Did you notice? We changed everything
Posted by Steve Revill Mon, 20 Aug 2018 20:27:00 GMT
There’s a surprising amount of behind-the-scenes work required to keep the services you’re using on the RISC OS Open website running, but it’s not glamourous work:
- Deleting spam accounts (thanks Dave!)
- Administering bounty donations and taming the beast (thanks Andrew!)
- Maintaining package lists (thanks Theo!)
- Keeping host OS versions patched and up to date (thanks James!)
Leaking money like a sieve
Over the last few months it’s the last item in that list that has been the focus. In the 12 years since ROOL was founded we’ve been expanding the infrastructure that keeps the company going in a piecemeal fashion – things like internal bug trackers, backups, various databases, the nightly auto builder, package lists, and 6 different source repositories.
The result was a number of servers held on several providers’ machines, each one taking up time to keep going. Most of these have now been consolidated onto an up to date multicore monster from Linode, saving around £300 a year.
CC-BY Leonardo Rizzi
Did you notice? Hopefully not, the switchovers were all done when most people are asleep.
More regular donations welcomed
If you regularly use services on the RISC OS Open website, we encourage you to set up a regular donation to help fund their running. Ideally, we need another 18 donors signed up to cover (current) costs.
Alternatively sponsor a specific task from one of the other open bounties.
One of the signs of a good sysadmin is that they can change the world without anyone noticing.
So far, I haven’t noticed anything (new) go wrong.
Well done!
Notice anything wrong? Quite the opposite actually. The forum now works reliably. ☺️
Ah! So that’s why the RSS feed broke…
Just kidding. It did break, but that could have been Thunderbird’s doing as well. The new version apparently doesn’t like http/https mixups.
Good work. Now please fix AcornSSL_Version so it actually returns 100*version and not 10000*version. :)