[tor-project] meetbot PSA

[Antoine Beaupré]

Hello!

I'm your new friendly sysadmin! I hope I'm doing good. I'm also not a
bot and should be able to pass a turing test on a good day. ;)

I've so far prioritized my work mostly towards sysadmin-specific stuff
(like rebuilding parts of the broken monitoring system and generally get
up to speed with everything), but I'm sensitive to priorities people
from the Tor project express, obviously...

One of those recurring issue I've heard (other than "OMG Trac is pain!"
of course) is that "MeetBot is down!" The service is ran by the good
folks at Debian, but has fallen somewhat in disarray in recent
years. All the gory details are of course in Trac:

https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/29680

... but the short story is that I've considered setting up a replacement
when the service was completely offline. Since then, the Debian folks
brought the machine back up (you can see logs at
http://meetbot.debian.net/) but the bot is still struggling to return. I
am hoping they bring it back up themselves and restore the service. If
that doesn't happen, I might squat a VM somewhere to restore some sort
of service myself within TPO.

But considering the number of things I'm juggling with right now, I'd be
very happy with not adding a new service to the list on my first (well,
second) week on the job. So I hope people don't mind the little extra
wait while the good folks at Debian figure out what they want to do with
the service in the long term.

As weasel says, we don't want to reimplement all the services on the
internet ourselves, do we? :) So if that problem can be fixed itself,
I'll be more than happy than watch it heal.

If not, we'll figure something out.

Note that I've made sure the ArchiveBot (from ArchiveTeam) takes a look
at the site so we have a copy as well in the Internet Archive.

See you around!

A.

PS: the best place to report problems like this is still Trac. File a
ticket in the "Internal Services/Tor Sysadmin Team" and I'll definitely
look at it.

-- 
Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions
of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught
mathematical concepts...
                       - William Gibson