Switching to the new VHFFS mail database

Posted on Thursday 26 April 2012, at 18:46 UTC

We are currently switching to our newly born mail database, if everything goes well, that shouldn't take long, if not, err... well, you'll see :-)

Edit: Done, everything went well! As usual, contact if something is not working the way it should.

Global outage

Posted on Saturday 14 April 2012, at 03:40 UTC

Yeah, as often after hardware changes, we enjoy software and hardware bugs.

Someone will check what is going on in a few hours.

Edit: Good, the filer managed to finally reboot itself, we are back online!

Heavy hardware maintenance planned

Posted on Thursday 5 April 2012, at 20:39 UTC

This week-end, we are going to do massive hardware change to TuxFamily!

Among other things, we are going to replace all storage disks, and we will also take this opportunity to migrate from ext3 to ext4 as well as starting from fresh new filesystems, which suffered a little bit corruption from storage issues we had several years ago.

Of course, this is going to take... hours... so be prepared for a week-end with hours of downtime! :)

Edit Saturday, April 7th, 15:26 UTC: Workforce successfully delivered at destination, work begin.

Edit Sunday, April 8th, 11:58 UTC: Work almost done, everything should be back.

Edit Monday, April 9th, 08:19 UTC: Workforce sent back to origin, on the road again ;-)

Global outage

Posted on Sunday 1 April 2012, at 15:17 UTC

We lost about one hour ago the network connectivity to our main rack, we are currently waiting for someone to check what is going on :-)

This is probably either a power outage or a dead Ethernet switch.

But, the secondary services (ns2 and mx2) are up and running, mails are kept in a safe place ;)

Please bear with us.

Edit: As planned, our main Ethernet switch died, leaving everything in the middle of nowhere :-). It was replaced successfully in a record time with our spare switch by our generous houser !

Edit: This one was of course not an April fool joke... or the Ethernet switch enjoyed the April 1st as well, doing a joke in its own way :-)

All HTTP services will soon be moved to Gopher

Posted on Sunday 1 April 2012

Hello,

One of our beloved hosted wrote a server implementing the Gopher protocol. Because of that, we had to try on TuxFamily and we managed to make it run on the TuxFamily website as well as on the download service.

For all common browsers, the overbite plugin allows you to browse the gopherspace, so there is no technical difficulty to use Gopher.

Now convinced that Gopher is far more simpler and faster than anything running over HTTP, we are going to switch to Gopher all services that are currently running over HTTP.

However, in order to let you smoothly migrate to Gopher, we designed some simple milestones that should give you enough time to prepare the migration of your websites. Here are the key dates:

• In a few days : Gopher service added to VHFFS, you'll be able to create gopherspaces along with your current HTTP Web areas.
• 1st May 2012 : All TuxFamily "internal" services moved to Gopher, like the TuxFamily Website, the FAQ, the VHFFS Panel, and so on...
• 1st Jun 2012 : HTTP, FTP, RSYNC removed from download repositories.
• 1st July 2012 : Planned shutdown of the web area service.

As usual, feel free to contact us if necessary.

The TuxFamily.org team

Edit: Of course it was our yearly April fool joke ;-)

Downloads master server down

Posted on Wednesday 7 March 2012, at 12:23 UTC

The master server of our downloads service is currently down. Content is still delivered by our slave servers, but the <yourproject>-repository directory you usually browse through FTP, SSH and SFTP is unavailable.

Your website may be impacted if by chance it reads data from your download repository through the /data/repository directory (note this practice should be avoided as much as possible).

The server will be back as soon as possible.

Edit: The server is back, everything is working again.

VHFFS 4.4.0 Released

Posted on Sunday 4 March 2012, at 17:51 UTC

VHFFS, the software which energize TuxFamily, was released yesterday, featuring some major changes, like HTML::Template eviction, FastCGI support for the panel, new VHFFS Panel theme, and a shiny cleaned API.

Of course, as TuxFamily follows almost day-to-day the VHFFS trunk, we are already running it !

Annual meeting report

Posted on Monday 30 January 2012, at 18:44 UTC

TuxFamily.org held its annual meeting on January 21st, 2012. We discussed our financial situation and needs and our future plans. For those who can read French, the report and the presentations are online.

New VHFFS panel!

Posted on Tuesday 24 January 2012, at 12:53 UTC

The user web interface of the hosting management software, known as the VHFFS panel, and some of the core code was almost entirely rewritten.

Enjoy!, and please report any bug found!

Network outage

Posted on Monday 16 January 2012, at 09:02 UTC

Due to a planned maintenance operation on the core routers of our hoster, we had a network outage on all our primary services this night from 2012-01-15 23:51 UTC to 2012-01-16 00:52 UTC. Everything is now back online.