[Consortium] Linuxaudio.org update

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(a)vt.edu www.performingarts.vt.edu disis.icat.vt.edu l2ork.icat.vt.edu ico.bukvic.net