Some switch between us and the upstream provider went boom about half an hour ago. The appropriate technicans are working on it.
Update: All is well again.
A server hosting a few virtual servers died some hours ago, giving downtime to rt.perl.org, cpan.org mail forwarding and a few other services. Thankfully we got many of the other things running on that server setup with proper redundancy in the last couple of months!
We're going to replace it this evening with another server provided by YellowBot. The new server is similar enough that the plan is to just move over the disks and hope it comes up. :-)
You may have noticed that some perl.org services (including www.perl.org) were unavailable for a short time this afternoon. For the past few days we've had issues in the middle of the night where one of our primary servers would grind to a halt. We believe we've isolated that to a bad disk, and have replaced the disk. We also took this opportunity to upgrade some of our networking hardware and reboot a variety of systems. Everything should be back to normal now.
The Best Practical blog has some updates related to rt.cpan.org. Click through to read about some useful new features!
One of the primary network links to the main perl.org servers is having some trouble causing lots of packet loss and other such unpleasantries. Our providers are looking into it and we expect all should be back to normal shortly. (Famous last words?)
Happy 4th of July to all our readers in the US. Belated Happy Canada Day to our friends to the north.
Two weeks ago, Best Practical announced that rt.cpan.org had been updated to be SSL (https) only for increased security and to fix some bugs.
Today, we've made similar changes for rt.perl.org.
For both sites, you will be redirected to the SSL version if you attempt to go to the non-SSL version.
One of the more popular sites we host over here is perldoc.perl.org with about half a million visits a month.
It's cleverly built to be an entirely static site. As part of upgrading, modernizing and moving things around the hosting for the perldoc site got a bit of an upgrade today so it should load even faster than it did before.
In related news then yesterday the CPAN Ratings site got an extra upgrade too to enable caching, CDN serving of the static resources and so on and so forth.
For about a week posting to the CPAN Ratings site hasn't worked. Since earlier this evening it's back (and now running on Plack rather than under mod_perl and much easier to get up and running).
We are a little early for IPv6 day, but www.cpan.org has since a few minutes ago gained AAAA records. This means that if your system has an IPv6 address, it will likely access that CPAN mirror over IPv6. Woo!
It also means that if your system thinks it has IPv6 access, but doesn't really – it'll connect much slower.
Our friends at Dynect monitors the IPv4 addresses for a couple of mirrors in California and one in Europe and makes sure that www.cpan.org is always accessible. They don't offer this service for IPv6 yet, so for now IPv6 just gets round-robin DNS for two of the mirrors.
Perl.org is looking for outside assistance to help remove spam from perl.org and/or cpan.org email. (i.e. we are interested in outsourcing our spam filtering.)
Today, our filtering consists of SpamAssassin, qpsmtpd, blacklists (like IVM), and a ton of custom rules. But still spam gets through. The perl.org mailing lists even have human moderation as a last line of defense.
We try hard, but there's no way we can filter as well as a company that is 100% focused on it. If you represent one of those companies and think you might be interested in donating spam filtering services to us, we'd love to hear from you. Please email webmaster at perl.org. We'll sing your praises, add your logo to our list of sponsors, and more!
