CPAN mirrors list now (also) in JSON format

The list of CPAN mirrors have for ages been published in the MIRRORED.BY file.  The format was good back when just parsing a text file was the common data exchange format (and I believe the "master file" was indeed the same file).

Now this file is output by a small program from another data source[1], so Henk Penning (the ever patient and hard working maintainer of the mirrors list) added a JSON export.  If you are making a tool that needs the CPAN mirrors list (and you are able to load a JSON file), it might be easier to use the new mirrors.json file.

 

 - ask

[1] The master data source is actually also a JSON file ...

Now hosting the master mirror for CPAN

15 years ago Jarkko Hietaniemi started CPAN; now arguably the most important feature of Perl.  For all that time the canonical CPAN has been hosted at FUnet, with (now more than 600) mirrors around the world.  Having made much of my living using Perl I'm incredibly grateful to Jarkko and FUnet for having built and maintained this incredible resource for such a long time.

A few months ago Jarkko started passing the baton for looking after CPAN on to others in the community and as part of that we at perl.org are taking over the task of being the "master mirror" for CPAN.  Currently almost 500 of the CPAN mirrors are mirroring straight from FUnet which is an incredible resource drain for the master mirror.

The new system will be using the rrr tool for rapid mirroring to a set of "tier 1" mirrors so we more easily can scale to support anyone who wants to mirror CPAN.  File::Rsync::Mirror::Recent is already in use by some of the mirrors to get "instant" updates from PAUSE. Andreas König (the inventor and long time maintainer of PAUSE) is working on some improvements to make it work better for cpan.org in general.

We're also working on getting things in place so the static pages on cpan.org more easily can be maintained and updated by the community.

If you are interested in helping with testing the mirroring process or anything else, please subscribe to the cpan-workers mailing list.

- Ask

Brief Downtime: Reboots

 

We're celebrating the day after 10/10/10 by rebooting many of the perl.org servers.  You may notice some unavailability of perl.org services over the next few hours as we perform rolling reboots.  

Brief maintenance outage

We're having a brief outage of some services this Sunday evening (or Monday early early morning in Europe) to resize a file system, run fsck etc on one of the servers.

update (9.10pm PST) Woah - those disks are slow.  System is starting up again now; all affected services should be back again shortly.

The End of CPAN Testers 1.0

Thsi is reposted from the CPAN Testers blog:

The End of CPAN Testers 1.0

By CPAN Testers on September 6, 2010 1:28 PM

As of this weekend, the final switch to turn off the SMTP gateway for CPAN Testers was flipped. You can no longer post anything to the old cpan-testers mailing list, and any attempts now will result in a bounce message.

Our thanks to Robert and Ask over at the Perl NOC for looking after us all these years, and for being very patient with us while we got the HTTP gateway up and running over the last 9 months.

As a consequence, anyone wishing to still be a part of the CPAN Testers community, now needs to upgrade their test environments, to use the latest smokers and associated libraries. In the main this will involve a simple upgrade of your smoker client and the installation of 4 specific modules (which in turn will install any additional prerequisites needed). You will then need to acquire a metabase profile. For full details of the steps necessary please see the Quick Start page on the CPAN Testers Wiki.

For those casual testers, the upgrade will initially involve some manual intervention, although we hope to automate this as soon as we can. If you do have any problems, or are confused by any of the instructions, please post to the cpan-testers-discuss mailing list, where the developers and other experienced testers can help you.

The end of an era.

 

 

Brief-ish perl.org downtime

A bad cable (or switch port, we haven't entirely figured that out yet) made the perl.org sites be down for about an hour this afternoon.   All should be well again.

CPAN Testers email submission interface going away September 1st

If you submit CPAN Testers reports via email, you may receive an email that looks like the following:

Thanks for submitting a test report to CPAN Testers!

On September 1st, 2010, we will be disabling email submissions as part of the migration to CPAN Testers 2.0.  You must switch over to the HTTP based submission mechanism before that date (metabase transport), or all your test reports will be rejected.

For more information, please see the documentation:  http://wiki.cpantesters.org/wiki/QuickHowToCT20

For more information on CPAN Testers in general, please visit  http://static.cpantesters.org/

Please heed the warning, because in a little over three weeks, we will be turning off the inbound email gateway, and we really would like to continue to receive your module test reports.

Welcome to the family, perl.com

perl.org is happy to welcome www.perl.com to our famiy.  See this post for details.

Temporary migration of Mongueurs' hosted services

Since Tuesday 6th June, 16:00 (CEST), profane.mongueurs.net is temporarily down because of a thermal problem in the datacenter hosting it. Most services have been migrated to spectre.mongueurs.net in order to insure continuity of service:

• web sites of the Mongueurs association and local groups


• web site of YAPC::Europe


• web sites of ACT-hosted conferences (nearly all YAPC and Perl Workshops)


• mailing lists of YAPC::Europe, Mongueurs and OSDC.fr

Some services may be unavailable during this period.

Apologies for the troubles.

Feel free to mail <sebastien @ aperghis . net> if you have any further questions.

(Post by Sébastien Aperghis-Tramoni)

Second Rock from the Sun

All of our planets, Planet Perl, Planet Parrot, Planet Perl Six, have moved to Venus, Sam Ruby's fork of PlanetPlanet.  Venus is being actively developed, and fixes some issues that we were having.  Please let us know if you notice anything (new) that isn't quite right.

Reachability Issues

We understand that some users are having trouble reaching some perl.org sites (specifically those hosted in our Los Angeles facility.)  We've escalated this issue to our network provider, and they're looking into it. We hope to have it resolved soon.

Update 1:19pm: The issues have been resolved.  

Rainy Day Outage (update four)

Good news everyone!

The few remaining services that were out should be back shortly.

We moved the failed server from Robert's house to Ask's office today and finally got enough parts replaced that the server is running again. As we hoped all data is intact.  It's currently copying all the data off to a couple of 2TB disks.  Actually, I just checked and the only missing services right now are some pm.org sites and some of the historical mirrors /archives (very old versions of perl, some cpan-testers mails).

The pm.org sites should be back by the morning; the rest might need a few days for us to do the sneakernet thing to get the data to a fast enough network connection that copying hundreds of GB isn't too slow.

Rainy Day Outage (Update Three)

Not a lot of new news.

We got a new motherboard for the system, and have installed it.... but it's not working.  Which leads us to believe that its actually the powersupply thats shot.  We're on the hunt for a compatible powersupply locally, but its probably not worth pouring more money into this box, so we're working on Plan B, which is to get the 3ware RAID controller installed in another system and get the data off the drives.  This is complicated by the fact that we need to connect eight drives at a time and that the controller is PCI-X, a no-longer popular form factor.

If anyone in the Los Angeles area happens to have an idle server we could borrow for a few days with a PCI-X motherboard and at least 8 PATA bays, we'd love to hear from you.  Drop us a line to webmaster at perl.org.

(We're trying to avoid Plan C, which involves taking images of all the drives one at a time and then gluing them together.)

We've initiated a plan to get rt.perl.org up and running again ASAP, and are dedicated to getting the pm.org (and other) data off these drives.