new BALUG venue >=2014-10 - location to be determined
Four Seas Restaurant lost their lease. We still have meeting space there
through our September meeting (their last regular day of business will
be 2014-09-27). For our October meeting and beyond, we'll need a new
meeting location. Anyway, this can (and likely will) be discussed on
the "talk" list, and I'll also mention it fairly soon on the "announce"
list (not later than whenever we put out our next regular announcement).
Hopefully we'll come up with a good/excellent "permanent" (well, at
least long-term) location, but in any case we'll certainly meet
*somewhere*.
My initial thoughts:
o BALUG has always met in San Francisco, and almost always at the Four
Seas Restaurant in Chinatown. Despite it being the
"Bay Area Linux Users Group", given history and momentum, etc., it's
probably most appropriate/best to come up with a regular meeting
location that's in San Francisco, and not too far time/distance-wise
via walking or short Muni/BART hop from the general
Financial District/Downtown/SOMA/Chinatown area, or some reasonable
approximation thereof (e.g. parts of the Mission). Notably a fair
percentage of our typical attendees come in from the East Bay, and a
significant percentage of those come in via BART. Of course we may
have a bit of the self-selecting sample set phenomenon, but if we want
to retain at least most of our attendee base, we'd probably want
something at least fairly comparably convenient regarding location
(and also some kind of semi-reasonable parking not all that far away).
o Opportunity(?) :-) ... changes? Perhaps best to think of it as an
"opportunity" - perhaps we can improve or significantly improve some
factors of our meeting location. The
"Good locations for a BAD meeting will have" listed on:
http://bad.debian.net/shotgun_rules.txt
gives a pretty good overview of what generally constitutes a good
meeting location, though some of that is different for BALUG. Notably
BALUG sometimes has large crowds - e.g. >=110 people for some of our
meetings. BALUG also almost always meets at the same fixed location.
o (relatively) Unique to BALUG - some things are relatively unique to
BALUG. Many of them are probably well worth preserving - at least
if/as feasible, others might not be so important (and can sometimes
even be a moderate disadvantage). At least a few that come to mind:
o *typically* has speaker/presentation, and meeting location suitable
to that
o can accommodate *large* crowds, e.g. up to >~=200 people
o relatively convenient location for and in San Francisco, and
considered relatively central to the Bay Area (it is the
"Bay Area Linux Users Group", after all)
o Chinese food - rather good food and a quite good price, and the
simplicity of relatively fixed menu, and fixed price - and able to
handle large meetings. Note also the restaurant/food thing can be
both advantage and disadvantage - some folks often don't come on
account of the food cost/expectation and that part of the meeting
structure. Notably some may quite prefer a much lower to free cost
of totally participating and being present at all parts of the
meeting - while that may not be possible/feasible for many (e.g.
restaurant/cafe) venues, many also have a much "lower cost of
entry" (e.g. minimum purchase might be something like a beverage or
cookie or the like).
DO NOT REPLY ALL! (unless you're subscribed to BOTH lists)
maintenance starting after 2014-07-02 5:30 P.M. PDT,
expected to conclude before 2014-07-02 24:00 PDT
there may be no additional notifications for this set of outages
Various services will be intermittently (un)available.
Will impact:
SF-LUG:
sf-lug.org, sf-lug.com, www.sf-lug.org, www.sf-lug.com., etc.
will not impact: sf-lug(a)linuxmafia.com http://linuxmafia.com/pipermail/sf-lug/
For SF-LUG, there may also remain the coincidental but unrelated timing of:
http://linuxmafia.com/pipermail/sf-lug/2014q2/010554.html
BALUG:
will mostly only impact non-production and ancillary services, e.g.:
http://www.archive.balug.org/http://www.wiki.balug.org/wiki
etc.
WILL NOT IMPACT: BALUG main web site and its pages:
http://www.balug.org/
nor BALUG mail lists or email infrastructure
Technical details:
If it's on 208.96.15.250-208.96.15.254 it will be impacted.
Various hardware/firmware/operating system maintenance will be performed
on the physical host which has guest hosts of sflug and balug,
and additional work may also be done on the sflug guest virtual machine's
operating system.
Will be doing some system maintenance, so,
some ancillary BALUG services will be intermittently unavailable.
Note that this WILL NOT IMPACT: main web site and its pages:
http://www.balug.org/
nor our mail lists or email infrastructure.
It WILL IMPACT some other services, at least intermittently,
e.g.:
http://www.archive.balug.org/http://www.wiki.balug.org/wiki
etc.
Technical details:
If it's on 208.96.15.254 it will be impacted.
The (qeum-kvm) virtual machine guest on that IP will be undergoing some
maintenance:
"convert" /usr, /var, and /home filesystems from reiserfs to ext3
(well, actually do a final rsyncs from ro mounted filesystems in
single user mode, then switch 'em out and reboot)
(and probably also continue up/cross grade from i386 to amd64)
Will be doing some system upgrades, so,
some ancillary BALUG services will be intermittently unavailable.
Note that this WILL NOT IMPACT: main web site and its pages:
http://www.balug.org/
nor our mail lists or email infrastructure.
It WILL IMPACT some other services, at least intermittently,
e.g.:
http://www.archive.balug.org/http://www.wiki.balug.org/wiki
etc.
Technical details:
If it's on 208.96.15.254 it will be impacted.
The (qeum-kvm) virtual machine guest on that IP will be getting upgraded
from: Debian GNU/Linux 6.0.9 (squeeze) i386
to: Debian GNU/Linux 7.5 (wheezy)
(and possibly also up/cross graded from i386 to amd64, or may defer
that)
And, back we go again - starting NOW.
For the most part, if you're not making changes or using a long-running
connection (e.g. ssh session), you probably won't notice. If you do
make changes, those CHANGES MAY NOT BE MIGRATED, effective NOW, until
the migration is completed. I'm guestimating that will be less than or
approximately one hour's time total. I'll update notification when the
migration is completed.
This WILL NOT impact:
www.balug.orgbalug.org (itself)
BALUG's lists
It WILL impact:
many non-production services and some ancillary production services,
e.g.:
archive.balug.orgwww.archive.balug.orgwiki.balug.orgwww.wiki.balug.orgsecure.balug.org
Technical details:
If it's on 198.144.194.234 it will be impacted (IP will change).
rsync ... reconfigure & boot target ... DNS
Due to needed physical host relocation (not sure of precise timing),
I'm expecting we may have some disruptions and/or non-continuity of
service for some BALUG services. Guestimated the impact may be on the
order of some hour(s) or (probably) less, or may involve some
discontinuity/inconsistencies of service (e.g. updates/changes may not
propagate to new host location).
I'll provides updates when I'm reasonably able to, however note at the
present time:
THESE DISRUPTIONS MAY OCCUR WITHOUT FURTHER ADVANCE NOTICE.
In "worst case" I'll be able to provide update when the dust is settled
and the move more-or-less completed, and in any case I'll provide update
when we can expect things are relatively settled and not as likely to
generally suffer more disruptions (mostly notably services should be
restored to much more consistent again, though availability probably
won't be as high as the current colo setup, as host won't be going to a
colo).
This WILL NOT impact:
www.balug.orgbalug.org (itself)
BALUG's lists
It WILL impact:
many non-production services and some ancillary production services,
e.g.:
archive.balug.orgwww.archive.balug.orgwiki.balug.orgwww.wiki.balug.orgsecure.balug.org
Technical details:
If it's on 208.96.15.254 it will be impacted (IP will change).