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"Your mission, should you choose to accept it..."

Mozilla IT (thanks Aravind and Justin!) recently archived to tape a huge set of builds from the mozilla.org FTP staging server.1

These aren't just the builds, but also the original build artifacts, from the original tinderboxen, through what was released (and probably [hopefully?!] is still available) on the FTP server.

I asked IT to make three copies of this particular backup tape: one to store with the rest of our backups, one for the Build Team to keep offsite2, and one to keep significantly offsite.

To achieve the last requirement, Beltzner, who happened to be in town this week, will be helping me to find a safe, shady spot in the Toronto office for this little bit of Mozilla Project history.

_________________
1 Thus reclaiming a bunch of space so we could keep... releasing software.
2 Which is likely to translate to "somewhere in my apartment."

Posted by preed on February 2, 2007 7:17 PM |

Comments

Dude,

you got to lose that poster in the background. I thought we threw that away.

I actually hung out w/ the guy that did that poster like a month ago. *sigh*

Posted by: Rafael | February 2, 2007 11:24 PM

Move the stuff to archive.mozilla.org? ;)

Posted by: Boris | February 3, 2007 2:08 AM

@Rafael

We actually found it hiding in the corner when I was stuck at the office into the wee hours of the morning yesterday. :-)

@Boris

There's much better things to use 400 Gb of storage on archive than initial and intermediate build deliverables for year-old releases.

Posted by: Preed | February 3, 2007 4:12 AM

Porn?

Posted by: Jonathan | February 3, 2007 6:51 AM

Have you thought of selling that would be a cool piece of Mozilla to own.

Posted by: karit | February 3, 2007 12:52 PM

If I'm not mistaken, the poster in the background was produced to mark the release of the original version of Netscape 6.

As it happens, the code wasn't ready.

Posted by: Alex Bishop | February 3, 2007 2:47 PM

Oh, so these are not like branch nightlies or anything like that? OK, then. ;)

Posted by: Boris | February 4, 2007 1:31 AM

Oh, so these are not like branch nightlies or anything like that? OK, then. ;)

No... however, we're going to have to start systematically cleaning those up, too (bug
342972).

We don't have the disk space to keep an infinite number of nightlies from years past.

We'll have to figure out what algorithm for deleting them makes the mosts sense.

Posted by: Preed | February 4, 2007 12:55 PM

I think it's great that you are sending one tape to Toronto. That way, if a terrorist ever takes out the entire Bay area with a nuclear bomb, historians in the future will still be able to install Mozilla M3.

;-)

Posted by: Gerv | February 5, 2007 5:00 AM

If it's so historically valuable, I am wondering if it is a good idea to keep it on a tape -- since they get old and will eventually end up being unreadable.

That's arguably the case with all backup media, but still...

Posted by: Fred | February 9, 2007 4:47 PM