[svlug] Vote of no confidence in the current administration

[Marc MERLIN]

Ok, I first sent this to private lists not to stir things up in public, 
but my posts are being rejected (sometimes silently) on most if not all
those lists.
When is the day where things got so bad at svlug that people get prevented
from posting to svlug lists, have posts silently discarded, and the
president tries to make new lists with reply-to munging turned on?

I'm just very saddened by the current state of SVLUG. Volunteers don't seem
to be able to willing with the president anymore, VP and volunteers quit,
and the svlug machine which I built years ago, and worked fine for years,
seems to have mis-admined into a state where simple things like mail and web
can't even work reliably anymore (and it's not a hardware issue, several of
the problems I've seen came from breaking a system that was working fine
prior to that)

Mail's been down and spooling for about 2 weeks now, and nothing was done.
Some people seemed to have known but had no access, or no willingness to fix
one more thing that someone else keeps breaking.
(I'm not going to give names because I don't want to debate who said what
and who did what, I'm just noting the current state of affairs).
Web was down for a portion yesterday, and the list goes on (I'm sure some
can give a much longer and detailed list)

I think some people have been patient, have tried to work or help until they
got fed up or turned away by the problems, and the end result is that the
svlug server has been mis-managed to a point that Paul is now saying svlug
should just move to google groups.

WTF? For those who don't know me, I've been officer, VP, and president of
svlug for 7 years in the past, and I work at google, but hearing that
svlug's current leadership cannot even run a web site and a mailing list
reliably (which BTW were working fine before they were tinkered with), and
wants to offload this to managed hosting, is just pathetic.

While I have given enough of my time in the past, I have no desire to
re-run, but I'd like to call a vote of no confidence in the hope that there
are at least a couple of (ex-)volunteers who are willing to become the new
leadership, and have the means to run a linux machine and do whatever else
is necessary to run at least the bare minimums to allow this group to run
(back in the days, we've run it with as little one linux admin, one web
person, and one person to find speakers. More is better, but 3 is enough)

I'm also very concerned that the current state of affairs is putting strain 
on the good will that Joe at via.net is giving svlug by offering free
hosting (see mail below).

If people think that things are good enough the way they are, or no
one is wiling/able to volunteer their time to take over the current
responsibilities (which I'd understand), then good luck to all.

Marc

Below is the last mail/problem that tipped it over for me.
(mail that got rejected, silently on at least one of those lists)


----- Forwarded message from Marc MERLIN <marc_news at merlins.org> -----

From: Marc MERLIN <marc_news at merlins.org>
To: Paul Reiber <reiber at gmail.com>
Cc: David Hummel <lemmuh at gmail.com>, web-team at lists.svlug.org,
	volunteers at lists.svlug.org, officers at lists.svlug.org,
	Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>

On Tue, Jan 22, 2008 at 12:43:25PM -0800, Paul Reiber wrote:
> I restarted things.  All seems to be working again; please use
> SVLUG's google group -  http://groups.google.com/group/sv_lug
> to communicate about server failures/problems going forward.

If I may, things had been broken, unmonitored, and unacted upon, and fixed
themselves when the daemons restarted due to the forced reboot at via.net
due to the power outage that happened there this morning.

The problem is not another mailing list, but an apparently unadmined, half
broken system. Whatever admin work has been done, by whoever did it, has
been damaging to it. Things that just worked for many years are now
suddenly not working anymore, like web services, or mail.
This is very worrisome.

Also, if I may, please don't call Joe at via.net to say that svlug is down
when it's fully up, pingable, ssh'able, but its web server isn't answering.
Joe is doing everyone a huge favour by hosting svlug for free, but we should
not waste his time.

Marc

----- End forwarded message -----

-- 
"A mouse is a device used to point at the xterm you want to type in" - A.S.R.
Microsoft is to operating systems & security ....
                                      .... what McDonalds is to gourmet cooking
Home page: http://marc.merlins.org/