[CC to madwifi-users removed]

Hi Alvin.

First of all: it's good to see you being back and available again. I
really was concerned about what might have happened, since you did not
reply to any of my mails during the past two months.

quoted text
> i see there's lots of un-necessary activity on madwifi.org

If that refers to the fact that some of the people behind the project try
to contact you by phone, please see below. Otherwise please explain what
you refer to here.

quoted text
> it was nice and quiet  and peaceful and functional
> per the original agreement, and still is,

To be correct, there currently is a technical problem related to one of
the two authoritative DNS servers. The DNS service at
dnsf.linux-consulting.com was down for some days; it seems to be back up
since Friday (September 12) last week, it replies for queries about
linux-consulting.com, but not for queries about madwifi.org.

quoted text
> i'm sure you would not appreciate a dozen daily
> phone calls to your home from people you do not know

I think it would only be fair to sched some light on "the other side",
too, to set what you said above in the right context.

Several years ago you have registered the domain madwifi.org (and .net and
.com). Back in late 2005, when we decided to move the project website away
from sourceforge.net on our own server, you granted use of madwifi.org for
this site. The agreement was that you manage the zonefile, and if
something needs to be adjusted, we let you know. Since that time I was the
person who talked to you on behalf of the project in this regard.

This agreement worked fine, you were responsive and you did apply all
requested changes quickly, within no longer than two or three days. The
DNS servers were running reliable and stable for almost two years. The
first outage appeared not earlier than in late April 2007, and a second
one in early July 2007. No problem, since you fixed both issues quickly.

The authoritative nameservers are dnsc.linux-consulting.com (157.22.35.2)
and dnsf.linux-consulting.com (157.22.35.3). Both servers are in the same
IP subnet. As you told me, both servers are also in the same building and
attached to the same UPS device. Which leaves some room for improvements
in terms of failover safety.

In response to the DNS outage in July we were contacted by several users
who offered their DNS servers as backup. I was busy at that time, so it
took me until August 3 before I started a discussion with you about the
general topic "ways to improve the availability of the nameservices for
madwifi.org". At first it seemed that we disagree about some aspects, but
finally it turned out that we are on the same page.

During the discussion another DNS outage occured on August 13, and you
fixed it promptly again. My last reply to the mentioned discussion was
sent to you on August 16, suggesting a "hidden primary DNS" scenario [1]
that would allow madwifi.org administrators to modify the zonefile
directly, thus eleminating the dependency on you or me for that particular
task. In closing of that mail I asked for your feedback.

I did not get any reply from you since then. On August 28 I've resent my
last mail, adding that I'd appreciate your reply because of upcoming
changes that need to be made to the zonefile (in response to the switch
towards ath5k that we were preparing for at around that time) - no
response. I've sent another mail on September 7, adding that even a short
"sorry, I'm busy" would be fine - no response. Another mail on September
20, asking for some sort of reply - again, no response.

This was very unusual; in all the time we have been working together you
always replied in a timely manner. What's going on? Did I upset you with
one of my mails? A long holiday? Did you move to a different location? Or
even something worse? These were the concerns I had in the back of my mind
when I asked for help from other team members on September 24.

My spoken english sucks, and in addition I was (and still am) pretty busy
due to my daytime job, so I asked for a native speaker who would be
willing to contact you or your company by phone. The contact information
in madwifi.org's whois differs from that on http://linux-consulting.com,
which I took as possible proof for the theory that you might have moved.
Thus I mentioned a total of four numbers (one from whois, three from
linux-consultimg.com) where you probably could be reached.

As far as I know, a total of three project members tried to contact you,
none of them on overlapping times. They told me that they never got a
human being on the phone, and there was no reaction on the left voicebox
messages. The issue with dnsf.linux-consulting.com (that still holds on)
then just added to our growing concerns.

Please accept my appologies if we overshot the mark by trying to contact
you by phone after you didn't respond to mails for several weeks. I hope
the above explanation helps to understand why we took that road.

quoted text
> please contact the information provided by
> 	whois madwifi.org
> and more importantly, have 1 contact person ...

As a side note, one of your statements in our "improving availability of
madwifi.org nameservices" discussion was: "i've been involved with too
many open source projects that all dies due to one person control of all
aspects of the project. opensource should involve and encourage as many
people as possible to help in various ways".

In fact we are actively working on eleminating "single point of failures"
for the project, and besides the technical PoF (such as the DNS servers)
this also includes administrative PoF (such as me being the only person
involved in certain procedures, such as contacting you if needs be). It's
pretty obvious that "have 1 contact person" does not fit into the picture
here, right?


Anyway. It would be great if we could now continue the original discussion
regarding the nameserver setup - preferably offlist. Please let me know if
I should resend the last of my mails in that discussion.

Bye, Mike

[1] http://www.dyndns.com/support/kb/running_a_hidden_primary.html


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