rt.cpan.org SSL certificate update

Tis the season for SSL certificate renewals.  For the past five years, rt.cpan.org's SSL certificate was sponsored by IT-Kartellet.  This year, Best Practical Solutions has picked up the cert as part of our ongoing support of rt.cpan.org.

Please let us know of any problems with the update at our usual address, rt-cpan-admin at bestpractical.com.

Greylisting

We have experimentally enabled greylisting on the mail servers that accept mail for cpan.org and pm.org and some other domains.

We expect that this will result in a reduction in the amount of spam that makes it through our filters.

You may notice a slight delay in mail delivery, as your MTA may have to retry to satisfy the greylisting filter.

7/18/2014: Scheduled Maintenance -- Moving Day!

More details afterwards, but most perl.org services will be unavailable for most of the day on Friday, July 18th 2014.  We're moving!  DNS will still work, but anything running on one of our machines (many webservers and mailservers, etc) will be unavailable.  We'll post updates here.

export TZ=America/Los_Angeles

Updates:

• 8:48AM - the first batch of machines shut down and powered off cleanly, which is a good omen. We're in transit to the datacenters at high rates of speed and the unracking will begin when we get there. 
• 10:02AM 7/19/2014 - apologies for not posting any updates during the day yesterday, we were busy with actually doing the move.  Current state is that we're having trouble getting one of the key vm-hosting machines to boot, and the VMs on it include key servers.  We'll keep working on this this afternoon.
• 2:00PM 7/19/2014 - the last machine is up and happy again.  everything should be working fine now.

Heartbleed updates for rt.perl.org and rt.cpan.org

Both rt.cpan.org and rt.perl.org were running vulnerable versions of openssl.  They were updated on Tuesday April 8th.  At that time, the cert for rt.cpan.org was regenerated.  I'm still waiting for an updated cert for rt.perl.org.

Update 2014-04-16
A new cert for rt.perl.org has been deployed.

CPAN master mirror down for maintenance

The CPAN master rsync mirror is temporarily down. We expect it back around 06-08:00UTC. Another hard drive failed and then it went downhill from there while replacing it. Whee.

Update: Back since 8am UTC. Drives replaced, partition tables fixed, raid rebuilt, configuration files updated, initramfs updated, KVM firmware updated, cursing subsided.

Multiple Hard Drive Faliure

We've lost several of the drives from the machine that hosts PAUSE.  It's offline while we work to replace the drives and convince it to come back up.

Update 1/8/2013 5:49pm EST:  No good news so far.  We may need to restore from a backup.   <distraction>Did you hear that github was down?</distraction>

Update 1/10/2013 1:26am EST:  We're working to get PAUSE back up as soon as we can and apologize for any inconvenience this outage may be causing you.  It is taking a little longer than normal due to circumstances that are limiting our availability this week.  (i.e. bad timing for a failure.)

Update 1/11/2013 12:04pm EST: PAUSE is back up!  Thanks for your patience!

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.