Power outage

Posted on Friday 17 May 2013, at 13:33 UTC

Today, around 10:10 UTC, we collapsed under a power outage, everything should be back !.

Network outage

Posted on Thursday 2 May 2013, at 17:58 UTC

Our main hoster is currently working on their network, which might darken our services for a few minutes from time to time.

Edit: Work completed.

Moving to a new place

Posted on Friday 26 April 2013, at 00:05 UTC

This week-end, during the night from Saturday to Sunday, we will move TuxFamily to a new facility. Well, this is actually in a building which is just across the road, so a few hours would be enough to move everything ;-)

Edit 2013-04-27 16:51 UTC: Network is live at the new location !, so we start by moving all services except storage servers and web service.

Edit 2013-04-27 22:10 UTC: We finished moving everything to the new location, we restarded up everything using a quick'n'dirty wiring to check if we didn't lost anything during the move, and yeah, good news, everything is healthy. We now start to do regular disk array maintenance then we will rewire everything correctly.

Edit 2013-04-28 08:06 UTC: Yeah, everything should be back.

Edit 2013-04-29 14:16 UTC: All disks arrays just finished syncing, we can now consider that we successfully moved in to the new place ;-).

TuxFamily services soon to be moved to a revolutionary hostees-driven cloud-powered structure

Posted on Monday 1 April 2013

Greetings,

As you already know, TuxFamily, while being a centralized hosting solution since its creation, has always been in favor of self-hosting, and more generally in favor of anything that makes hostees more responsible and involved in the various hosting-related processes.

That's why the TuxFamily administrators strove to entirely rework VHFFS. As a recall, VHFFS means Virtual Hosting For Free Software; it is the software component which takes care of TuxFamily's infrastructures consistency. This rework gave birth to VHFFS 365.

Nicknamed "CloudFamily", this new version will radically change the organization and inner working of TuxFamily -- indeed, it intends to make the whole platform distributed following a P2P-style design. Each hostee will move up from simple services requester to the status of active node of the TuxFamily network.

From a technical point of view, each hostee will have to setup on their own side a virtual machine and provide a good quality network access along with sufficient disk space to store TuxFamily's data. At first, a 5 Mbits/s symmetric connection, a few hundreds GigaBytes (GB) of disk space and an availability of 23 out of 24 hours will be deemed acceptable to keep enjoying the services of our platform.

Relying on the global fast spreading of fibre channel within residential areas and the abiding capacity increase of hard disk drives, we assess the hosting conditions will not leave anybody behind starting from May 2013. Of course, once arrived to this due date, we will have to cease hosting the few potential refractory hostees who would not or could not have followed us in this groundbreaking revolution we are leading.

Please note that the most qualified among you may participate to the development of some features that were not considered release-critical for VHFFS 365, such as e.g. encryption of storage and all inter-nodes transmissions and more generally everything related to security.

Therefore, no time to waste! To your routers and keyboards to make TuxFamily the new reference of free hosting for free people! Please find below the planned agenda, take it into account to complete your facilities within delays:

• April 1st, 2013 : VHFFS 365 public announcement.
• April 3rd, 2013 : Release of technical details to join the CloudFamily.
• May 1st, 2013 : Addition of first nodes -- beginning of the coexistence phase between the former infrastructure and the new one.
• End of May, 2013 : Eviction of potential refractory hostees.
• June 4th, 2013 : Decommissioning of the former infrastructure.
• Early 2016 : Extra developments related to platform security.

Note: Until the end of security-related developments, the whole resulting platform will be placed under the protection of the leader in the domain of Security-as-a-Service, namely CloudFlare.

The TuxFamily.org team

Edit: Of course it was our yearly April fool joke ;-)

Network outage

Posted on Thursday 7 March 2013, at 07:36 UTC

We are being darkened by an outage on the network of our main services.

That shouldn't stay long, stay tuned ! ;-)

Edit: Network is back !

Download repositories master source failure

Posted on Saturday 5 January 2013, at 10:05 UTC

We lost during the night the data RAID array on the server used for master source of download repositories.

Until now, we managed to recover the RAID array and the data to the last known revision, but we do not want to put it back on production until we replaced and re-synched all the faulty drives.

There seem to be missing files on slave servers, but this is not a big deal, they will come back on master-to-slaves resync after array is repaired.

Edit 2013-01-05 17:29 UTC: Staff arrived at destination, work begin.

Edit 2013-01-05 23:51 UTC: We managed to recover almost everything from the died RAID array, meaning we have everything up to date except a few files, it took some time but this is, in our opinion, better than just recover from the backup. But there is a sad news, the delivered spare hard drives are not the good one, so we are going to rebuild the array with disks that are available and we will need to work on it again later to grow the array with the expected disks.

Edit 2013-01-06 00:51 UTC: So, today's hard drives being reliable as close to "already broken in the sealed package", we of course had to deal with never used once and already broken disks. Well, we still managed to create a hopefully healthy array that will be able to store all the data. Previously recovered data are being copied back right now.

Edit 2013-01-06 04:07 UTC: Yeah, downloads master source is back, with a fresh clean filesystem and all the data available. Slave servers (those used to get files) are currently synchronizing from master, everything should be back to normal in a few hours.

Edit 2013-01-06 12:00 UTC: Slaves finished synching, everything should be back.

This is a good time to point out that you are supposed to do backups, it may save you if someday we cannot recover the data. And also following our security recommendations, which aims at preventing common security issues.

Mail service down

Posted on Sunday 2 December 2012, at 18:58 UTC

Our mail servers just collapsed under a massive mail burst(flood?), imap, pop, mailing lists and mx1 services are down for now.

Fortunately, the mx2 is still up, we won't lose your mails ;-)

Edit: Mail servers recovered, mail service is back !

Dead hard drive replacement

Posted on Saturday 23 June 2012, at 13:30 UTC

In a few tens of minutes, we will start replacing dead hard drives in the server acting as the master source of the download repositories.

That shouldn't be long, you won't be able to upload new files to the download repositories during the replacement.

Edit: Work complete, everything should be back up.

Air cooling issue

Posted on Wednesday 20 June 2012, at 16:54 UTC

Almost half of our servers died due to an air cooling issue, all services are down except the web (but we don't know how long it will be).

Secondary services are up, your mails are kept safe ;-)

Please bear with us, stay tuned.

Edit: Everything is back!

Tuxfamily will be at Solutions Linux 2012 !

Posted on Sunday 17 June 2012, at 20:01 UTC

TuxFamily.org will be to the Solutions Linux 2012 event in Paris on June 19-20-21

It will be a great time for all of us to meet, talk about your projects and to have some feedbacks on our hosting platform. You are all welcome in our cubicle for a coffee (or more !) We always enjoy having a special time with our hosted people so don't hesitate, come and have a talk with us.