[Savannah-hackers] Re: new machine france.fsfeurope.org (aka fr.fsf.org)

[Joel N. Weber II]

I don't speak for the GNU project, only myself, but here are some
thoughts:

           All this is at a pretty early stage and it strikes me as
   particularily important that we don't start to re-implement facilities
   that are already existing in the GNU project such as DNS hosting,
   mailing lists, Savannah etc. I'd rather like that we re-use these
   facilities, re-use the guidelines and help maintaining them and mofifying
   them to better fit the needs of the GNU project. In other words, the
   fr.fsf.org machine should contribute to and use the GNU project instead
   of being a completly separate spinof that only has a domain name in 
   common with the GNU project.

We might want to consider using france.fsfeurope.org as one of the
canonical GNU nameservers.  I'm a bit undecided on whether I think
it's a good idea; I have in the past been rather strongly against
having a nameserver in the United Kingdom, in part because I hear that
bandwidth there is fairly limited.  However, as of like three minutes
ago, I seem to have a rather stable connection to
france.fsfeurope.org, and the ping time to there is approximately the
same as the ping time I get to various GNU servers at VA, so if the
transatlantic lines tend to consistently not be flooded,
france.fsfeurope.org is probably a reasonable choice of nameserver.

Also, regardless of whether the transatlantic lines are consistently
flooded, it would be nice to have at least one nameserver for the
european GNU stuff in europe, since the people who will be most
interested in fsfeurope.org and thus will care most about its
performance will tend to be in europe.  In fact, I think it might be
best to have the majority of the nameservers for fsfeurope.org located
in europe.

It's worth pointing out that rather than registering the machine with
your DNS registrar is france.fsfeurope.org, you should register it as
ns1.fsfeurope.org (or something more creative than ns1 if you prefer);
the reason is that you will probably need to change its IP address at
some point in the future, and if you register its primary name with
the DNS registrars, then there will be an A record for that primary
name in all the toplevel DNS servers, and so you'll have to wait until
the registrar propagates the changes before users can reliably view
the website again, whereas if you register ns1.fsfeurope.org with the
registrar, you can just change the zone file on ns1.gnu.org, wait two
hours, and everyone who looks up france.fsfeurope.org will get the new
IP address.

As far as mail goes, I do think that for software development
projects, we should always host the lists on fencepost in the gnu.org
domain, regardless of which country the project originates in.
However, if there are mailing lists that will be primarily of interest
to the europeans, I don't see anything that would be wrong with having
them appear in the fsfeurope.org domain.  We could still have those
lists handled by fencepost if people want; it's not too difficult to
configure fencepost to have aliases files for multiple domains (note
that one also needs to adjust the mailer config on delysid when doing
this), and I can do this if people want.