XSF Communications Team - 2022-04-26

emus, what's the best email address to contact you regarding commteam stuff? (want to forward you an email received to info@xmpp.org)

Its not directlt a role out of commteam I recommend to reply to the mail I wrote from. But to answer your question: xsfcommteam@protonmail.com

MattJ:

so what ever is fine. but I dont get forwards to my private mail

I'm not talking about the email you sent to info@, but an email received from someone else that is relevant to commteam

Ah alright! yes please

but if you cc the other mail I would be very happy ☺

protonmail? You know you could get your own @xmpp.org address certainly :p

Well especially since you're not the only one in commteam

Ain't PGP dead? :)

?

pep., the problem is we don't run IMAP at xmpp.org, everything there is an alias/mailman, and commteam wanted to be able to send/receive email from a specific address, hence the 3rd party

:/

i.e. we don't actually host any email *accounts*

MattJ: could still allow sending mail there, no? IMAP is just for storage/retrieval

Technically there still needs to be an account but yeah no IMAP indeed. The mail needs to be sent from the machine that has authority over the domain so receiving SMTP entities can have their various checks pass

singpolyma, sure, but at the time there requirement was send+receive

Receive can be an alias

We still don't have that ability for the newsletter, apparently

still ✏

Senders would have to go through hoops to be able to use it properly though :/

(That is for example, including the alias in every outgoing mail so everybody in the alias sees what's happening. Kind of a weird trick because of no IMAP :p)

But if it were just one person behind it might work ok

pep.: the proton account I took over from you guys 😅 and yes, I requested that several times but was not interest to do it so far

pep.: That's how my whole company does everything (cc the team alias on replies). Last thing I would ever want is a second IMAP to check, muh nicer to have stuff forwarded to me. Of course everyone has their own preferred workflow, but it works well for us :) ✏

pep.: That's how my whole company does everything (cc the team alias on replies). Last thing I would ever want is a second IMAP to check, much nicer to have stuff forwarded to me. Of course everyone has their own preferred workflow, but it works well for us :) ✏

emus, interest in what, exactly? Aliases/forwards have always been available, just an actual email account is not (and that is not going to change any time soon)

Talking about infra, what happened to contracting somebody?

Our main priority right now is that the server that all this is running on is 2003 hardware with an OS that needs an upgrade but there's no guarantee that the newer OS would boot on that machine (we already have that problem with at least one other server in the "fleet").

MattJ: it's an owned server?

Right now I think it's up to Board to choose between seeking a sponsor of new hardware, purchasing a new machine, or switching to VPS

singpolyma, yes, the XSF has several dedicated servers which have been donated or purchased

I think at this point the one handling the mail is our oldest that's still alive

And then paying for rack space or also donated in someone's cage?

But some of them have changed hostname during the years, so it's hard to keep track

We have a donated rack at USSHC

(shared with jabber.org, which is technically not an XSF thing)

32bit I guess, is that the main hw compatibility issue?

32bit, and concerns about whether it can boot from a partition not in the first 1024 sectors (we believe yes, but there's only one way to know for certain...)

A long queue of yaks reside in this infrastructure

and I *haven't* really regretted moving the website to a VPS a year or two back (it costs more $, but less time in the long term) ✏

Which is why I resist adding more self-hosted/self-managed stuff to maintain unless it's strictly necessary

Yeah, I don't mind my dedis but if the hardware gets old it's a few clicks to bring up a new one. Owned hardware is not something that has tempted me too much yet 😅️

The website is all static isn't it?

I think back in the olden days when we were younger, before cloud and VMs were everywhere, if someone said "I have a server going spare, want it?" was not something you'd turn down

Yeah, the website is all static these days

Tbh I could probably get you hosted in a squat somewhere if you wanted :P

Sounds reliable ;)

That's overrated :P

Especially when we're hosting websites on solar power nowadays! (https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/)

And email's got a 48h tolerance so it's all good :P

MattJ: right, so barely even needs VPS, could do it on anything. Email could do a-la-carte (either at a mail host or get some shlub like me to donate email server infra). I'm not saying you should do this per se, I'm just thinking out loud :)

As a selfhoster myself I'd rather not have the XSF go full third-parties (cloud and whatnot). I think that's a line we should not cross and I'd have the XSF pay for this not to happen.

There's already github, the thing for the agenda, gcalendar also, gdrive, the newsletter thing that's fortunately going away(?), and many others I'm forgetting?

pep.: it's third parties all the way down, though. Even currently the rack/cage/datacentre are third party. Putting the website on sourcehut pages (as an example) means you don't get to walk into the cage, but that would be true with a VPS too. It means someone else has root, but that's also true with the VPS, or even the current infra (physical access being root and all that)

singpolyma, I meant, just owning the domain and not the data. Yeah surely a VPS is already an abstraction and I'm compromising here

Not asking the XSF to get its own datacentre

pep.: it *has* it's own datacentre. We're wondering out loud if that's bad

It doesn't, it has its own hardware in someone's datacentre :p

pep., the question is, where do you draw the line, and how do you decide that?

I'm a self-hoster too (obviously), but it also has to be recognised that there are (often hidden) costs of self-hosting, and sometimes they aren't worth it

So these have to balance against the problems with dependencies on third parties

and I suspect the balance may shift depending on the service

We draw the line where we want to draw the line, but it has to be in line with the direction the XSF takes. I'm sure atm many people in the XSF wouldn't care because first they don't want to take care of the infra, and second they're part of this ideology and they're happy to give everything away and it's not an issue for them if the XSF reflects this

I'm not

Like, XSF could hire a contractor to run a mailserver. Or pay migadu. These seem effectively equivalent to me

It's only "self hosting" if you have a "self"

Self is the XSF? What else

XSF isn't a self, it's a comittee

It's a self enough to me

if XSF hires a contractor is that still "self" ?

As long as the XSF owns the data, that's a yes to me

Now that this chat has gone this far we can take it to infra@ if necessary, or we can pause here, whichever :)

I was mostly curious at first

*iteam@

Thanks I was looking for it

> MattJ escribió: > emus, interest in what, exactly? Aliases/forwards have always been available, just an actual email account is not (and that is not going to change any time soon) I just meant the email discussion I raised some time ago. but is fine now

pep.: Thanks - It think if we hire someone, then in iTeam instead of commteam

emus, I just said so.

Anyway I don't have much more to say about this topic and I'm not pesonally going to reanimate it over there. Just that I'd be sad that the XSF stops owning their data and that's where I'd personally draw the line because that's what I want the XSF to reflect. I want to encourage small self-hosted entities everywhere.

But I'm happy to debate on what "owning" its data mean. Just getting to talk about this would already recentre the debate anyway and that's good to me

fwiw, I'm annoyed about being told offtopic this or that. This discussion makes sense here because it's the continuation of another one and not everybody participating in is on the other channel

I didn't see anyone say anything about off-topic until you did... ??

Ok that's how I interpreted emus' last message

But it's not the first time anyway

People seems to quickly draw the offtopic card around here and that annoys me ✏

Okay, I have noted your annoyance

:P

Maybe we should make a dedicated channel for that ✏

Good

Annoyance is offtopic in this channel, please take it elsewhere. *pokerface*

(sorry, I couldn't resist)

:)

> pep. escribió: > Ok that's how I interpreted emus' last message > But it's not the first time anyway No, it didnt meant offtopic. I just run with this account. Id prefer an xsf owned thing, but for that we would need more resources in iTeam. That's why I came to the same conclusion as you. but also dont know what to do here :/

> pep. escribió: > People seems to quickly draw the offtopic card around here and that annoys me ?

> Sam escribió: > Annoyance is offtopic in this channel, please take it elsewhere. *pokerface* > (sorry, I couldn't resist) oh c'mon...

That's a meme already emus, embrace it :)

Licaon_Kter: offtopic 😉

👍

https://xmpp.org/rfcs/ is finally working :)

so nice - I will try to remind to tweet :-)

wurstsalat:

I left a longer comment on wurstsalat's iteam issue, but nothing major

I also just added a redirect for /rfcs/index.shtml which was the old index page that hasn't been updated for a long time

cool