Our old host has proven resistant to doing an in-place OS upgrade, so we have determined the way forward is to provision a fresh host (funding for that is another open matter, for a Fundraising committee – volunteers welcome for that as well).
I kind of hoped that the CL foundation has a bit of money left, enough to get another (virtual) machine (eg. Hetzner) to run in parallel for 1-2 months at most until the old one can be scratched?
This (standing up the new host) should be a fun project with a lot of learning and networking opportunities. Please write to me directly if interested.
Yeah, I'm still willing to help, even if I'm a bit more time-starved than a year ago.
In the meantime I've come to believe that it won't be easy to get a full weekend from all volunteers at the same time -- and even if we did, we'd just stomp on each others toes.
Can we define some common documentation area (perhaps using cryptpad.fr or a similar independent service) where we can create a list of tasks, edit/complete/document/check there in parallel, and start the migration of services to the new VM in the background?
I'm well aware that we need a bit of coordination for the final sync run[1], but quite a lot of configuration can be done independently.
[1] I hope that we can define stuff like /home/ as read-only on the old machine after a first rsync run -- but for gitlab we'll need some coordinated down-time, I guess.