The console server rocks

Last fall we got a really cool terminal server from our generous friends at Cyclades. Oh, and super fancy powerstrips.

Do we use it a lot? Yes! Directly? No, rarely. Indirectly? All the time! In the past it was extra uncomfortable to change anything that could possibly be messed up in a way that'd bring the server down at a time where going to the datacenter would be inconvenient (say in the middle of the night or in the middle of the day with "real work" looming).

Tonight was one of those times where I used it directly. One of the servers had crashed with this message repeating over the "screen" (serial port).

rtc: lost some interrupts at 2048Hz.

rtc: lost some interrupts at 2048Hz.

rtc: lost some interrupts at 2048Hz.

rtc: lost some interrupts at 2048Hz.

rtc: lost some interrupts at 2048Hz.

What it means? I don't know. It's been doing it once or twice before over the last year. Ctrl-p and a "power cycle" command later the box was rebooting and back up. Whee. No datacenter visit for me. The people at IX2 (the datacenter) are great, but it's nicer not to go there too much; in particular at 3am. :-) (Yes, the datacenter people would have helped reboot it, but I'd rather not bother them and more importantly it's much better to be able to properly see what's going on before hitting the big button - virtual or otherwise).

Thanks Cyclades!

www.irc.perl.org

sungo finished www.irc.perl.org today.

Subversion Conversion

Parrot has converted from CVS to Subversion. It was mostly painless, thanks to cvs2svn, and having tested out all the infrastructure and tools with other projects. The new instructions are nice too.

Post to the perl.org lists via Google Groups

In the past you have been able to read the perl.org mailing lists on Google Groups (and other news servers), but not post. You had to post by emailing the list or using nntp.perl.org.

Robert got that sorted out yesterday, so we now experimentally (as in it might work it might not) support posting to the lists via Google Groups, but not yet other news servers.

design doc synchronization

Several people had noticed that the design documents at dev.perl.org had gotten out of sync with reality.  This was a holdover from a CVS to SVN conversion of those design docs.

So... last night I hooked up some svn:externals magic, did a little reorganization, and the design docs will now be synchronized every night.

perldoc.perl.org

You might already have seen this over here, but we are really happy to announce Jon Allen's wonderful new perldoc site that we are hosting.

Perl NOC Weblog

Whee! We've long needed a place for posting news and notices regarding the operation of the perl.org services we run over at perl.org. We didn't want to run it with everything else because the whole point is to have a place that's always available.

Thanks to our friends at Six Apart we now have that place, whee. Thanks Ben and everyone else there!

We will post notices about scheduled maintenance, trouble with the servers and announcements of new features here now. (So no need to check our other sites anymore if that was all you went there for :-) ).

Be sure to subscribe to the rss feed!