[Strategic] Server hardware donation offer

[Eugene Usvitsky]

And thanks again.

The purpose of writing here was to let people know that they can get
resources if they need. It was also important to show OSMF Board the
situation to let them act and plan accordingly.

It is clear that the final decision is Boards' but the general idea
now is: if anyone wants to do something on these servers, he should do
it by himself. Rambler is providing only the hardware part and Gleb is
currently helping with their setup just because he personally wants
them to get working. He won't be always able (and willing) to help.

So, will XAPI author (or TWG instead of him) will set up and later
admin the server for it? Because if not, there won't likely be anyone
to do it. The same is for every other service. We have several people
who will do at least the initital setup for aforementioned converters
and planet splitting but "official" status means some support from
OSMF (so, from TWG). That is why the question exists - if OSMF will
formally accept these servers in any form, will TWG be involved in (at
least partially) administering it?

Best wishes,
Eugene.

On Fri, Feb 11, 2011 at 2:17 PM, Tom Hughes <tom at compton.nu> wrote:
> On 11/02/11 11:12, Eugene Usvitsky wrote:
>
>> As far as I understand, the decision is"Will OSMF use these servers?".
>> The real usage is not so important - you better know how and where
>> core services and supporting services should be hosted. But the
>> situation "Rambler provides official servers for global OpenStreetMap
>> project" differs from "Russian OSM community is hosting something on
>> Rambler's servers". We should understand that PR and promotion is
>> currently the only one thing Rambler can really get back for its help
>> and thus official support form OSMF would be much better.
>
> We, the TWG, don't really want to be involved directly with the day to
> day running of things like lots of tile caches and XAPI mirrors.
>
> Whether the OSMF choose to style tile caches and XAPI mirrors as being
> official "OSMF resources" is up to them. My view would be that if they
> are behind the GeoDNS we plan to use so that they are answering queries
> for tile.openstreetmap.org etc then they are in some sense OSMF resources.
>
>> From my personal point of view, tile cache and XAPI are important, as
>> well as planet mirror, but should not it also be used for OSM sandbox?
>
> You can probably already do a planet mirror if you talk to Grant about
> setting it up - we already have other sites doing that for us.
>
>> For second Mapnik (with the same style and stuff, just as a mirror for
>> the main)?
>
> That's not something we're looking to mirror right now, though we do
> have our eye on it. Most likely that would initially be done to another
> machine in the UK though.
>
>> For some additional projects like official maps
>> convertation for several navigation software like Garmin? For daily
>> .osm files for each country, similar to CloudMade's and Geofabrik's?
>> For internal router and data quality checker? There are countless
>> possible uses.
>
> Nobody's stopping you doing things like that. If the board want to
> official bless them as the "official OSMF Garmin Downloads" etc then
> that is up to them.
>
> Tom
>
> --
> Tom Hughes (tom at compton.nu)
> http://compton.nu/
>