As Joe just announced, all ftp services at ftp.postgresql.org has been shut down.
That of course doesn't mean we're not serving files anymore. All the same things as before area still available through https. This change also has an effect on any user still accessing the repositories (yum and apt) using ftp.
There are multiple reasons for doing this. One is that ftp is an old protocol and in a lot of ways a pain to deal with when it comes to firewalling (both on the client and server side).
The bigger one is the general move towards encrypted internet. We stopped serving plaintext http some time ago for postgresql.org, moving everything to https. Closing down ftp and moving that over to https as well is another step of that plan.
There are still some other plaintext services around, and our plan is to get rid of all of them replacing them with secure equivalents.
A few weeks back, I noticed the following tweet from Michael Paquier:
And my first thought was "that can't be right" (spoiler: Turns out it wasn't. But almost.)
The second thought was "hmm, I wonder how that has actually changed over time". And of course, with today being a day off and generally "slow pace" (ahem), what better way than to analyze the data that we have. The PostgreSQL mailinglist archives are all stored in a PostgreSQL database of course, so running the analytics is a quick job.
Today, Planet PostgreSQL was switched over from http to https. Previously, https was only used for the logged in portions for blog owners, but now the whole site uses it. If you access the page with the http protocol, you will automatically be redirected to https.
As part of this, the RSS feeds have also changed address from http to https (the path part of the URLs remain unchanged). If your feed reader does not automatically follow redirects, this will unfortunately make it stop updating until you have changed the URL.
In a couple of days we will enable HTTP Strict Transport Security on the site as well.
We apologize for the inconvenience for those of you who have to reconfigure your feeds, but we hope you agree the change is for the better.
We've just flipped the switch on www.postgresql.org to be served on https only. This has been done for a number of reasons:
We have not yet enabled HTTP Strict Transport Security, but will do so in a couple of days once we have verified all functionality. We have also not enabled HTTP/2 yet, this will probably come at a future date.
Please help us out with testing this, and let us know if you find something that's not working, by emailing the pgsql-www mailinglist.
There are still some other postgresql.org websites that are not available over https, and we will be working on those as well over the coming weeks or months.
For those of you who have been trolling our DNS details, you know that www.postgresql.org has been available over IPV6 for a while - just not activated in DNS. As of 15 minutes ago or so, we have now activated IPV6 for the main DNS record www.postgresql.org. Just like the IPV4 version, we are distributing the load across multiple frontends, with DNS based failover in case one of them were to go down. Right now, we have two IPV6 capable frontends and three IPV4 capable ones (the difference comes from our infrastructure in Europe being 100%25 IPV6 enabled, and our infrastructure in the US being 0%25 IPV6 enabled due to lack of upstream availability).
So if you are experiencing connectivity issues that started recently, check your IP stack if you are perhaps trying to connect over a broken IPV6 connection. If you need assistance beyond that, you can usually find helpful people in #postgresql on FreeNode who can help you figure out if the problem is on your end or ours!
Hopefully, this should be a completely invisible event to all our visitors....
Most of the visitors to www.postgresql.org probably never noticed that a couple of weeks back, the entire site was replaced with a new one. In fact, we didn't just change the website - just days before, we made large changes to our ftp network as well (more about that in another post, from me or others). So in fact, we hope that most people didn't notice. The changes were mainly a technical refresh, and there hasn't been much change to the contents at all yet. We did sneak in a few content changes as well, that have been requested for a while, so I'm going to start with listing those:
The rest of the changes are under the hood, and it's mostly done for two reasons: * The technology powering the site was simply very old * The frameworks used were quite obscure, which severely limited the number of people who could (or wanted to) work with them
Hopefully these two changes will make it easier to contribute to the website, so if you're potentially interested in doing that, please read on!
and along with them, a few other services.
From what we can tell, what has happened is that the datacenter that hub.org hosts most of their servers in, in Panama, dropped completely off the Internet several hours back. The PostgreSQL mailinglists are managed by hub.org, and is tied into their main infrastructure. For this reason, there is nothing the rest of the sysadmin team can do other than wait for the situation to resolve, and we unfortunately have no chance to bring up any backup servers anywhere.
As an added unfortunate bonus, it seems at least one of the hub.org nameservers is still running an incorrectly configured DNS zone file. This means that while this server is geographically hosted elsewhere, like it should be, email will get delivered to that host and then bounce saying that the postgresql.org domain does not exist. This is incorrect - the domain itself exists and works perfectly well, and if it wasn't for this incorrect zone file mail would be queued up and delivered once the main datacenter is back up.
Along with the lists, a few other services hosted with hub.org are currently unavailable - pgfoundry.org, pugs.postgresql.org, the developer documentation, jdbc.postgresql.org and possibly some other minor services.
All other infrastructure services are operating properly, including the website and the download mirrors.
Please be patient as we wait for hub.org to resolve this issue. For any up-to-date status information your best bet is the #postgresql IRC channel on FreeNode - but people are unlikely to be able to provide any information beyond "it's down, and we're waiting for hub.org".
At PG-east^H^H^H^H^H^H^HJDCon here in Philly yesterday, Dave announced the infrastructure changes that we decided on late last year, and have been working on and off to get the groundwork done for over the past months (mostly off, or we'd be done already). Since I've had a number of questions around it, I'm going to post a summary here.
The bottom line is, we're changing - over time - how we're going to run and manage the infrastructure behind the postgresql.org services. Things like website, source code repositories, etc. The reason is simple - the way we are doing it now has become too hard to maintain, and just requires too much manual work.
There are several parts to these changes. For one, we are building automated methods for a lot of things that previously required a little manual work. But even a little manual work rapidly becomes very time-consuming when you have a lot of machines - and the number of machines we have have been increasing fast over the past couple of years.
The biggest change is that we will be moving our services off FreeBSD, that we use now, onto Debian GNU/Linux. At the same time, we will switch virtualization solution from FreeBSD Jails to KVM. FreeBSD jails have served us very well over time, but now that we have access to a well working KVM product that uses hardware virtualization, the gains of having full virtualization are much easier to get at.
One of the main drivers for the change is that maintaining ports-based installs are just taking way too much time. The new system will be based heavily around using Debian packages and the apt system, to the point that everything being installed will always be done using "meta-packages" that will ensure that all our machines look the same way. This also plugs into our monitoring systems very well, making applying (security) updates across the many machines much easier. In particular, it should get rid of what's sometimes a multi-day operation to get everything security patched, due to dependencies and the slowness of updating ports.
It is quite possible - in fact, I'd say probable - that there are perfectly fine ways of doing this on FreeBSD. But this outlines another big reason for this change - it's simply a lot easier to find people who can do these things on a Linux based system today. Our efforts are entirely volunteer based, and in the end we just don't have people who know enough FreeBSD volunteering to do this work. In fact, we have had several people retire from the sysadmin team over the years specifically because they refuse to work with FreeBSD. We don't expect this change to magically create more volunteers, but it will make it easier to recruit in the future.
The system will also automate a lot of the configuration work that needs to be done manually today, as well as automatically configure our monitoring systems (primarily Nagios and Munin) and backups. And finally, the system will automatically provision (and un-provision) users and access permissions across all machines from a central repository.
The code is not entirely done yet, but we do have enough in place to automatically provision and configure basic virtual machines in just minutes, as well as much of the configuration. We have prototype deployments online, but we haven't started moving production services yet. We'll hope to get started on that shortly. It will obviously take a long time before we have migrated all services - in fact, we may never migrate all services. The focus will obviously be on the most manpower-intensive ones first.
As usual the code that's used to build these services will be published under the PostgreSQL licence once it's finished. Some security sensitive parts may be removed, but the bulk of it is very generic and should be re-usable as a whole or in parts.
Another issue that's going to delay some changes is the fact that a few of our infrastructure servers are currently not VT-capable, and thus cannot run KVM. In the short term these machines will continue to run FreeBSD Jails, but eventually we want to replace these machines with more modern ones. So if you are sitting on one or more VT-capable machines with enough RAM to run a number of virtual machines, hosted in a datacenter somewhere that can provide us with multiple IP addresses and a decent availability of network and services, that you would like donate to the PostgreSQL project, please get in touch with our sysadmins team to see if this is something we can work with!