"Planned" Power Outage

All perl.org hosted services will be taken offline shortly before 12:01AM PST on February 25th. (That's late Saturday night.) Our building is having a scheduled power outage because "a conductor cable has been compromised to the point that immediate action to repair it is necessary or a ground fault will occur to the building systems". (The memo from the building goes on to explain that if the cable fails, it will be worse than crossing the streams from proton packs.)

Ask and I will be keeping an eye on things, but don't be surprised if things are down well into Sunday the 26th California time. No email should be lost, but it may be greatly delayed.

You can also read about this on the Dreamhost Status Blog. One of their datacenters is in the same building as we are.

update: All services should be back (they started coming back between 2 and 3am PST and I got the last ones going around 6am or so. I also got our console server fixed so I don't have to spend half the night here too soon again (I hope, knock on wood...). It's 7am now and Robert should be up soon and can fix things that are broken if you email webmaster@obvious.domain -- Ask)

Feeds on the new list archive site

The new list archive now has RSS and Atom feeds - both of individual postings and just of new threads.

The server that's running the old site is very much on its last legs, so I'm planning to switch over the main url over to the new site shortly unless someone points out something terribly wrong. :-)

Planet Upgrade

We've upgraded our planetarium software to planet 2.0. You probably won't notice anything different, but there are a few minor changes:

• Atom feed support


• Better handling of bad HTML


• Better handling of weird encodings

See it in action at Planet Perl, Planet Perl Six, or Planet Parrot

cpan.org mail forwarder listed in Sorbs

Sorbs decided to list 63.251.223.170 which is the IP that the cpan.org mail goes through.

I'm not entirely sure why (a bounce? evil user?, ...) but they are making it a pain to get de-listed and I just lost patience navigating their slow, broken-link-ish, wordy website. So, if you or your ISP blocks mail based on SORBS you might miss your cpan.org (and other perl.org) mail. Too bad for you.

(On a similar note: If you or your ISP are using Spamcop you'll every few months lose some perl.org list mail because some idiotic spamcop user/perl.org subscriber submits a mailing list mail to that system).

Update: Robert just told me we had trouble with our virus scanner (it wasn't updating the definitions) so for a few days we were bouncing some new viruses instead of just dropping them in a giant file never to be looked at like we usually do. Their "spamtrap" was joe-jobbed and we bounced a mail to it. Anyway, if you know anyone at SORBS feel free to make them de-list us. Thanks.

Power outage again!

Yikes, the perl.org data center unbelievably had another power outage. Lots of services didn't start up; I'm working on it.

The list server is slightly broken and can't get going without a kick (we are getting a replacement), so it won't be back until I've been by to, well, kick it. I should be there in a couple of hours ...

Update: All should be well again. Email me at ask@perl.org if you find a service that's still down...

CPAN Ratings upgrade

I did a bit of work on CPAN Ratings today.

The RSS feeds for reviewers and distributions should work (better) now.

I added "alternate" headers for the RSS feeds so your tools can find the RSS feeds more easily.

I also implemented a proper API for the helpful votes. This was just to make it easier to make other API things in the future (and to maybe make the site support non-javascript browser some day ;-) )

If the site doesn't work properly, be sure to clear your cache, shift-reload etc etc. (The .js and .css files aren't versioned so your browser or ISP proxy might have cached the old versions).

new list archive

I've been working on a new list archive. There's still work to be done, but you can test the Work In Progress at the beta site.

perldoc stats

As part of an effort to translate the perl documentation to other languages Joergen W Lang graphed the perldoc.perl.org logs from the first week of October.

perlfoundation.org DNS

The perlfoundation.org DNS has temporarily reverted back to ancient settings. We expect to have it sorted tomorrow (Friday).

Emails to @perlfoundation.org might not work until then.

The websites can be accessed with the "-" version, www.perl-foundation.org and news.perl-foundation.org (the non "-" version is usually what we normalize them to).

perl.org and pm.org services are not affected.

EU search.cpan.org server back up

Some months ago our european search.cpan.org mirror went down with some hardware trouble.

Our friends at Digital Craftsmen kindly replaced the server some time ago and Graham and I finished the setup just now and put it "back in rotation".

If you are in Europe you should see a "hosted by digital craftsmen" thing at the bottom of the search.cpan.org page now.

If you notice any trouble with the service, please let us know.

Power upgrade this weekend

The building is doing some sort of upgrade to the power system this weekend; hopefully it won't impact us in a negative way. (Crossed fingers, knock on wood).

We have been informed by the building management that on Friday, August 11, 2006, the Department of Water and Power, City of Los Angeles will be upgrading one existing 2500 KVA transformer to a new 3750 KVA transformer on the MST Grid here at the Garland Building. This project will commence at 6:00pm PST on Friday, August 11, 2006 and conclude on Sunday, August 13, 2006 at 9:00pm PST.



During the installation of this transformer the normal electrical power for the MST Grid will be transferred from the DWP utility grid to the Building’s emergency diesel generator plant. ABM Engineering has informed Morlin Asset Management that this transformer upgrade will affect the Garland Building in the following ways:



At exactly 6:00pm PST on Friday, August 11, 2006 on the MST Grid only, a two (2) minute outage will occur.



When the DWP utility grid is restored at 9:00pm PST on Sunday evening, another two (2) minute outage will take place.



We have been assured by building engineering that the service that is being upgraded will not have any impact to the power that provides service to IX2's facilities including any of the cooling equipment for the building. This work is the first step in the building's plan to increase the UPS capacity of the building. Again, this outage will not impact IX2 and our clients according to building management.

svn.perl.org cert expired

The SSL certificate for svn.perl.org expired yesterday. We'll get it replaced ASAP.

Error validating server certificate for 'https://svn.perl.org:443':
- The certificate is not issued by a trusted authority. Use the
fingerprint to validate the certificate manually!
- The certificate has expired.
Certificate information:
- Hostname: svn.perl.org
- Valid: from Aug  4 06:20:36 2004 GMT until Aug  4 06:20:36 2006 GMT
- Issuer: Certificate Authority, Develooper, Los Angeles, CA, US
- Fingerprint: 67:09:93:f3:3b:41:f2:7e:0f:fe:6c:1b:fd:b4:2a:fb:65:f0:29:e7

Anatomy of a(n ongoing) Disaster..

Dreamhost's datacenter is in the same building that the perl.org rack is in. They put together a wonderful blog post that's a very good summary of last week's troubles. (Of cousre, their troubles are an order of magnitude or seven greater than ours.)