Still Worried about ZIM

Trejkaz — Mon, 21 Nov 2005 12:53:00 +1100

Well, here we are again with yet another 5-day downtime for Jabber.ZIM.

It’s a bit depressing to be the so-called admin of a server which continuously experiences this kind of downtime — we used to have such good uptime, too — but the reality of the whole thing is that a lot of factors stack up to prevent me having the control I need to keep the server running.

It’s currently hosted at ZIM itself, meaning that the odds of moving it to some other host is minimal (although starting a completely new server is something I’ve been considering for a long time now.) I don’t own the ZIM domain name, so I can’t just redirect the entries to point them somewhere else.

Next, ZIM itself is actually a virtual ISP, and the server which runs the Jabber service occasionally crashes (I guess BSDs aren’t as stable as the Slashdot BSD fanatics would like us to believe) and thus I become unable to fix it as I have no authority to go and do so, nor ability to sway the ISP to do so for me.

And finally, occasionally we get situations where the machine itself is completely healthy and the Jabber server is up, but the Internet simply stops routing packets to it.

All of these factors result in an awful lot of things which can go wrong which are all outside my control, and in some cases outside the control of ZIM itself.

I guess the question is… is it really impossible to move this to another host? ZIM would obviously have no direct connection with the server anymore, and we’d have to put up banners for the new sponsor, but otherwise nothing would really change as long as we pulled all the spools over to the new server.

I just don’t know how to go about begging for sponsorship for something like this. Maybe it’s time to start learning.

Jabber uses (using statistics from jabber.org) approximately 100 bits per second per user (outbound, slightly less inbound.) It would take, then, around 4,000 users to max out a 512kbit ADSL connection, and ZIM has/had something like 150-200 frequent users so in reality it would be using only the tiniest amount of bandwidth. Space requirements aren’t a major issue, though CPU and memory requirements may be. Overall the requirements aren’t too harsh, so perhaps it wouldn’t hurt to start prodding a few ISPs to see how they feel about hosting this kind of thing.

Then we just need to see if ZIM is willing to relinquish control of the server which has their domain name in it…

Trypticon: Still Worried about ZIM

Still Worried about ZIM