Re: New email list for emergency communications

[Stefan Kaltenbrunner <stefan(at)kaltenbrunner(dot)cc>]

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