webspace for GDP

[Graham Percival]

Thanks for all the offers for hosting!  I should mention some cautions, 
though.  There are two ways of doing this:


RSYNC

The documentation is about 150 megs, including all the languages, 
images, snippets, and the like.  Let's say that we're look at up to 200 
megs for the next six months.  (at that point GDP will be over)

A bigger concern is that I need to update the docs every day.  Via 
rsync, I'm guessing it's about 10 megs of traffic on average.  It 
depends whether I've been changing any macros (= lots of HTML pages 
modified) or just adding new sections.  However, there are 12,999 files 
for rsync to examine for changes.  That's still a huge amount of 
traffic, even if nothing was actually updated.

(you see now why I wanted to have it locally, so that all this traffic 
would be over ethernet)


BUILDING DOCS LOCALLY

An alternative to full rsync is to build the docs locally.  That's 
actually what I do now.  I installed a bunch of programs, so on the 
webserver I just do a "git pull; makedocs; publishdocs" to update stuff. 
 That results in pulling about 5k of doc source file changes, and the 
server handles everything else.

There are two problems to this one.  First, building the docs takes 
about an hour.  If this server is in your basement, that's no problem. 
If it's a co-location host where you pay for CPU usage, this _is_ a problem.

Second, you need a bunch of programs not commonly found on a webserver:
git
texinfo
texi2html (maybe)
netpbm
latex
imagemagick
ghostscript
... probably a few I've missed...


The one plus side is that the actual web traffic will probably be about 
5 megs per day.  There are currently two people working on GDP, and they 
only need to look at a few doc sections each week.  (unfortunately, I 
can't easily restrict the doc build to only those sections)


I expect the problems with opihi to be resolved on Monday.  We host real 
research on this webserver (a couple of published papers direct people 
to examples found on the server), so it should be a priority for the IT 
guys.  And it's not the computer itself; I can view the files just fine 
if I connect from campus.  It just doesn't work from off-campus.  :(


My general impression is that it's not worth moving the server unless 
there's a GDP helper who wants to build the docs themselves anyway. 
That said, I might be overestimating the charges for uploading material 
to a webserver, or the price of storage, or something.  I readily admit 
that the last time I looked at commercial web hosting was about ten 
years ago.

Whatever happens with the GDP output, I'm going to move the files for 
GDP helpers to a different server.  My main university account only 
gives me 5 megs, but that's plenty of space for those files.

Cheers,
- Graham