Sunday, July 29, 2018

Server maintenance

We're doing maintenance today to the servers and network setup; disruptions to the CPAN master mirror, PAUSE, rt.cpan.org, rt.perl.org and the perl.org mailing lists may happen through the next ~8 hours (and possibly after as we finish things up).

Many of the servers are getting new drives or SSDs and the network setup will get a small overhaul if all goes well.

Sunday, July 1, 2018

Network issues: Where'd the magic smoke go?

We had a router failure on Saturday night, which took the perl.org network equipment offline for most of the night.  We were able to cobble things back together, but as of now (Sunday afternoon) we're still working out some kinks in our solution.  In particular we're not getting the throughput we expect.  You may notice that some services are slower than normal.

We'll update this blog post with any significant updates.

Update July 1, 2018 10:00pm:  set hw.vtnet.tso_disable=1 is the magic that got our speeds back up and helped with some other weirdness. 



Update July 1, 2018 11:23pm:  IPv6 is working again too.  Time for sleep.

Tuesday, June 26, 2018

search.cpan.org ➡️ metacpan.org

Yesterday, we threw the switch and routed all traffic for search.cpan.org to metacpan.org

The MetaCPAN team has worked hard to ensure that almost all links continue to work and that it will be a painless experience for users. 

Olaf Alders, founder of MetaCPAN, has written a perl.com article where you can read more about the switch.

A fond farewell to search.cpan.org.  We'll miss you!

Wednesday, June 6, 2018

CPANRatings going read-only

CPANRatings has gone read-only due to low traffic.  Existing ratings will still be visible, but it is no longer possible to add new ratings.

In a few months, we expect that MetaCPAN will add review functionality.  You can already favorite modules there and see the most popular modules counts.

Why are we doing this?  First, we haven't had time to give the site the attention it deserves in quite a while.  There are numerous open bugs and feature requests in the GitHub issue tracker.  Second, it gets extremely low traffic.  Only a few hundred visitors a week, rarely leaving reviews.  This will also allow us to shut down a few dependent services and free up resources for other use.

We know that CPANRatings is important to its (few) users and the community, and we look forward to the MetaCPAN replacement.  The current site will remain in read-only mode until the replacement is finished.

Wednesday, May 16, 2018

The end of an era: Saying goodbye to search.cpan.org

It's with sad hearts that we are announcing that search.cpan.org will be retired on the 25th of June 2018.

Graham Barr originally wrote the site nearly 20 years ago -- it first went live in early 1999 -- and it quickly became an invaluable resource for Perl developers around the world.

The ability to search CPAN (Comprehensive Perl Archive Network) and read Perl module documentation online helped spark many developers interest in Perl and helped to build the Perl community.

The site was originally hosted by Washington University in St. Louis on a single Solaris box. For his work on search.cpan.org, Graham won a White Camel award in 2002.

The site was later moved to the Perl NOC. US mirrors were hosted by YellowBot and Phyber and a European mirror has been hosted by digital craftsmen for the last 10 years. These amazing people and companies helped make the site a success.

In recent years maintenance has become a burden. Most of the site is running 2005 era Perl code.   Luckily, there is now a viable alternative: MetaCPAN.org. The MetaCPAN team has been getting ready for the transition and is nearly ready to take over.

Shortly, a link will be added to all pages on search.cpan.org to inform users of the upcoming change.  After about a month, all traffic will be redirected to the equivalent MetaCPAN page.

We would like to thank all who have assisted with this project.  An extra special thanks to Graham for his hard work and unwavering support of search.cpan.org for all these years.  To search.cpan.org -- we will miss you.

Update #1 (2018-05-19):  There's some confusion around whether or not existing search.cpan.org URLs will continue to work.  They will!  The vast majority of of them will be transparently served by MetaCPAN pages.  You do not need to update any links right now.

Saturday, March 24, 2018

Goodbye Bitcard

Fourteen years ago, it seemed like a good idea to have perl.org SSO solution.  So, we built one -- Bitcard -- and deployed it across perl.org and related sites.  Today, it doesn't make much sense.  Nobody wants yet another account to keep track of -- especially only for limited use such as perl.org related sites.

We're switching our authentication systems to use Auth0.  If you want to have a login just for us, you still can.  You can also use your Google, GitHub, or Facebook account, and Auth0 will proxy the identity.  Through the magic of OAuth2, we don't get access to anything except your name and email address.

If you are logging into a perl.org site for the first time with Auth0, be sure to use the same email address you used with Bitcard, or your may end up with a new account.

rt.perl.org and rt.cpan.org have already switched to Auth0.  There's a few stragglers remaining, and then we'll shut down Bitcard.  It has served us well.

Thanks again to Auth0 for their great service!