3/10    Regarding donations, does CSUA take monetary donations? Why can't
        We setup a non-profit fund raising event & setup a bank/treasury and
        give more quota/cputime to those who donate more while keeping
        the same services for other members. I'm sure that'll really buy us
        a really nice machine, with gigabytes of RAID, fast quad processors
        (to run crackroot at night), etc etc. What do you all say?
        \_ You can't sell services; people can donate money, but you can't
           give them more disk space because they donated money.  (Though
           you could raise the quota for everyone).  But anyway, the CSUA
           could easily come up with the $400 or so it would take to
           completely eliminate the disk space problem.  (Or they could even
           use a joined filesystem that would mean there would be no problem,
           even with the current amount of disk space).  It's just a question
           of will.  -tom
           \_ I am fairly certain some people have more diskspace than others
              due to 'contributing to the CSUA', and I am fairly certain some
              of those contributions resulted in either making or saving money
              for the CSUA.  The line does seem a little faint. -- ilyas
              \_ Why should the quota be the same for everyone? I thought
                 you hated socialism.
                 \_ Certainly it should not.  But drawing the line at 'buying
                    diskspace' seems stupid, as it is already essentially
                    bought.  "In Soviet Russia, socialism hates you." -- ilyas
        \_ Er, I don't know if "$400" is enough to get the disk we want.
           The current tech/vp cabal (mainly njh and erikk) are looking at
           much larger disk arrays (in terms of number of disks or whatnot -
           $400 will only get you ~2-3 good sized disks) with good RAIDing and
           backup and whatnot - ie, fibre channel, scsi, etc etc - at least
           this is what we did to fix the office accounts disk space problem
           (which seemed more dire at the time, if I remember right). These
           kinds of things usually take a fair amount of planning, time, and
           cash to get right and be fairly future proofed, from what I have
           seen. Any time, money, or hardware alumni kick in will be
           appreciated (unless it's a 5 disk, 80GB SCSI RAID array...). There
           is no pay for play, that just won't happen. --jhs
           \_ I'm not sure what disk you want, but the disk you *need* isn't
              anything near that.  Even right now there is about 100 GB of
              spinning disk on soda and only about 50GB of usage (half of
              which is backup instead of primary usage); reallocation
              would solve the immediate problem, and you could easily triple
              the disk space available for very little money.  -tom
                \_ If that is the case, I think it would be reasonable to
                   ask alumni to donate for a couple hundred GB drive to
                   expand to, I would donate some $ to that to increase
                   quotas.  I'm not convinced w.r.t. the fibre raid, though.
                   \_ I'd be perfectly willing to contribute $50-$100 if it
                      were easy and straightforward.  I suspect other alumni
                      would be as well.  -emarkp
                      \_ me too: ...
           \_ The new CSUA'ers sure are picky.
           \_ jhs, what the fuck are you talking about?  This is something that
              anyone who has done before can set up in an afternoon.  And why
              isn't there pay to play?  We've done it in the past, it's all
              just a matter of semantics.
              - Has set up good raiding and backup several times, and can
                now do it in an afternoon
              \_ Feel free to send mail to the masses of members who have the
                 time, skill, desire, and spacial locality to soda to set up
                 the system you think is best. I'll enjoy the larger
                 quota and defer to your greatness. --jhs
                 \_ I'll be at the next politburo meeting and I'll offer to
                    do it on the condition that you stop naysaying and
                    shooting down ideas that you basically know nothing about.
                    - Has set up good raiding and backup several times, and
                      can now do it in an afternoon
           \_ out of curiosity, what is "good backup"? Raid is easy but
              backup is the screwy part. --not a sysadmin
              \_ You can do very clever things with any number of pieces of
                 software.  A second large array and using incremental dumps
                 or rsyncs (my preference) is easy, cheap, and effective (and
                 less of a pain than rotating tapes) --scotsman
        \_ How 'bout a little paypal donate button on the web page?
           \- what is the point of adding disk to soda?  i'm not saying there
              isnt one, but i dont see the case being made. --psb
              \_ I don't know what everyone else's problem is, but the
                 current soda disks (the TDAs) scare the hell out of me. The
                 disks in the array are probably ten years old, and as far as
                 I know there's no redundancy in the disk array (other than
                 the backup disks, which aren't really redundant). These
                 drives are nearing the end of their useful lives, so we may
                 as well come up with a new storage solution as we look at
                 phasing out the old disk. I'm much more concerned with
                 reliability than space, but I hardly use my soda space
                 anyway. -gm (!root)
                 \_ And wisely so.  Why anyone would really need more space
                    on soda is beyond me.  Soda could at any moment go poof and
                    arch over and take out the backups.  Don't keep anything
                    on here that you're worried about.
        \_ Dick Hyman is a famous jazz musician. pianist?