The Commits Explorer is now living on one of our AMD machines and is much faster and responsive.  The old vserver has been retired due to disk size limitations.  This should improve the project summary pages on the main site as well since the activity meter and information about which companies and committers are active all comes from Dash.  It took me the better part of a week to get it up and running after the old machine died, so apologies to anyone who felt slighted by being shown as ‘Inactive’ during that time.  Everything is back to normal and faster than ever!

You don’t need to pay your friendly Webmaster for saving your butt… But the funds will be put to good use (no, not drinks…)  BTW, bug 292476 was initially called “Oops, I’m a dumbass!”

I’m in the process of setting up read-only git repositories of Eclipse CVS projects.  You can see the list on this temporary page, and you should be able to use all the repos listed.

Feel free to read (and comment) on bug 280583.

If your Internet-connected computer accepts SSH connections, chances are half the planet is trying to get in to hax0r you — literally.  Using Zeemaps and IP geolocation, we can easily plot the values on a Zeemaps.

I’m just kidding about Eric Rizzo..  But Eric, if that is you, don’t count on me for free beer at EclipseCon 

I stumbled across the AMP project website this morning.  The first thing that caught my eye was the terrific layout.  The second thing I noticed was the context-sensitive top navigation that they are using.  This is the first time I’ve seen a project override our $Menu object with some context-sensitive links.  Cool!  You can see how it is done by looking at the _projectCommon.php file.

The Community Forums homepage has taken the #3 position as the most visited URL at Eclipse.org, surpassing the main Downloads page.  Here’s the new short list:

1. “Find a mirror”

2. Eclipse.org Home

3. Community Forums

4. Main Downloads page

5. Resources

6. Categories

7. Documentation

8. EMF downloads

9. PDT downloads

10. Ganymede SR2 downloads

Today is October 1st — my fifth anniversary working at Eclipse.  To celebrate, I thought it would be appropriate to compile a THEN and NOW table of Eclipse.org, as seen by an IT guy.  As the years go by, some things changed, and some stayed the same…

There is a picture here.

I’m sure that list doesn’t even scratch the surface of everything we’ve done in the past five years, nor does it hint at all the awesome people I am privileged to work with on a daily basis.  Here’s to another 5 years of supporting this great community and helping projects pump out the coolest stuff!

If you were able to upgrade to Galileo SR1/Eclipse 3.5.1 in a timely manner, you were probably just lucky.  Even today, 5 full days after the release, our servers are still crawling.

What happened?

In late August, Karl and I had installed our new Cisco load balancer and firewall.  Unbeknownst to us, we were dropping connections.  A few committers noted that CVS connections were causing broken builds, and we had early reports from our mirrors that their RSYNC connections were being terminated.  We didn’t pay too much attention to the RSYNC issue in favour of resolving CVS, since RSYNC is one of those robust protocols that is essentially bomb-proof.

Mistake 1.

Fast forward to Friday, Sept. 25. I did real quick mirror check and everything checked out.  We’re good to go.

Mistake 2.

I mean, this is just a point release, and I’ve done millions of these. Business as usual, right?

Mistake 3.

At around 3:00pm ET on Friday, I was getting reports that the ZIP files were missing on most of the mirrors, despite the fact that they were considered in sync.  Uh oh.  Since Karl had found (and fixed) some short timeouts that may have caused the dropped connections, I went on to assume that mirrors were simply not yet fully up-to-date with Galileo SR1, and that they would be in sync sometime during the weekend.

Mistake 4

As it turns out, since late August, our mirrors would begin syncing, but would never finish.  They were all badly out of date, but still considered in sync but because they checked in regularly. So they spent most of the weekend simply catching up, without actually getting the new SR1/3.5.1 files.

On Monday, the above became painfully apparent when we were caught serving p2 updates for most of the planet from a single 100 megabit internet connection. At this point, mirrors were having a difficult time pulling updates from us.  I then brilliantly re-routed most of our downloads to our Amazon AWS account, after making sure it was in sync.

Wrong again, hero.

My uploads to AWS were also not completing. Apparently, when you update Eclipse, there are content/artifact jar files everywhere in our tree that need to be fetched. Some of those were not on AWS yet, causing the updates to fail.

“Epic Fail.” What have you learned?

When you think it’s business as usual, you’re probably wrong.  Plenty of learned lessons here.

What happens now?

Most of our mirrors are now in sync, and so is our Amazon AWS.  p2 probably got burned by many broken mirrors and now only trusts the home site.  It will eventually learn to trust its mirrors again. Until then, updates may be a bit slow, but they should succeed.

Galileo SR1, based on Eclipse 3.5.1, is here!  You can fetch your favourite goodies from the usual URL:

http://eclipse.org/downloads/

Galileo SR1 is available a day early for Friends of Eclipse.  Here is your link:

http://friends.eclipse.org/galileo_sr1.html

Of course, it’s never a bad time to become a Friend:

http://www.eclipse.org/donate/