Ros-general November 2013

ros-general@reactos.org

6 participants
4 discussions

Fezile server down
by Colin Finck 28 Nov '13

28 Nov '13

Hi all, Apart from the critical servers hosted in Germany, we can operate our own network in Sweden by courtesy of Jan Blomqvist-Kinander. Today, the infrastructure team has set up a new switch there, which is meant to increase the network performance, allow a better intrusion detection and offer more ports. Most of our machines could be successfully moved to that switch, except for Fezile. Due to unexpected networking problems, this machine became unavailable even for us and needs to be rebooted manually. It's also one of our older servers without an IPMI module, so we can't remotely reboot it. The server outage affects the following services: * iso.reactos.org * doxygen.reactos.org * cppcheck.reactos.org * VMware Player Test slave I'm very sorry for the additional downtime this has caused. Once the server is up again, we'll do our best to prevent this from happening again. Take my word that I'll write a report for the website about the recent infrastructure changes, so you can get an idea of our additional resources :) With best regards, Colin

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Server downtime on Saturday
by Colin Finck 26 Nov '13

26 Nov '13

Hi all, In the process of improving the performance of our infrastructure, we will upgrade the first of two servers this Saturday. This will result in a downtime for the following services: * SVN * Mail and mailing lists * BuildBot * Testman * GIT mirror * File server at svn.reactos.org * Compatibility Database * ev.reactos.org * Second nameserver * RosKGB bot The upgrade will in particular increase CPU performance as well as RAM and HDD sizes, so we will have more resources available afterwards. Our current server has served us well since 2009, so don't expect such an upgrade to happen again in the next few years. We're aware that this affects many core services, so we will do our best to keep the downtime as low as possible. Our target is <12h. Gladly, we have already done such an upgrade in the past, so it mainly boils down to the speed of transferring files over the network. Meanwhile, we apologize for the caused inconveniences. With best regards and on behalf of the whole infrastructure team, Colin Finck

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ReactOS website issues
by Pierre Schweitzer 21 Nov '13

21 Nov '13

Hi all, This is an acknowledgment and informative email. Since we migrated the ReactOS website to Drupal, you all have spotted critical performances issues. We did our best to address most of them in the following days to ensure smooth browsing on the website. Unfortunately we could not fix them all. Even worse, nowadays, ReactOS website faces a kind of "shutdown" everyday (approximately between 2:45 AM CET and 4:45 AM CET). This is a really long and critical downtime that affects mainly US users due to timezones. Be sure we are aware about it. Unfortunately, this is not something we can fix from a day to the following. This is due to our backup policies that completely lock the MySQL server to ensure consistent backups. We are currently working on getting this fixed as fast as possible. But this will require (besides the rest) a two hardware upgrades on our infrastructure. Indeed, Drupal stresses our infrastructure much more than old RosCMS. And we have to fully rethink our web infrastructure and redistribute it, which we cannot do at the moment due to hardware constraints. Upgrading our hardware will be in our first steps (obviously, expect downtimes at that moment). Then, we will finally be able to replicate our MySQL server to perform load-balancing and prevent shutdowns on backup. We, the sysadmins team and the website team, agreed on a plan about how to enhance and strengthen the infrastructure, and thus fix all the issues we are currently facing. This will take some time, but we are working together to get ReactOS website back into a decent shape. Be assured that we are doing our best to make your place nice. Meanwhile, please forgive us the caused inconvenience. With my best regards, on behalf of the guys working behind the scene, -- Pierre Schweitzer<pierre at reactos.org> System Administrator ReactOS Foundation

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Status of accessibility components (MSAA/iAccessibility/UIA), NVDA compatibility etc
by Geoff Shang 13 Nov '13

13 Nov '13

Hi, I realise it's somewhat bad form to jump on a mailing list and immediately start posting, so I hope you'll forgive me. But it looked like the most appropriate place to ask this. I've been watching the project from afar for some time. I am a big fan of open source and have been using console-mode Debian Linux as my primary operating system for almost 15 years. But I am pragmatic enough to realise that we need alternatives, and that Windows cannot be ignored. A free Windows alternative would be fantastic if realised. As a blind person, I am very interested in the ability to use ReactOS with screen reading software such as NVDA which is open source, and others which are not. Last time I looked into the status of accessibility APIs in ReactOS, it appeared that not much had been done. After watching a presentation from Alex Ionescu yesterday on ReactOS and where it's at right now, and with Windows XP about to be end-of-lifed, I thought I'd look at this again. A google of various appropriate terms turned up a number of encouraging things, most notably doxygen documentation which indicated work on the iaccessible/MSAA accessibility API. This is most exciting, as the successor to this, iaccessible2, is I believe freely available and should not need to be reimplemented. I don't know if there are plans to extend implementation to that provided by UI Automation in more recent operating systems and back-ported rather buggily to Windows XP, but my understanding is that this would provide even greater possibility for access (particularly if it didn't include the bugs!). What I did not find, how ever, is any indication of the current status of this. I didn't find any mention of it on the Wiki in Current Status, Missing Functionality or Community Funded Ideas. There was nothing obvious to me in the Tech Wiki or the reference section, nor in the two most recent GSOC pages (I didn't go back any further). I did find something on a page entitled Change Taskforce, basically saying that this would be a good thing to support and may lead to greater support from people like GSOC, but nothing else. I also found a couple of emails like this one which don't appear to have been answered. In case further justification is needed for this, apart from the obvious goal of enabling screen reader users to use ReactOS, the NVDA project has shown what blind developers are capable of. Blind users would be able to report on accessibility issues in other parts of ReactOS and its various applications, and some would even be able to contribute by writing code or submitting translations. It's pretty much impossible for a blind person to contribute to ReactOS if they can't use it. Finally, it may be possible for the ReactOS project to either use existing software or develop their own that can conduct automated testing of ReactOS by using the accessibility APIs to both activate UI components and monitor the results. I am writing to ask about the status, but I am also asking that this status be made available somewhere where people are likely to look for it, probably on the relevant wiki page. This would mean that blind people would be able to start testing ReactOS if support is complete/near complete, and it would attract the interest of developers and interested doners if it is not. Any information on this subject would be most welcome. Thanks, Geoff.

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Ros-general November 2013