Hereby I am announcing that I will eventually quit the administration of TASVideos and all related tasks.
As I have
previously stated, I want to keep things operational as long as possible, and certainly I do not want my quitting to disturb the site's operation in any way. For example, I have paid the tasvideos.org domain for five more years.
As such, however, I want to progressively give out portions of this site to other people.
These are the things I want to give out / assign new people for:
BitTorrent tracker
The tracker is the site
tracker.tasvideos.org.
It contains the following properties:
― A webroot wherein torrents are stored and downloaded from. In the same webroot, a SOAP API, written in PHP, exists ― the main site will use this API to query torrent download locations, and to upload new torrents.
― BitTorrent tracker software (BNBT). It uses the webroot as its allowed-dir.
Maintenance requirements:
― Your Internet connection should allow incoming connections to ports 80 (http), 6969 (BitTorrent) and 6967 (the second tracker).
― Ensuring that the disk space does not run out. Currently the tracker uses some 44 MB of disk space. If tracker logs are enabled, the amount grows by some 50 MB each day, but otherwise, it grows quite slowly.
― Ensuring that the tracker software (BNBT) as well as the web software are up and running.
― Once in a while moving old torrents from the webroot into an "obsolete" directory. This is an entirely manual process, but completely optional.
― It requires a relatively small amount of bandwidth. I'd say if you have 15 kB/s upstream, it's enough for the tracker. You will, however, require a robust router, because the tracker gets connections from a lot of different IP addresses. If your router is not robust, you may find that you need to reboot it often.
TAKEN by Nach. (Not migrated yet?) Thanks!
Image server
The image server is the site
media.tasvideos.org.
It contains the following properties:
― A webroot wherein images (screenshots) are stored and downloaded from. In the same webroot, a SOAP API, written in PHP, exists ― the main site will use this API to query image download locations, and to upload new images. (Implemented in April 2009)
Maintenance requirements:
― Your Internet connection should allow incoming connections to port 80 (http).
― Ensuring that the disk space does not run out. Currently the site uses some 500 MB of disk space (though most of that consists of old AVI demonstration files). The amount grows by a megabyte or so per month. If the AVIs and old TASSnapShots are scrapped (feasible), it is only 80 MB. 40 MB, if also autoscreenshots are scrapped.
― Once in a while, optimizing all new PNG files with
pngout. This is completely optional, but it will reduce your bandwidth utilization by a few percent.
― Ensuring that the web software is up and running.
― Your bandwidth should be such that your server can upload something like 20―50 kB/s. Images are requested usually in spurts, i.e. for 20 seconds there is no access, and suddenly 150 files are downloaded at once.
TAKEN by Nach. Thanks!
The actual site
The actual site is the
tasvideos.org website and its subdirectories, including the forums.
It contains the following properties:
― A webroot wherein the site engine is executed from. In the same webroot, is the forums, and all the backend functions (such as the SOAP API) of the website.
― Two MySQL databases: one for the actual site (nesvideos_site) and one for the forums (nesvideos_forum).
― A memcache cache process.
Maintenance requirements:
― Your Internet connection should allow incoming connections to port 80 (http). (And likely 22 (ssh), for the developers.)
― Absolutely trustworthy and keeps confidential information confidential.
― Ensuring that all software is running and operational.
― Ensuring that the Internet connection (network) is capable enough and robust.
― Ensuring that the hardware is sufficient for the site. The current site
has a Intel Core2Quad (64-bit 4-core 2400 Mhz) and 6 GB of 800 MHz RAM. It is well enough to run everything mentioned in this post.
― Ensuring that there is enough disk space. The website (including forums) requires about 8 MB of disk space and the MySQL database requires 1 or 2 gigabytes.
― At least the following software are required on the site: Apache version 2.2 or later, PHP version 5.2 or later, MySQL version 5.0 or later; the following PHP extensions: Curl, Gd, Memcache, MySQL, Tidy, XSL, SOAP.
― Give maintainers of the site source code the access to update the site, and to access the databases directly.
― Your bandwidth should be such that your server can upload something like 20―50 kB/s. More is better, of course, and especially with the large Movies-*.html pages (which vary from 200 to 600 kilobytes), users will appreciate it if the pages load quickly.
TAKEN by Nach. Thanks!
Site development and maintaining (multiple people wanted)
This is the most important bit. In the future, I will not have time to maintain the site's source code anymore, so others will have to do it. However, I cannot grant access to the current site directly – only to the source code – for the reason that the server contains many other things besides TASVideos – and thus, the actual site has to be moved too, for the maintainership of the site to be possible for others than me.
The TASVideos site source code is stored in a GIT repository, and the database is a MySQL database.
A developer will implement changes in those and upload those changes to the actual site.
The developer will gain access to the entire site history and to some privileged information such as the e-mail addresses of the userbase.
Requirements:
― Absolutely trustworthy and keeps confidential information confidential.
― Experience in PHP programming and MySQL database design.
― Ability to read code that is although modular, very scarcely commented and documented.
― Understanding of secure web programming; proper escaping of SQL queries, proper escaping of HTML characters, etc.
― Desire to maintain and improve the site. Anything changed on the site should go through the coordinator first, though.
Maintenance requirements:
― Once in a while running the makesnapshot.php script, which creates the TASSnapShot.
― Once in a while running the automatic_screenshot.php script, which adds automatic screenshots to new submissions.
Examples of long-term plans to flesh out:
― Streaming video support.
― Upgrading the forums (phpBB3 for example).
― Changing the wikimarkup engine (use mediawiki's?).
Site coordinator
A site coordinator (policy administrator) decides the direction that TASVideos is going towards.
Example tasks:
― Deciding which emulators are acceptable platforms (
TAKEN by Adelikat)
― Deciding how files are named
A site coordinator should also be a developer, or be in close contact to developers to exact these changes.
TAKEN by Adelikat. Thanks!
Public relations person
Sometimes the press wants to contact us, asking questions, interviewing us.
A PR person would be the one to most commonly answer such interviews. So far, it has been me.
They would be identified on the About page as the spokesperson.
Requirements:
― Knowledge of the
site history.
― An enthusiastic view towards TASing.
― Expertise of TASing techniques.
― Responsible use of language and a positive appearance when talking via email or otherwise.
― Good relations to the contributors.
TAKEN by Adelikat. Thanks! But requires some set-up…
IRC channel ownership
Someone else should take over the ownership of #nesvideos and the responsibility of assigning operators.
TAKEN by Adelikat. Thanks!
For all these tasks, it is an absolutely requirement that the new responsible person will be trustworthy, and will not e.g. suddenly disappear from the Internet without warning, at least not without first transferring the responsibility to someone else in a similar manner as I'm now going to start doing.
You should also make frequent and complete backups, just in case your harddrive blows up or something else happens.
I will be available for guiding, training and helping in questions until September 2009.
The desired timeline for this all is that by the summer of 2009, everything has been moved.
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EDIT: By AngerFist's input, I'll clarify this a bit.
I'm gradually going to spend less and less time with TASVideos, and some day -- probably not this year but maybe in three years, I may be required to move to another country; that day, it'd be convenient if I didn't have this server running here at my home.
A much closer looming possibility is that my privilege of free Internet connection with static IP will be ended by the company I work for....
So in a few years, I hope it can be arranged that TASVideos does not need to be hosted particularly on a computer running at my home. If a day comes that I must move and TASVideos is
still running from my home, I will archive it as a readonly copy, put it on a lightweight free hosting, give a backup of the database and code to someone who I can trust (if there's one), and then I'll shut down the site and redirect the address to the readonly copy.
As for the administrative tasks, as long as I have Internet access, I can contribute somewhat, but as I'm going to spend less and less time with TASVideos, I can't keep up with everything that happens here, and I cannot respond to needs immediately, and to prevent things from falling into stale state, I want there to be other developers and other admins. It'd be nice if these responsibilities could be split among many people so they don't need to know much at once, but a person who could handle more would be better and more fluent for the development model.
I'm very glad that encoding and publishing tasks as well as page editing have been taken by volunteers so far. I'm grateful to those people!
