2013 Year End Maintenance

Happy Holidays!

We're doing some invasive maintenance and year-end cleanup down at the datacenter today (12/27/2013).  You may notice some service interruptions and glitches on perl.org, pm.org, cpan.org, and other hosted sites.

  One of the things we're doing:
    dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1M &

Update 1:35pm:
  The maintenance completed without incident (and went very smoothly.  Almost too smoothly.)  We've been monitoring the systems for two hours, and everything seems stable and happy.

rt.perl.org down for maintenance (Complete)

We're now hard at work on rt.perl.org.  We'll update this post when it's back up and ready to use.

2000 GMT - https://rt.perl.org is now back and upgraded to a new version of RT.

If you encounter problems, please report them to the perlbug-admin email address on the footer of every rt.perl.org page.

rt.perl.org maintenance 2013-10-24

We'll be upgrading https://rt.perl.org to the latest version of Request Tracker 4.0 starting at 1500 GMT on Thursday the 24th of October.  During this time, rt.perl.org will be inaccessible via the web and mail to RT will be queued for later delivery.  We'll blog when the upgrade starts and update the blog post as needed during the upgrade.

New rt.cpan.org SSL Certificate

Today we updated to a new 2048-bit SSL certificate on https://rt.cpan.org.
Please report any problems to the admin address at the bottom of every rt.cpan.org page.

Interview with Jay Hannah

One of the things we do at perl.org is host the Perl Mongers web and email infrastructure.  That's the easy part -- Jay Hannah does the hard work for Perl Mongers, dealing with the incoming requests to create new groups, modify old groups, and help people troubleshoot their setup. Gabor Szabo recently interviewed him: Learn more about what it means to be the self titled "Chief Ticket Monkey for Perl Mongers International" as well as a little bit about motorcycles, co-working, and Nebraska!

Thanks again Jay for all your hard work!

April Showers bring... Network Outages

It hasn't rained in weeks near the perl.org datacenter, but April has ended with a network outage anyway.  We're currently experiencing a lack of IP connectivity to the main perl.org server farm.  Many of our websites are unreachable and email will not be delivered until it comes back.

Update 10:22pm:  We're back up!  2h 9m of downtime.  Cause appears to be something in the facility's interconnect.  Details still being figured out.
Update 11:12pm:  We're still bouncing up and down a bit (with too much down in there.)  Suspecting a bad cable or port in the interconnect.
Update the next day: Total downtime 3 hours, 36 minutes.  The cause was isolated to a failed cable in the facility cross-connect.  Thanks to the awesome techs at IX2 and Phyber for working with the facility to isolate and solve the problem.

rt.cpan.org upgraded to RT4

We're proud to announce that rt.cpan.org has been updated to the latest and greatest version of RT.  Click through to this Best Practical blog post for details: rt.cpan.org new features and upgrade to RT 4.0.11.

All the hard work (including a quick and nearly transparent migration) was done by the great development and support team at Best Practical.  We just gave them a clean VM to install on.

svn.perl.org shutdown in one month

We just sent the below email to active module authors who use svn.perl.org.  If we missed you, please accept our apologies and read on....

Dear very short list of module authors who still use svn.perl.org, 

  Due to declining usage and increased maintenance costs, we've decided to shut down the SVN hosting on svn.perl.org. 

  We are currently planning to shut the service down in a month, on April 27th, 2013.  For various reasons, we'd love to do so sooner, so it would be appreciated if you could migrate quickly. 

  Google Project Hosting and GitHub are popular hosting options, but you can use anything you want.   

  After you have migrated, please commit a note to your repository updating the README or adding a MOVED file that says where you've moved to.  You do not need to delete the old files unless you want to. 

  You can find a filtered svndump file at http://svn.perl.org/modules-dumps/ that contains only your project for easier migration using svnsync or svn2git.

Thanks!

Network Glitch

The main perl.org cluster is currently experiencing a network connectivity issue (since around 9:45pm TZ=America/Los_Angeles).  This primarily affects www.perl.org, www.perl.com, www.pm.org, several other hosted websites as well as email services (mailing lists, forwarding.)  We are in contact with the our providers and are working to identify and resolve the issue.

Update: 
  Everything is back to normal.

Seeking "list-owner" help

We have an RT queue for when people email somelist-owner at perl.org for help subscribing or unsubscribing. It's pretty rare, but it adds up and the current volunteers have been falling off their routine keeping the ticket queue in check.

Therefore we seek new volunteers! There are a few hours of work clearing up the backlog (maybe less, most are probably taken care of and can just be bulk closed/replied to) and then it's a few minutes of work every few days.

Email ask at perl.org if you are interested in helping. Basic email skills (send, reply, headers) and optionally familiarity with RT is all that's required.

pause.perl.org moved

A couple of weeks ago the PAUSE server was moved to be hosted with the other perl.org servers and infrastructure bits we look after here. Considering the few emails we got about it, it appears that everything is running smoothly!

Andreas is still running PAUSE, we (Robert & Ask) are just providing hosting and an occasional helping hand.

Two changes that might be meaningful to you:

• The new server doesn't have FTP enabled, so you have to upload via HTTP(S). HTTP really is a better protocol for this.
• The CPAN master mirror is now on the same network as the PAUSE server, so there's really no reason to mirror directly from PAUSE. The master mirror server is much better equipped for rsync, too.