We'd like to make some of the perl.org services (Search CPAN for example) faster for users in Asia; so we're looking for servers (Xen or KVM based servers are fine as long as we can run RHEL) in for example Japan, Taiwan or Singapore.
If you think you might be able to help, please email [email protected].
Today search.cpan.org got a tiny slightly bit faster. We're serving the CSS and images via the PantherExpress CDN, so in particular if you are in Asia/Australia or thereabout it'll all load a fraction or two of a second faster.
For the main site and search currently users in North America are served from Montréal (hosted by Weblocal), European users are served from London (hosted by Digital Craftsmen) and everyone else (most notably South America and Asia) are served from the perl.org servers in Los Angeles.
Documentation pages on search.cpan.org now contain a list of related modules. For an example see LWP::UserAgent
This list is determined by data created by Perlmonks.org about which modules are discussed together.
At the request of Michael G Schwern gravatar icons have been added to author pages on CPAN search.
Any author can get a gravatar icon on their page by registering at gravatar.com using their CPAN email alias.
One of the boxes serving CPAN Search to the US and the world has been about to fall over for a while (one of the disks hangs the system for a minute once in a while with scsi errors...). We are working on setting up new a pair of load balanced (for redundancy) mirrors provided by YellowBot.
Ideally we'll get it setup so the DNS servers will check and notice when one of the mirrors are out too... (patches to pgeodns are welcome - we even have a wiki for it and other perl.org infrastructure things, send an email to get invited to it).
We could still use a well-connected box for CPAN Search in Asia -- it probably wouldn't get much traffic, but it'd decrease latency for users there. Minimal specs required (it can be in a virtual box, vmware or xen): ~2.5GHz CPU, ~2GB ram, not much disk space, ability to install RHEL (we'll provide a license).
Many visitors come here from the CPAN Search Site that we run with Graham Barr. They all end up on the CPAN Search News page, which doesn't get the regular updates that often does affect that site. Oops.
We do have more redundant mirrors of the search site than the rest of the infrastructure, but unplanned outages still affect it. So, if you are here for operational news regarding perl.org, be sure to check out the main weblog. :-)
It's not something we (Robert, Graham & Ask) are in control of, but if you were wondering why search.cpan.org hasn't been getting new module uploads quickly lately it's because of problems with the hardware running the FUnet.fi master CPAN mirror. It's making all of CPAN "not move" so to speak.
PAUSE is still running and taking uploads and no data is being lost anywhere, just a little delayed.
Last I heard it should get better sometime this week.
For a long time Search CPAN has used the WAIT module to provide searching of POD documents. Today we started testing the use of Swish-e. Try it and let us know what you think
Many people have not been ablt to find the RSS feed for CPAN uploads that search has been providing for quite sometime. The only link was in the FAQ. It was also only in RSS 0.91 and did not contain much information.
Well now there is a new feed at http://search.cpan.org/uploads.rdf which is in the header of each page so discovery tools can find it. And there is a link on the recent upload page
I flipped the switch, so cpansearch.perl.org/search.cpan.org is now using the EU mirror for European users.
(see the search.cpan.org mirror post from yesterday)
Thanks again to Digital Craftsmen. We're also running one of our "geodns" thingies on their server now.
Over the last week Graham and I have been setting up the box provided by Digital Craftsmen; our first mirror not hosted on the perl.org infrastructure. We are planning a mirror in Japan and another US mirror too (but haven't gotten the hardware for it yet).
It's not on the search.cpan.org name yet, but (Very Alpha-ish) at cpansearch-geo.perl.org. If you are in Europe you should reach the new mirror, if you are anywhere else you should reach one of the perl.org hosted boxes (with the "hardware by bizrate" logo). The cpansearch-geo.perl.org name will go away when we are done testing.
Please try it out and let me know if you are having trouble with it (email [email protected]).
Our geography-aware DNS server, pgeodns, is a bit naively assuming that all of Europe will have better access to the UK mirror than to the West Coast US mirror.
In the process of setting it up, I updated pgeodns a bit, so if I made a mistake or two it might impact the ftp.perl.org and ftp.cpan.org names too, so please let me know if you are seeing any abnormalities with the DNS for those too.
pgeodns is in a private svn repository, but Robert says he'll move it to another one for me any day now. :-)
