[Nms-cgi-devel] [Fwd: SUBJECT: SourceForge.net: CVS service offering changes]

[Jonathan S. <jn...@ge...>]

In case anyone was wondering why the CVS wasn't working.

/J\
-----Forwarded Message-----
> From: SourceForge.net Team <no...@so...>
> To: jn...@ge...
> Subject: SUBJECT: SourceForge.net: CVS service offering changes
> Date: Thu, 11 May 2006 16:42:19 -0700
> 
> Greetings,
> 
> You are receiving this mail because you are a project admin for
> a SourceForge.net-hosted project. One of our primary services,
> CVS, suffered a series of interrelated, critical hardware failures
> in recent weeks. We understand how frustrating this CVS outage
> must be to you and your users; however, our top priority remains
> preservation of the integrity of your data.
> 
> The series of CVS hardware failures prompted us to expedite the
> deployment of planed improvements to our CVS infrastructure,
> drawing upon much of the knowledge that we gained from our
> Subversion deployment. Our improved CVS service architecture,
> which we plan to deploy tomorrow afternoon (2006-05-12), will
> offer greater performance and stability and will eliminate several
> single points of failure.
> 
> The Site Status page (https://www.sf.net/docs/A04) will be
> updated as soon as the new infrastructure is rolled out. In the
> interim, please read the important information provided below
> to learn about how these changes will affect your project.
> 
> 
> Summary of changes, effective 2006-05-12:
> 
> 
> 1. Hostname for CVS service
> 
> Old: cvs.sourceforge.net
> 
> New: PROJECT_UNIX_NAME.cvs.sourceforge.net
> 
> This change will require new working copies to be checked out of all
> repositories (so control files in the working copy will point to the
> right place). We will be updating the instructions we supply, but
> instructions that your team has written within documentation, etc. will
> need to be updated.
> 
> cvs -d:pserver:ano...@cv...:/cvsroot/gaim co gaim
> 
> would be changed to
> 
> cvs -d:pserver:ano...@ga...:/cvsroot/gaim co gaim
> 
> 
> 
> 2. ViewCVS
> 
> We are moving from ViewCVS to its successor, ViewVC. ViewVC is
> currently in use for our Subversion service.
> 
> 
> 
> 3. Sync delay
> 
> Old: CVS pserver, tarballs and ViewCVS provided against a separate
> server which is a minimum of three hours behind developer CVS.
> 
> New: ViewVC will be provided against developer CVS (it will be current).
> CVS pserver will be provided against a secondary server (not developer
> server) with a maximum expected delay of two hours.
> 
> Follow-up work is planned (this infrastructure takes us 80% of the way)
> to essentially eliminate the sync delay.
> 
> 
> 
> 4. Read-only rsync service
> 
> As a new service offering, we are now providing read-only rsync access
> against developer CVS. This allows projects to efficiently make
> on-demand backups of their entire CVS repository.
> 
> All projects should be making regular backups of their CVS repository
> contents using this service.
> 
> 
> 
> 5. Nightly tarball service
> 
> Nightly tarball service is being dropped in lieu of read-only rsync
> service. Projects which currently depend on nightly tarballs for
> repository backups will need to begin using rsync to make a backup copy
> of their repository contents.
> 
> We see this as a major functional improvement. For a number of reasons,
> tarballs have fallen out of sync with the data in the repository at
> times in the past few years. Tarballs required a substantial amount of
> additional disk, and I/O to generate. The move to read-only rsync
> allows backups to be produced on-demand, with an update frequency chosen
> by the project.
> 
> 
> 
> 6. Points of failure
> 
> In the past, developer CVS service for all projects was provided from a
> single host. CVS pserver service was provided from individual backend
> heads based on a split of the data.
> 
> Under our new design, developer CVS and most of our CVS-related services
> are provided from one of ten CVS hosts (count subject to increase with
> growth). Each host is independent, and makes a backup copy of the
> repository data of another host (which is used to provide the pserver
> CVS service).
> 
> Failure of a single host will impact only the availability of data on
> that host. Since the data is split among a larger number of hosts, the
> size of data impacted by an individual host outage is substantially
> smaller, and the time required for us to restore service will be
> substantially shorter.
> 
> This rapid architecture change has been made possible specifically using
> the research we performed for our recent launch of Subversion service.
> We've applied our best practices, produced a substantial amount of
> internal documentation, and kept an eye toward maintainability.
> This effort has allowed us to deploy this new architecture quickly
> once hardware was received, and will permit us to quickly scale
> this service horizontally as growth and demand requires. 
> 
> 
> 
> Many other minor improvements have also been made to improve the service
> offering and make it less trouble-prone. The most important of which are
> listed above. For a full description of the new service offering, and
> for information on how to use the services described above, please refer
> to the site documentation for the CVS service after the service has been
> launched: https://www.sf.net/docs/E04
> 
> 
> Thank you,
> 
> The SourceForge.net Team 
> 
> .
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