Ste Packaging

A few days ago one of my two servers went away, as the sponsor (Freeit4Less) failed to pay for it at the beginning of this month. Neither they, nor the hosting company warned me this was going to happen, and my attempts to reach Freeit4Less have been fruitless. This leaves me with only one server, which means that if it goes down for any reason, there is no other server to fall back to and handle the load.

The server uses lighttpd to serve the files. For some reason, it dies about every day or so and needs a simple command to restart it. That was why it was down the other day and again this morning. I have put a watchdog cronjob entry in place now to restart it if it should die, and it runs once a minute. That should keep the site up and running (I will test it, momentarily, by deliberately killing lighttpd and making sure the script restarts it - update: the script works). I will then start looking to upgrade lighttpd or whatever else is needed to figure out why it frequently dies.

-ste

You may have noticed that things haven’t been updated a lot recently. Let me apologize and start by saying that I’m working on rectifying that as I write this.

The download stats, which hadn’t been updated since May 27th, are in the process of updating now. It’ll likely take a few hours, during which you will see the number constantly growing and the timestamp always about whenever you check. Once it stops changing, you’ll know it’s finished.

I see that one of the two servers that make up the repository seems to be not responding. I have removed it from DNS and all traffic should shortly be going to the other, functioning, server. I’ll work on getting the down server up again, A.S.A.P..

The server that the download stats database and the cacti service is on, was down for a few days, due to a sever set of thunderstorms that went through the area. We were without power for the better part of a day, afterwards. The power is back and thanks to someone who pointed out it was down, I’ve brought it back up (which is how you can see the stats updating now and I found out one of the servers was not responding).

For most of the past month, I have been assisting in the medical decision making process for a friend. His liver failed and he went into the I.C.U.. Shortly therafter, he went on a ventilator and became unconscious. Over the course of the next two weeks, most of his other organs failed and he developed a fever. Ultimately it was decided to let him pass away and I, along with two others whom he loved, stayed with him until he peacefully passed away. I had the unhappy task of telling his mother and then later, his sister, of the news that he had been ill and had died. He was estranged from both, and we’d been instructed not to tell them anything, which we respected, until he was gone, at which point they had to be told. He was 45. My head hasn’t really been right during all that, so site maintenance and updates suffered.

I’m back and pulling it together now. My apologies for being out of the loop for as long as I was.

-ste
UPDATE: It seems the reason the one server is down is that it’s service was cancelled. Neither the hosting company, nor the sponsor who was paying for it, contacted me, so I’m not sure what’s up. I’m looking into it further, now. -ste

I haven’t been able to reach one of the servers for 40 minutes. I also cannot reach the hosting company’s website. I have just removed the server from DNS and it will therefore be out of service within 30 minutes from now. I’ll add it back whenever this is resolved. In the mean time, the other server will carry the load.

Update 2008-03-03 14:32 - The server was cut off from the net due to (I’m told) a fiber cut that has been fixed. It’s been accessible for 30 minutes, so I think the fix appears stable. I have just added it back to DNS and within 30 minutes the load will be once again split between the two servers.

-ste

FDCServers just emailed me and said:

“we`ll be adding new additional carriers to our network mix tonight around midnight CST. While we do not expect any downtime however there might be some packet loss and routing issues”

-ste

Back on January 19th, I told you that my site was in trouble and was in danger of being shut down. Things went from bad to worse, as the days went on, but I managed to keep the site going, in spite of the problems. Yes, there were troubles with refreshing my site and downloading packages, but while lots of people encountered those issues, just as many didn’t.

Then, Freeit4Less.com and Polar Bear Farm Ltd stepped up to provide me the resources I needed to not only save the site, but make it faster and better than ever. They had the technology. I could rebuild it. (+10 if you get the reference) They each provided me with a dedicated server (no shared hosting, no VPS) and oodles of bandwidth. I have spent the past week setting them up, configuring them, testing them and putting them into service. As of about two and a half hours ago, I finally finished. They are done. Yay!

They are fast. They share the load (via round-robin DNS). Each is capable of carrying 100% of the current traffic, by itself, should the other server go down. (Note: there would be issues (about 50% of refreshes and downloads would fail) because of the down server, but as soon as I knew it was down, and likely to stay that way for more than a few minutes, I would remove its entry from DNS. Within 30 minutes of my doing so, service would be back to normal, and coming entirely from the other server.)

One thing I have noticed, as my site has moved around in the past, is that huge numbers of people refuse to update their Installer.app and Community Sources packages, so that they point to and can use the new location. I have had to accommodate those people by putting redirects on the old sites, that point to the new sites, so that things still work for people. No more. I have gone to all the old servers and deliberately broken their configurations so that they will no longer work. You must upgrade to at least Installer.app 3.0 and Community Sources 3.4, to get access to the new site and to be able to use it. Yes, people paying attention will note that, technically, Installer.app needn’t be at 3.0, but since more and more packages will use features only found in that version, you’d be wise to upgrade to it if you haven’t yet. Additionally, just as I broke my old sites, I may configure the new one to ignore requests from versions of Installer.app that are less than 3.0.

It didn’t make sense to put out package updates while the site was having so many issues. Consequently, there is a huge backlog of them, some of which have been waiting since January 26th. Now that the servers are done, all that’s left to do is get these packages out the door to all of you. It’s late here (nearly midnight), so I am not going to start them tonight. I’m tired and I don’t want to mess them up. So, when I get up in the morning, I’ll start in on them and will work all day and into the evening, if need be, to get them all released. If I run into any problems with a package, I’ll email the developer right away. As soon as we resolve the issue, their package will get done. I apologize to all of them - they have been patiently waiting for me to get to this point. Once caught up, I’ll get back to the daily (or nearly so) updates of the past.

Be sure to check out the sites of my sponsors, please. Between them, they are paying $1,200.00 a month to keep this repository alive. When you are at their sites, check out their products. If you think they might be useful (hell, even if you don’t, heh), buy them. And don’t forget to donate to me, too - I’m still out of work and perilously close to being out of money. Your donations go directly towards keeping a roof over my and my three cats’ heads, and food in our stomachs. Many of the developers, whose apps I host, also take donations. Try to spread a little love their way too, so they keep writing and updating these apps we all love. Every little bit helps, and no amount is too small.

Let the fun recommence! :)

-ste

UPDATE: I forgot to mention that the URL to the RSS feed for my packages changed. If you were subscribed to it, you should unsubscribe and resubscribe . -ste

UPDATE: There *is* another way that you can help, besides donations, but since I’m not allowed to even talk about it, I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out. -ste