Congratulations to all our friends at The Phone Coop for winning the Best Social Enterprise Award at the Enterprising Solutions Awards 2008 yesterday. (TTLLP is an agent and I’m a member personally too.) Longer report at Cooperatives-UK.
Comiserations to Barnsley Building Society, who are merging into Yorkshire Building Society after having £10m with collapsed Icelandic banks. Still, it survived further into the banking crisis than even the biggest of the demutualised building societies.
Bonfire Onlooker by dominicspics (cc-by)
Of all the things I wanted to do yesterday, testing TTLLP’s disaster recovery plan was not one of them. I often suggest customers make disaster recovery plans, but I don’t like having to use them.
One of our server farms suffered a serious hardware failure and slowly died during the day. (It didn’t catch fire – the title is a silly reference to lp0 on fire.) The current stinging electricity bills means that there’s an emphasis on power-saving now that wasn’t there 4 or so years ago, when we still built servers ourselves, before WEEE and cheap big-brand systems. Today’s servers aren’t quite as resilient, because each extra piece of hardware in use takes extra power. There are some much cleverer tactics now, but they don’t catch everything before it goes “bang” and we can’t just bring the “spare” hardware into action if it’s not installed yet.
Replacement hardware will be installed as soon as possible, as well as some extra hardware that will help protect against a similar failure in future. The slow failure of the server also means that we lost some emails, voicemails and instant messages from 10am to 2pm yesterday. If one was yours, please resend.
Most services have been rerouted or temporarily replaced with help from friendly associates. Three important services that haven’t yet are: 1. our financial system (which gets updated in batches anyway), 2. our task tracking (which is newer than our recovery plan and I need reminding about its backups, but at worst all the current data exists in other places) and 3. our newsletter server. I’ve copied the customer newsletter subscriptions to an older listserver, to send out news of our recovery, but the member newsletters (with GPG integration and so on) will wait for the replacement hardware. I’m hoping we can recover some things from the old server filesystem, else I’ll recreate it from the last release (that’ll teach me to hack it on the live server!). In the meantime, I’ve still most of yesterday’s work to do…
Just received this comment from Jimmy Kaplowitz over in the US: “yuck, your country continues to turn into Big Brother: BBC News: Giant database plan ‘Orwellian’”
Hell, yeah. That’s a reason why my support for the party is so weak at the moment. I’ve been working and writing against this since ST@ND and the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, which we were told was essential for crime-fighting, but actually helps gov.uk spy on parents making school place applications.
Currently, I’m telling people Gov.UK Consults on Forced ISP Snooping: Please Say NO. If anyone has any doubt that the database state will be abused, look at some examples of Labour’s “terrorists” (at least, they had supposedly anti-terror measures used against them) since 2001:-
and that’s ignoring gov.uk’s frequent data leaks.
Noodles replied: “There’s a quote somewhere that goes along the lines of “If the Tory policy is looking sane compared to what you’re doing, you’re doing it wrong” that’s been applied to the Labour fascist state stuff.”
Our terrorism measures are a joke, with loopholes that gov.uk can drive a truck through. They should be repealed and clearly-limited ones enacted, shouldn’t they?
As well as my little What topics do you want to read here? survey, there’s a more serious Free/Open Source Participant Satisfaction Survey by Brenda Chawner for the Victoria University of Wellington New Zealand which you might like to answer. It seems that the results will be published under CC-NC, which is less than great, but better than not sharing them at all.
Shame I don’t know of a third survey. The joke doesn’t quite work without it.
I’ve just set up a poll on my site asking: what topics do you want to read here?
Since this July, when cycling and most local and political themes were split off into other blogs, this site has been mostly Web Development and GNU/Linux topics, with an SPI article appearing most weeks, and minor themes of Koha news and ideas and general internet/telecoms issues around ThePhoneCoop. Finally, Drupal, OSCommerce and general business topics appear less frequently.
By traffic, the SPI series seems by far the most popular (but at least one of those is heavily spam-attacked now, so I’d discount it), followed by other political themes, then the technical posts. I suspect that politics is getting a temporary boost because of the US and Canadian elections, even though I’ve not written about them much. But is there some other theme that people want to read about?
The poll box on the right column lets you tick as many or as few as you want. It requires javascript, but if you don’t have javascript, please leave a comment on my site. If you want to suggest a new topic which I should add, please leave that in a comment too.
Update January 2009: comments now closed due to spam. You can email me or contact me some other way if you would like. Thanks.
or “how did we do Batting Against Three Strikes through the Back Door?”
In the latest EDRI-gram, there’s a report on the telecoms package EuroParl vote which is mostly positive. Thankfully both the Harbour and Trautmann reports were amended in vital ways to protect user privacy.
So, just to tie up my last loose end from my last report: Neil Parish MEP never did bring any replies from Malcolm Harbour back to me. Conservative MEPs, eh? At least they make the right noises on privacy and freedom now, even if the actions are still old-fashioned and confusingly unconvincing.
Back in Solved but Why? Belkin F5D7630 to Realtek 8139 Drop-outs, I thought I’d cured my random 20+-second network hang problem, but I celebrated too soon. While that seemed to work for a while, it didn’t last. Those options also stopped the printer (lp0) from working, which was a bit of a fatal flaw – I print TTLLP’s invoices and minutes.
As far as I can tell, the drop-outs are all the 8139-using laptop’s fault. They may only happen after resuming from suspend-to-disk, but it’s difficult to be sure of anything with an intermittent fault. I thought it was related to having all PCI devices on IRQ 10, but adding acpi_irq_balance to boot options cured that without curing the hangs.
Today, I’m trying the 8139too driver instead of the 8139cp one and I’ve built both as modules so I can try unloading, reloading and switching between them if it keeps happening.
This problem is doing my nut. I hate intermittent faults and it plays havoc with my VoIP phone, ssh, IRC and jabber sometimes. Anyone seen this before? Anyone fixed it for sure?
Today is Blog Action Day about poverty. As a member of several cooperatives, I have a pretty strong hope that the responsible lending of credit unions can help people escape from poverty. The basic process of a credit union is that you save for a while, then when you’ve shown that you will put aside that amount of money regularly, you can borrow some multiple of it and repay at the same rate you were saving. In addition, you get a voice in controlling the credit union itself, although it is limited by financial services regulations and so on.
At yesterday’s meeting of the Cooperatives-SW board in Taunton, some members expressed concern about a “social enterprise” called South-West Pound backed by a company called South West Community Banking Partnership. Although it’s called that, apparently it’s not a bank and also not a credit union: its members don’t manage it. It’s working with credit unions, but I’m very unclear on how it’s regulated. From the few details on their website, it looks to me like it could even be running a Farepak-style scheme which happens to hold deposits in credit unions instead of banks. Why is concealing member-controlled unions allowable as a “social enterprise”? Why would anyone go to a “community banking partnership” instead of direct to a credit union? (Coo, I’m getting a bit angry again, both at the lack of information and the hide-them-to-promote-them idea.)
Tomorrow (Thu 16 Oct) is International Credit Union Day. If you’ve not already done so, please go open an account and help your local community to fund itself, then see if you can get involved in publicising them to communities who suffer financial exclusion.
The monthly IRC board meeting of Software in the Public Interest will take place later today, as announced by SPI’s secretary last week. While the announcement is back on time (yay!), the agenda isn’t (aww!).
I’d be quite interested to learn how SPI is going to try to reduce the risk to its reserves, given the current slow decline of its primary bank which is not one of the first US banks getting bailed out. I think the best way for not-for-profits to avoid risking donations at the moment is to avoid having them in their bank accounts, in line with the Better Business Bureau standard that
“the charity’s unrestricted net assets available for use should not be more than three times the size of the past year’s expenses or three times the size of the current year’s budget, whichever is higher.”
Back in June 2005, SPI’s board of the time (Ian Jackson, John Goerzen, Jimmy Kaplowitz, David Graham, Bruce Perens, Benj. Mako Hill, Branden Robinson) decided to “remain noncompliant” with that standard and I fear that chicken could be coming home to roost now. I hope we don’t lose anything, but AIUI we’ve got nearly $150,000 in play.
Update: Unlike its UK analogue, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation covers corporation accounts up to $250,000, so SPI is only risking temporary unavailability, not yet a risk of loss. Thanks to bd_ for pointing me to that.
