  That's the 
other essential data.  



#!/bin/sh
#
# mailman-rosters:  Cron script to mail out current Mailman mailing list rosters.
#
#               Written by Rick Moen (rick at linuxmafia.com)
#               $Id: cron.weekly,v 1.01 2011/03/29 15:51:05 rick

set -o errexit  #aka "set -e": exit if any line returns non-true value
set -o nounset  #aka "set -u": exit upon finding an uninitialised variable

test -x /usr/bin/mail || exit 0
#
/var/local/mailman/bin/list_members -f carpool | mail -s "Carpool Roster as of $(date +%F)" rick at linuxmafia.com dmarti at zgp.org

/var/local/mailman/bin/list_members -f jobs | mail -s "Jobs Roster as of $(date +%F)" rick at linuxmafia.com dmarti at zgp.org 
#
/var/local/mailman/bin/list_members -f officers | mail -s "Officers Roster as of $(date +%F)" rick at linuxmafia.com dmarti at zgp.org 
#
/var/local/mailman/bin/list_members -f smaug | mail -s "Smaug Roster as of $(date +%F)" rick at linuxmafia.com dmarti at zgp.org abcruzww at gmail.com
#
/var/local/mailman/bin/list_members -f svlug | mail -s "Svlug Roster as of $(date +%F)" rick at linuxmafia.com dmarti at zgp.org 
#
/var/local/mailman/bin/list_members -f svlug-announce | mail -s "Svlug-announce Roster as of $(date +%F)" rick at linuxmafia.com dmarti at zgp.org 
#
/var/local/mailman/bin/list_members -f volunteers | mail -s "Volunteers Roster as of $(date +%F)" rick at linuxmafia.com dmarti at zgp.org 

/var/local/mailman/bin/list_members -f web-team | mail -s "Web-Team Roster as of $(date +%F)" rick at linuxmafia.com dmarti at zgp.org



I am doing a test backup of /var/local/mailman/archives/private/*.mbox/ 
via rsync over ssh.  If it's practical, I will set up a cronjob that 
updates that fileset nightly, logging in via an ssh public keypair as per 
"SSH Public-key Process" on http://linuxmafia.com/kb/Security/

I actually have in my /var/spool/mail/rickstuff/svlug/ tree on my server 
all the _other_ files required to fully rebuild the lists.svlug.org
host in a day, if/when it fails.