[Consortium] Linuxaudio.org update

[Ivica Ico Bukvic]

Dear Colleagues and Linuxaudio.org Consortium Stakeholders,

It's been a long time since we used these lists to communicate and 
coordinate the Linuxaudio.org consortium. This was in part because the 
community has experienced a steady growth both in terms of resources and 
their support through Virginia Tech. Since the server was migrated to 
Virginia Tech almost 12 years ago, the server traffic and its services 
increased by several orders of magnitude. In 2006 we had only a couple 
of vhosts with thousands of monthly hits and minimal bandwidth. In 
contrast, by January 2018 those numbers grew to over 10TB of monthly 
traffic with over 7 million hits spread across 40 vhosts.

As you may be by now aware, the server was severely compromised at the 
end of January which warranted complete reconstruction. It appears one 
of the community members' SHA keys were stolen and used to access the 
terminal upon which the hacker exploited a bug in kernel to gain root 
access. The good news all the data was safely backed up and recovered. 
This hack was made possible in good part due to understaffed nature of 
server admins. As a result a decision was made to migrate server, thanks 
in good part to the hard work of Jeremy Jongepier, to the cyso.net 
servers in Europe where it is anticipated to have a more regular support.

After almost 2 weeks of downtime, the end result are better hosting and 
more bandwidth for the community. This, however, also marks an important 
milestone in this essential community resource. Namely, I believe it is 
time to once again mobilize the management group and to establish an 
advisory board or a steering committee that will help steer the 
consortium and jointly explore ways to provide better and more 
consistent support, ensure we offer up-to-date information, to grow the 
resources, their visibility, and footprint, as well as consider 
establishing a foundation that may help facilitate and support critical 
programs, including the LAC conference.

With this in mind, I invite those who are still active in the community 
and are receiving this email to voice their thoughts on this matter for 
the purpose of identifying optimal next steps. Thank you.

Best wishes,

Ico

-- 
Ivica Ico Bukvic, D.M.A.
Creative Technologies in Music
Director -- DISIS, L2Ork, CTM
ICAT Senior Fellow
Virginia Tech
School of Performing Arts – 0141
Blacksburg, VA 24061
(540) 231-6139
ico at vt.edu
www.performingarts.vt.edu
disis.icat.vt.edu
l2ork.icat.vt.edu
ico.bukvic.net