[knowledgeforge-user] knowledgeforge.net down

Thu May 1 11:50:55 UTC 2014

On Fri, Apr 25, 2014, at 11:17, Mark Longair wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> knowledgeforge.net seems to have been down for two or three days
> now - could someone give us an update on what's going on?

Hi Mark,

The (old) AWS machine that the service was running on went down in
flames, and we've had to bring the machine back from backups.

After engaging on a lengthy yak-shaving exercise yesterday (for those of
you who are not familiar with the term, this should give you some idea:
https://i.imgur.com/t0XHtgJ.gif) knowledgeforge.net is mostly
resurrected.

I should make clear that not all of the site is working. Subversion and
Mercurial services seem to be mostly ok, but Trac has problems and I
haven't tested webdav, www, and friends. If anyone has systems chops and
wishes to volunteer their services in bringing an ageing and
*horrifically* messy kforge deployment back to life then I'm happy to
coordinate that.

Realistically, we can't provide support for these services any longer --
the software is approaching 6 years old, and has a complex dependency
chain involving even older software. I spent several hours yesterday
compiling postgres, psycopg, and mod_python by hand, because there's no
simple way to set up the versions KForge requires on newer
hardware/operating systems.

As such, I'll be writing some of this stuff up and sending an email to
this list, detailing our desire to pass the knowledgeforge.net hosting
on to somebody else. If we're unable to do so within a reasonable
timeframe (say three to four months) then we will, sadly, have to shut
the service down.

-N

-- 
Nick Stenning
Technical Director, Open Knowledge Foundation