[OSM-dev] more admins

[Chris Fleming]

SteveC wrote:
> Nick Hill wants to make his phone number more visible. If you have a
> service problem with openstreetmap please call ++44 7977544679. Put this
> on the wiki if you want.
>
> I want to do a few things to distribute server admin load.
>
> * Add two people to an admin group that car restart servers, add svn
> accounts and so on
> * Set up an admin list where these people can be contacted and discuss
> admin issues
> * Set up an announce list where a few people can put out pure service
> and other announcments
>   
Sounds like a good plan. It's very brave of Nick for putting his phone 
number "out", hopefully he won't be receiving a million calls every time 
something isn't working :)

It may be worth thinking about some kind of automatic monitoring of 
services, checking that the general connectivity,  API functionality, 
the Wiki, Map and anything else that I've forgotten. Ideally we could 
then link this in to the status on the front page and also automatically 
send out SMS's to Admins? I would be happy to work on this although I'm 
not going to have any spare time until May...

It may be worth making sure that the admin team is spread over several 
time zones, so that there is some coverage through the day.

> Nick makes the point that setting up accounts to restart services
> doesn't actually solve the long term problems. For example, restarting
> the wiki every day doesn't solve the need to turn on caching, change
> database type etc like he did. It's also difficult in that most people
> don't know and don't want to know/work with the server code and many
> problems are due to the interactions with the code, the recent mysql
> stalls withstanding. It's a bit chicken and egg though.
>
> If you have any suggestions or thoughts along these lines we'd be glad
> to hear them. We have another server on the way also.
Agreed, I've been meaning to see if I could get my own play server up 
and running but just haven't had got round to it yet. I guess that the 
problem is that doing the actual mapping is so much fun that it's hard 
to get round to playing with the server stuff...


Cheers
Chris