[maemo-community] maemo.org infra safety - HiFo action URGENTLY needed.

[From: chemist]

Hello Community,

where do I start with?

A bit over a year ago one of HiFo asked Joerg Reisenweber to become
Administration Supervisor.

While starting off with the initial move of the infra Nokia asked Nemein to buy
for HiFo and transfer it to IPHH, his duties included to find a fit for any
sysop position the maemo.org infra needs. Making sure that the lights do not
turn off.

Wherever he could not find anyone to maintain a service he started to work at it
himself, sure he had not to ask anyone for access or tell anyone that for now he
is maintaining a service. He was also not shy about it and from time to time he
found someone who had a look at a service or even took over maintenance. No-one
questioned it and as a fast learner Joerg became experienced and a true bless to
the community infra.
 
Shortly after the move we had some backup issues and an account to l2 was
offered to me to backup talk.maemo.org. From all over the community people
started to make private backups of everything Nokia was gonna shutdown in the
next months and I was aware of that this also happened on l2.
I happened to recognize this server to be skeiron.org, that time this did not
mean anything to me. Shortly after the backup-system on maemo.org servers
themselves were made available, our main sysadmin moved the talk.maemo.org
backups to the "in-house" backup-service and I deleted the backups left from l2.

That was some time mid of last year where the additional disks were bought by
Joerg with funding from several community members, iirc reinob and woody(Craig
Woodward) paid most of it but I can't tell as this has not been handled properly
ever since. Recently, Joerg offered to sell those drives for 20eur to HiFo
stating that those drives do belong to the Maemo Community already but to make
them HiFo's we need to pay. HiFo admitted that this was handled absolutely wrong
in the past.

Also just recently, Craig Woodward stepped down from his position as Secretary
of HiFo's Board of Directors. You probably ask yourself how this is related?
Joerg was accused of funding skeiron.org as our named backup-server, this came
up as Gido asked about it, not knowing that he just hit a hornets' nest. This
called another shitstorm in talk.m.o and on several mail-bounces. 

Later on, Joerg expressed that without paying for the backup-service anonymous
is providing us with, that maemo.org was at serious risk. He explained to us
that he will shutdown l2 if we do not come up with a regular payment plan.
I checked with Joerg about the backup and what was needed in terms of
requirements and I also asked techstaff about the same details and found out
that Joerg exaggerated approx. 100%. That is when I actually found out that
Joerg is not paying any backup-service our main sysop knows of. Somewhere in
between I checked if I still have access to l2 (while chatting with Joerg on
IRC) and I had, there were VMimage-backups dated a year ago so no current backup
(just recently I was made aware of that the VM images are the ones Nemein
transfered initially) of those and no maemo.org backups. I can be wrong but the
visible parts were not our backup to me and as I checked with techstaff whom I
made aware of those left VM-images (at that point I did not know what kind of
images they are and so did the one from techstaff), we had nothing there.

In the meantime,
we were offered a sponsored backup-server meeting our requirements, which then
got delayed and we wanted to make sure that Joerg does not shutdown anything we
might need as we were unsure if it is even l2 he is talking about or another
service he never told anyone about.
Then I found out that it is already about the month after next as Jussi  already
paid the next month some days ago. Once we got the server, I tried to reach
Joerg on IRC where I never got a response and he claims to never have gotten
anything (this might be related to the fact that he has several clients online).

At this point, it was already decided that HiFo is going to dismiss Joerg and if
not need be not pay him money for a backup-service.

I made the remaining councilor aware of the change of the backup-system but in
fear of shutdown I kept Joerg out of the loop. So basically, our main sysop who
is in charge of the backups, 2 of three councilors and the board knew about the
new backup-server. I have never seen anyone making such a mess about a change in
services but well it was us not paying him for a service he did not want to
properly request funds for and were expecting him to fund illegal activity. That
is the actual key point as in USA/PA you are held liable if you even suspect
criminal intentions or illegal activities and did not do anything about it (iirc
one of the reasons why Craig quit).

I have to admit, that HiFo did not get things straight, but we are trying to 
get things right, clean up the mess what was left from broken negotiations, 
undocumented negotiations and transfer of ownership. But this takes more time 
than we like but Nokia is in the move and not as responsive over the last four 
months.

If Joerg has support from the majority of techstaff and another councilor and 
wants to take over he might be lucky and have him self a community infrastructure 
with servers for free. (He never said that in this way but he questioned the
need for HiFo in the first place)

This is usually the part where people try to limit damages as a community must
not be in the hands of a single person or a single persons interests. We tried
to and this public email conversation is the result. Joerg got a thank-you
email, was asked to handover and that his access-rights to the maemo.org infra
be revoked when done. That was the actual job description, find someone who can
move and maintain servers, find maintainers for the services, keep maemo.org
alive and retire when everything is settled.

If you still think that HiFo has no say in who is maintaining maemo.org infra
and still support Joerg's appeal, you might consider founding a NPO now and take
over.


Respectfully
Ruediger Schiller

Chem|st
HiFo Maemo Councilor & HiFo Director

PS Neither myself nor any other Member of the Hildon Foundation asked to be the
replacement for Joerg, yet.

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