Server Infrastructure Update

Written by Quintus on 2017-10-26.

The project infrastructure got a major upgrade — all user accounts and subscriptions cancelled!

NOTICE: This article contains important information for mailinglist and forum users! Please read it carefully!

On Sunday, 2017-10-15 our main server alexandria suffered from a power outage at our sponsor’s datacenter that corrupted the SQL database. Luckily, thanks to a working backup procedure it was possible to restore all important data except for the very newest posts on the Chessboard forum.

However, we have taken the server outage as an opportunity to finally upgrade our long outdated server operating system (Debian 7) to the current Debian 9. This upgrade has now been completed, and we apologise for all the inconvenience that resulted from the procedure which especially included the forum and mailinglists being unavailable. Furthermore, former project lead Quintus (Marvin) has announced to devote some time again into a rewrite of TSC for version 3.0.0. To support him in this, it was decided to shut down the Chessboard instance at forum.secretchronicles.org as Chessboard is a software written by Quintus himself that would otherwise need active maintenance by means of code changes in case security issues arise. This way he can now concentrate on the actual TSC code.

This move however does not mean that there is no communication medium left for TSC. First off, forum.secretchronicles.org has been archived into a static copy that remains available for reference but causes no maintenance problems anymore as it’s only static HTML now (the copy has been created by means of HTTrack). You cannot log into that site thus anymore, and all user accounts on that site have been cancelled.

The Chessboard instance has always been a frontend to two mailinglists, tsc-users@lists.secretchronicles.org and tsc-devel@lists.secretchronicles.org. These mailinglists were managed with the mlmmj software whose lack of a web interface was the primary reason why Chessboard had originally been written. Since that time however, other mailinglist software has evolved. Most notably, the standard mailinglist software, GNU Mailman, has seen a drastic update in its web user interface. The old “Pipermail” UI was dropped entirely in favour of a rewrite called “HyperKitty”, which uses modern technology and makes for a nice and clean experience. Consequently, the TSC project’s mailinglists have been moved from mlmmj to Mailman. In order to ease the transition from mlmmj+Chessboard to GNU Mailman however, all subscriptions to both tsc-devel and tsc-users have been cancelled, just like the forum accounts.

The primary domain for interaction with the project is now lists.secretchronicles.org. On that website, you will find a nice web interface that allows you to participate in the discussions on the mailinglists without having to use email if you don’t like to. HyperKitty should comfort all of those users who have complained that Chessboard’s interface looks too old. If on the other hand you prefer the email communication (and rightly so!), then this is of course possible as well; the website allows you to choose between subscription (email variant) or registration (web variant), or you can use both if you like to, in which case you should first register and then subscribe.

Therefore: Everyone still interested in the TSC community has to visit the website at lists.secretchronicles.org and subscribe there to the email versions of the desired lists and/or create an account in order to be able to use the web interface for posting.

Since all of this infrastructure is now completely new, it might well be that there are errors and problems. Don’t hesitate to contact us, ideally by posting to the tsc-users mailinglist, either via email, or via HyperKitty.

Another aspect revisited during the upgrade was our IRC bot, furbot, that has seen a general software upgrade which especially involved a facelift of the IRC logs. If you now visit chatlogs.secretchronicles.org, you’ll hopefully be pleasently surprised by the improved readability of the newer chatlogs (old logs have not been altered). The most annoying bug in the chatlogs, furbot repeating itself multiple times after it got disconnected from IRC, has been resolved as well.

The plans to move the ticket system to alexandria are placed on hold for the moment due to lack of time. The mlmmj to Mailman conversion with the removal of Chessboard plus the OS upgrade have consumed quite a bit of time. Those plans are not given up, though.

Many thanks go to Lauri (xet7) who conducted the OS upgrade, to Quintus for moving Chessboard+mlmmj to Mailman, and to First-Root UG to the continued sponsorship of the project in form of the alexandria server.

Marvin (Quintus)
On behalf of the TSC team