Latest on Server Outages

Server outages have continued over the past week or so.  Most recently the power supply has been replaced and we are hopeful this will address the issue.

Server Back Up (was Down Once Again)

Update: The remote console was used to perform various hardware tests but ultimately no problems were found.  The server was started back up as normal.  We are still scratching our heads.

The community server went down again today, apparently around 16:19 UTC.  This time we have requested a remote console which should allow us to check things more thoroughly and possibly diagnose a hardware cause.  Expect an update once we know more.

Squeak.org Server Up (was Down Again)

Update: The most recent reset request was processed quickly and the server was back up by 16:35 UTC.

Update:  This is beginning to feel like October 2008 over again more and more.  The server was reset at our request and backup again at about 6:35 UTC Monday.  Unfortunately by 15:50 UTC it was down again.  Another reset has been requested.

Seemingly in a repeat of the events of last Sunday the community server was unreachable again as of about 8:18 UTC Sunday October 25th.  We will request a reset again but as we don’t have weekend support it will not likely be processed until about 4:30 UTC Monday.  This article will be updated as we know more.

Preliminary Agenda for 11/4/2009

Terms of Reference

Free Server Hosting Options

SFC/Relicensing

Promotion and Visibility of Squeak

Development Progress

Squeak Swiki Improvement

Meeting Report for 10/21/2009

Randal Schwartz had an otherwise unavoidable business meeting and was unable to join us this week otherwise everyone else was in attendance today: Jecel Mattos de Assumpção Jr, Ken Causey, Bert Freudenberg, Craig Latta, Andreas Raab, and Igor Stasenko.

We started the discussion with a review of the recent server outage.  We still don’t know the cause was but are suspicious that the uptime was almost exactly one year and if this server is still up in six months a manual reboot may be in order.  At some point we will discuss this further regarding replacing the server but paying for things like this will be simpler when we are part of the Software Freedom Conservancy.  However we will investigate using hosting sharing/free hosting options in the near future.

Not long before our meeting we were asked to consider defining our Terms of Reference with regards to how the Squeak Oversight Board interacts and communicates with the community and with teams in particular.  We discussed this for a while but this is a somewhat complex topic and input from the community will be necessary in this process.  We plan to discuss this in more detail at our next meeting on November 4th.

We discussed unit testing in Trunk and the increasing level of failures and errors.  Ken Causey will update the New Community Development Model document with a basic policy regarding unit tests and will investigate providing a roughly weekly report regarding the changes in the unit tests in Trunk.  Check back here for updates on this.

Next we discussed the inclusion of Monticello 1.6 in Trunk and clarified our common understanding of a number of related issues but came to no particular decisions yet.

If you haven’t listened to it yet you might want to check out the recent appearance of Bert Freudenberg and Andreas Raab on Industry Misinterpretations.

Our next meeting is scheduled for Wednesday November 4th, 2009.

Server Back Up (was: Squeak.org/SqueakFoundation.org Server Unplanned Outage)

Update 10/19/2009 18:30 GMT – Once the hosting company processed our reset request it seems that everything came back up fine with a little assistance where needed (thanks Bert).  The server has been back up since around 0:00 GMT and so the total downtime seems to have been just about 24 hours

Update 10/18/2009 22:30 GMT – We have requested a server reset but this is not likely to be done until at least 5:30AM GMT Monday.

This is just a quick note to confirm that we are aware that the community server is currently down and are in the process of rectifying this.  I have no explanation at this time but will be updating this notice as more is learned.

It appears that the server began having trouble around 5:30 AM GMT.

Sadly almost exactly a year ago we had serious trouble with the server for about a month including about a week of outage.  Hopefully  this outage will be much less severe.

Preliminary Agenda for 10/21/2009

Should we be paying attention to something?  Let us know…

Community Server/Services Hosting

SFC/Relicensing

Promotion and Visibility of Squeak

Development Progress

The technical responsibilities of the Board

Squeak Swiki Improvement

Meeting Report for 10/7/2009

Edited: see note below.

Everyone was in attendance today:  Jecel Mattos de Assumpção Jr, Ken Causey, Bert Freudenberg, Craig Latta, Andreas Raab, Randal Schwartz, and Igor Stasenko.

We started out discussing the visibility of Squeak, particularly in the area of conferences.  OOPSLA 2009 is coming up and Bert will be attending and possibly Andreas as well.  With little time to prepare it’s not likely we are going to do much more this year than for last year, it depends ultimately on the time and willingness of those attending.  In general we are interested in increasing the visibility of Squeak and are open to suggestions and will revisit this issue regularly.

Related to this Andreas and Bert will be appearing in a near future episode of Industry Misinterpretations.

Next we discussed the current status of development , in particular how someone would be added to the Core Developers group.  To be added to this list you need to have some experience contributing to Squeak, preferably recently, and be nominated.  Anyone can nominate themselves or anyone else.  Once nominated the Squeak Oversight Board will vote on each candidate.

We also discussed the issue of the visibility of submissions.  Currently this is in the form of one email to squeak-dev per submission, although Inbox submissions often do not make it through due to message size.  This is not to everyone’s taste.  Andreas suggested an easy compromise: use a separate list for all submissions and subscribe the squeak-dev list to a digest of this list.  This will result in one message per day to the main mailing list and anyone that wishes to see the full feed can subscribe to the commit list.  It was decided to implement this and you can expect more information soon.

Our next meeting is scheduled for October 21st, 2009.

Edit note: Regarding being selected for the Core Developers group I (Ken Causey) made a statement in this report regarding the likelihood of being rejected that is more my opinion than any sort of policy or group decision of the Squeak Oversight Board.  I have now removed that statement and apologize.