Re: New email list for emergency communications

Bruce Momjian wrote:
> Andrew Sullivan wrote:
>> On Mon, Mar 24, 2008 at 11:48:36AM -0400, Bruce Momjian wrote:
>>> Well, I certainly don't until I realize I haven't received email, nor do
>>> I know who is working on it. Right now the emergency communication
>>> system is ad-hock.
>> So the solution you propose does not solve the problem you think you have
>> -- i.e. that in the event there is a failure, the community doesn't know it.
>>
>> Would a health check system that updated web pages based on the monitor
>> status help? (Hint: I think the monitors are already in place. What we
>> need is some additional ways of accessing that data, I guess.)
>
> Personally, I would love to get an email when the community email system
> isn't working, and status while it is being worked on. I assume others
> would like to as well, so I don't go reporting/contacting people when
> things are already being worked on.

there is a large grey area here and things are by far not as black &
white as your are painting them - like just defining what constitutes
"community email not working" is not easy - he have a few dozends checks
on that already and you can assume that we are aware of issues usually
faster than most other people.

For the reporting/contacting stuff it seems you actually want to start
advocating a tracker/ticketing solution for the project which is an
interesting idea (note that the sysadmin team already has simple
tracker/ticket solution internally).

As for providing status updates and stuff like that - this is probably
much more than we can do(we don't have unlimited resources ...) - this
is still a community project( for 99% of the issues (because those are
either fixed very quickly or have no or no noticable effect on the
infrastructure).
For planned maintenance and reboots/updates of major infrastructure
components we are actually trying to inform in advance (but we could
certainly improve in that area)

>
> Right now, when email is down, I just start IM'ing people. A more
> structured system would help me.

Some people would say a more structured approach to patch/bug tracking
would help them (but maybe not help you) ;-)
Getting you sent the alerts too is simple to do - but the question is
more of what value that information would be for you ?

Stefan