[Harp-L] Details of the new hardware and software

["\"\"Ben J. Nathanson\"\"" <bjnath@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Although the announcement said the cutover would take place
tomorrow, it's (as you probably realize) already done. It
took place quietly in the middle of the Juke thread. 

Our new machine is a virtual private server operated by
RimuHosting (http://rimuhosting.com). VPS means we can be
true root -- uid 0, not sudo. We're free to install and
reconfigure and reboot as we please. It's a small virtual
machine (64MB memory, 4GB filesystem, $19.95/month),
virtualized with User Mode Linux, running White Box
Enterprise Linux 3 (http://whiteboxlinux.org). RimuHosting
describes the hardware at
http://rimuhosting.com/hardware.jsp. Our machine came nicely
set up with the kinds of software we'd have had to install
and configure otherwise. Apache and Sendmail were running,
Webmin was installed, and they installed Mailman for us.
More ready-to-use stuff keeps turning up (SpamAssassin, for
instance). I've been pleased with RimuHosting. This is
clearly a geek-run company (see their purposeful website).
They know what you're after. If you pick up a VPS of your
own from them, please mention harp-l -- for each referral
they'll take $15 off our bill. 

fjm chose Mailman (http://list.org) to replace the backlevel
Majordomo release that had been running the list. Mailman --
which in addition to being GPL'd is officially Gnu Project
software -- provides a wonderful array of list features
including archiving, but, surprisingly, no searching. To get
searching, and to handle multimegabyte archives, we replaced
our Mailman install with the integration of Mailman, MHonArc
and htDig created by Richard Barrett
(http://www.openinfo.co.uk/mailman). Mailman is written in
Python, which made it easy (fun, actually) to make
modifications for our site. 

All Mailman administrative settings were the responsibility
of fjm, who based the work  on his experience running harp-l
for the last year (I hadn't known this either). 

I'd like to echo fjm's thanks to the beta team, which kicked
the tires on the new list and offered input on features. 

And deep thanks to fjm, who leaped at the opportunity to
make this change and pushed it forward. It makes the list
better now, it opens up the list's past through the
archives, and it opens up the list's future.