RHEL5

We've started upgrading some of our boxes to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 which includes virtualization. We haven't entirely figured out how we are going to use it, but it'll likely make it easier for us to host more things, which is good...

Bad Spam Day, But Nice Weather

<me> Today is a bad spam day.

<someone> nice weather. all the spammers are coming out.

<someone else> no comment

<someone> crap, are you spamming today?

There's a lot of email spam slipping through our filters over the past few days, and that stinks! (It's getting through other people's filters too - so we're not the only ones having trouble.) We're working on tightening things up - but we have day jobs too - so please bear with us and don't report us to spamcop.

New CPAN Search mirror(s)

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).

Oops - several services down!

Oops - while doing something else in the datacenter earlier today it seems like I managed to unplug one of our switches! The friendly people there are looking into it. If they don't find the problem I'll go down there shortly.

update: Everything is back!

perl infrastructure news

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. :-)

"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 [email protected] -- 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 [email protected] 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.