4:05 p.m.
Hello all,
The past few weeks have been very trying on the Adélie Linux project.
You may have noticed that the weekly status reports stopped with the
week ending 2019-01-20.
Usually, I'm able to send the weekly status report emails on Monday or
Tuesday of the following week. Both of those days were spent attempting
to secure more funding so that the project could continue.
Wednesday, 30th January 2019, at approximately 16:40 Central Standard
Time, the dedicated server that powers the following Adélie Linux (and
other) infrastructure was disconnected from the Internet:
- code.foxkit.us (GitLab)
- enfys.foxkit.us (PostgreSQL database serving GitLab and IMAP/SMTP)
- IRC bouncer used by awilfox, Elizafox, rwg (IRC operator), and others
- other systems including our backup Bugzilla server
During the week of January 14th, the Systems Administration team,
consisting of Aerdan, djt, and myself, had migrated the contents of a
dedicated server hosted at Rack911 containing mirrormaster and rarity
(the mailing list system) to other systems. We were told in early
January that this dedicated server was being powered off at the end of
the month. We were then notified at 18:21 CST on the 30th of January
that the information we were provided was incorrect, and that the other
dedicated server that was hosted there was also being powered off.
We had less than 36 hours to move over a terabyte of information to
other systems. Some of this infrastructure is still not available
(notably, my IRC bouncer, which allowed me to communicate with many of
our upstreams, is still down and needs to be reinstalled). From all of
us, I would like to extend an extreme debt of gratitude to Zach van Rijn
(Thalheim on IRC, who hosts us2-distfiles) for managing to bring up an
image I took of our GitLab server on the same infrastructure as us2.
This allowed us to recover much quicker.
Since GitLab requires Node.js, Go, and a few other packages that we had
not yet stabilised, we were unable to reinstall GitLab on our new
dedicated system at Integricloud. This most likely will not be able to
take place until after the 1.0 release cycle is completed.
Immediately after this emergency migration, my office had an insect
issue that required me to abandon it for six days. This also required
me to leave my laptops behind. I was only able to use my mobile phone
during this time, and as such, was unable to do much of the work of
managing the Adélie Linux project.
Since then, our team has been working tirelessly to try and regain our
momentum and continue to release 1.0-BETA3 at the time that we promised.
At this time, it appears that although we had no ability to work on
Adélie Linux from the 30th of January until the 6th of February, we had
managed to complete things sooner than anticipated. This means that we
are only currently four days behind schedule, with an anticipated
release date of 18th April at our current pace.
Thanks to Bobby Bingham (koorogi on IRC)'s efforts of rewriting
libucontext, we now have a functional Go on 64-bit PowerPC. More on
this and other developments will be included in the next weekly status
report, which I will write this evening. It will be primarily focused
on the week of 18th through 24th February, but it will also include
information about what happened before the 18th of February.
Rest assured that even through adversity, we remain dedicated to
creating the best libre operating environment possible.
Thank you for your continued support. We could not exist without our
amazing community.
All of my best,
--arw
--
A. Wilcox (awilfox)
Project Lead, Adélie Linux
https://www.adelielinux.org