[H-GEN] Procedure to restore a HUMBUG Backup from Amazon S3 to a VM

[Greg Black]

This email requests all Sysadmins to perform a small action to
ensure that we can easily recover from any disaster with our web
server in the future.  Please read it and carry out that step.

As most members who are interested in the Humbug web server will
know, we have had some problems recovering from disasters in the
past.  To solve that for the future, our President has put quite
a bit of work into a backup system that stores our data (with
the private elements encrypted) on the Amazon S3 system.  The
backups have been running successfully for some time now and I
have now successfully proved that we have instructions that will
allow any Sysadmin to restore a fully running Humbug server from
the Amazon backups without any reference to the current server,
excalibur.

However, for this to be reliable, all Sysadmins now need to take
some action as it's important for the Sysadmins to have certain
files on their own machines in order to obtain and decrypt the
backups from Amazon.  The instructions used to be on the Humbug
wiki, but have been removed from there as that's not a useful
place to refer to them if the server is dead.  Since we only
want to have one copy of the instructions, they are now in a
Mercurial repository which all Sysadmins have access to.

This is a request to all the Humbug Sysadmins to carry out a
couple of simple steps, which are in the file called README in
the Mercurial repository that will be cloned by the command
below.  We want all Sysadmins to run the hg clone command (after
installing Mercurial on their home machine if necessary), to
read the README and to carry out the steps described in the
section entitled "Preliminary Steps - Do This Now".

  hg clone ssh://excalibur.humbug.org.au:24//etc/rdiff-image

Please note: this will result in you having some private Humbug
data on your machine, so please don't do this on a work machine
or any other place that is not secure.

If you are a member of the "root" group on excalibur, you're a
Sysadmin and you have access to that repository.  Otherwise, you
don't.

If anybody has any problem with any of this, please let me know
so I can resolve the issue.  And please don't leave it to the
other Sysadmins to do steps outlined above.

Cheers, Greg