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
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
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
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.
