[NTLK] 2018-07-05 UNNA.org outage status update

[Morgan Aldridge]

Hey all,

First, my sincerest apologies for the long downtime for UNNA.org site and
the lack of communication. I have recovered the UNNA data and am currently
rebuilding infrastructure to so I can start putting the pieces back
together. This outage is affecting my own small business in innumerable
ways, so it's extremely high priority and is my sole focus right now.

Timeline of Events:

2018-06-23 - 2018-06-26: The web server hosting UNNA.org, plus a number of
other sites hosted on makkintosshu.net crashed sometime early Sunday
morning. Unfortunately, I was out of town on a canoe camping trip without
cell or Internet service, and didn't notice until Tuesday morning when I
finally got back to checking email.

2018-06-29 - Present: The aforementioned server crashed again sometime
early Friday morning, this time resulting in catastrophic, unrepairable
data corruption. The first few days were spent in data recovery, which
appears to have been successful, plus planning & prepping for upgrades,
service & data migrations, and required reconfigurations. Unfortunately,
some of the additional services the server was running resulted in
cascading failures of makkintosshu.net network & server infrastructure, so
I've since been rebuilding & troubleshooting that so I can get websites
back up and running (and get back to now significantly delayed client work).

Going Forward:

Once infrastructure & web servers are restored, there will actually be a
fair amount of additional work to get UNNA.org back up and running again,
roughly:

1) UNNA data is hosted in a large Subversion repository which includes the
websites (www.unna.org, tools.unna.org, mirrors.unna.org, etc.), but this
is slow and unwieldy. That will need to be migrated to separate git
repositories (they'll end up under the UNNA GitHub organization: <
https://github.com/unna/>) for several reasons: performance, manageability,
additional backups, improved community access/support, and easier
restoration of UNNA mirrors.
2) Then I should be able to get the UNNA.org sites back up and running
relatively quickly.
4) There will be some code that needs to be updated to restore all
functionality, such as automatic commits when files are uploaded/published
(currently SVN), background processes, etc.
3) Next comes restoration (and updates) of additional services such as UNNA
torrents seeds, NPDS tracker, etc.
5) Finally, implementing & documenting a new process of hosting UNNA
mirrors, utilizing the Git repos (previous versions used rsync, which is
great, but using version control—esp. git—will be much easier & faster).
6) ...
7) Non-profit

That's just the UNNA punch list, and I'm already nearly a week into
infrastructure rebuild with all too many "bang head here" moments, plus
client sites and contract work to get back to ASAP. I greatly appreciate
everyone's patience so far, I'm sure you're all fighting back many anxious
questions. I'll try to answer questions & provide more timely updates, but
it'll be very much as time permits.

I know several of your have expressed interest in hosting a mirror over the
years. Let's discuss once the data is up on GitHub, but probably no sooner.
At that point, I'll also happy to discuss other improvements, upgrades, etc.

Wishing for cool & calm,

Morgan
-- 
Morgan
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http://makkintosshu.com/
http://centresteer.com/
http://seriesparts.com/
http://unna.org/