http://gentoo-{wiki,portage}.com doesnt work for me?

Message

rmcknt · Post by **rmcknt** » Sat Oct 18, 2008 4:51 pm

Gentoo-Wiki, Gentoo-portage Down
What's Happening?

At approximately 1:00 AM October 17th both websites went down. heres what i know:
Saturday, October 18th 10:19AM

when the server went down at first I dident think anything was wrong with the site. I attempted to call Skiplink (my server provider) to find out if anything was wrong. They dident answer, but it was 1 AM, so i left it for the time being.

The next day In the morning the server still was not up, so I gave them another call, they did not answer. It was at this point I noticed that my 2nd server (same company, different carrier, different physical rack) was also not up. And I this is where i start panicking... the 2nd server was the backups for the first.

I have emailed, txt'd, phoned (5 different numbers) and I have yet to get ahold of anyone. If anyone knows anyone that works at http://www.56marietta.com, this is the building where the servers are housed.. could you get them to find out if anything is going on there and shoot me an email. I would REALLY appreciate it.

I'll go freak out on my own now and update this page whenever I find out anything new.

P.S. come back for updates if i have any. (I am currently editing this live)

Mike Valstar mikevalstar@gmail.com

* http://www.gentoo-portage.com/

kaldek · Post by **kaldek** » Sat Oct 18, 2008 10:26 pm

Hmmm. Financial crisis causes meltdown of hosting provider and they close their doors??

Just a thought.

phgamer · Post by **phgamer** » Sun Oct 19, 2008 6:04 am

I noticed he uses Media Wiki. It looks like there's no nice way of duplicating wiki using that software in a nice way. Both text and images. Their main idea for replication is a mysql dump ::shudders:: though they have an XML format for content. But that still leaves things like images and that would have to expose the filesystem. Meh...

Sprotte · Post by **Sprotte** » Sun Oct 19, 2008 6:19 pm

someone should make a backup of that stuff before it's too late.

using google cache if necessary.

Bitspyer · Post by **Bitspyer** » Sun Oct 19, 2008 6:57 pm

@Kaldek:

That was my first thougt too!

kernelOfTruth · Post by **kernelOfTruth** » Sun Oct 19, 2008 7:01 pm

Sprotte wrote:someone should make a backup of that stuff before it's too late.

using google cache if necessary.

++

seems the data still not lost, but he definitely should make a hard copy of that stuff and store it at home

Januszzz · Post by **Januszzz** » Sun Oct 19, 2008 8:30 pm

Relaxx!

Data is in ours heads (and in google cache until now).

If the wiki is lost I swear I'll devote one month of my live for restoring it from anything I find. The wiki gave me pain but knowledge, I do Gentoo Linux for living, so I won't hesitate to rescue it

Regards and wish steel nerves to Mike

PS. I'm nervous too...

Sprotte · Post by **Sprotte** » Sun Oct 19, 2008 8:41 pm

I'll help if necessary, I suspect many will.

All right.

kaldek · Post by **kaldek** » Mon Oct 20, 2008 4:53 am

+1 here. Also willing to help with a rebuild effort.

Seriously, the Gentoo Wiki is one of the best Linux resources out there. A google search with "Gentoo <random word>" always has a Gentoo-wiki response, and I don't want that to go away.

hujuice · Post by **hujuice** » Mon Oct 20, 2008 1:58 pm

+1
Ready to work to definitively face the problem.

kaldek wrote: Seriously, the Gentoo Wiki is one of the best Linux resources out there. A google search with "Gentoo <random word>" always has a Gentoo-wiki response, and I don't want that to go away.

More.
A google search with "Linux <random word>" often brings to this precious resource of this great community.
Maybe I arrived to Gentoo because my many visits to the gentoo-wiki.

I don't know the story of that hosting and also I don't know the needed bandwidth and CPU load, but it should be expensive (Mike said «reduce my costs monthly by a couple hundred dollars»).
Why a complete (and expensive) housing?
Hosting solutions are cheap and reliable, many of them give high quality services, they can be switched easily in case of dissatisfaction and the administrative tasks are on someone else shoulders.

Why not?

Regards,
HUjuice

d2_racing · Post by **d2_racing** » Mon Oct 20, 2008 3:53 pm

In fact, I saw a wiki about an another distro, and they link to gentoo-wiki.

So, Gentoo-wiki need to be up

fukas · Post by **fukas** » Mon Oct 20, 2008 5:11 pm

>Seriously, the Gentoo Wiki is one of the best Linux resources out there

That's absolutely true. Let's try not to loose it!

cast0r · Post by **cast0r** » Tue Oct 21, 2008 8:50 am

yngwin wrote:
phgamer wrote:Who owns Gentoo Wiki?
It is a private initiative, not officially part of the Gentoo Linux project. It does however provide a very useful service, I think we all agree on that.

Is there any particular reason why Gentoo has no official wiki?

Im not geting it, sorry. We all appreciate the hard work of developers putted into Gentoo, so why Gentoo team do not appreciate hard users work who put they effort into wiki by giving them an official wiki platform?

AllenJB · Post by **AllenJB** » Tue Oct 21, 2008 11:21 am

cast0r wrote:
yngwin wrote:
phgamer wrote:Who owns Gentoo Wiki?
It is a private initiative, not officially part of the Gentoo Linux project. It does however provide a very useful service, I think we all agree on that.
Is there any particular reason why Gentoo has no official wiki?

Im not geting it, sorry. We all appreciate the hard work of developers putted into Gentoo, so why Gentoo team do not appreciate hard users work who put they effort into wiki by giving them an official wiki platform?

This has been gone over many times before, so search for the full discussions, but it essentially boils down to a number of points:
1) One already exists
2) Manpower required to admin it
3) It could be seen as "official" documentation and thus newer users might follow instructions without considering correctness (There are quite a few articles on gentoo-wiki that use bad practices or don't consider security implications)

kaldek · Post by **kaldek** » Wed Oct 22, 2008 12:42 am

Folks,

The latest update from the admin increases the likelihood of total data/server loss (hosting provider has financial difficulties, network connections to boxes cancelled).

I'm going to spend some time on working out how to produce a full dump from Google of the articles and content. Then, we can build an index of articles and farm out the work (once new servers are back online).

This all assumes Mike - the admin - will accept our help, but I dare say he will.

yngwin · Post by **yngwin** » Wed Oct 22, 2008 1:12 am

Doesn't he have a backup? We should be able to organize hosting somewhere.

nutbar21 · Post by **nutbar21** » Wed Oct 22, 2008 1:56 am

yngwin wrote:Doesn't he have a backup? We should be able to organize hosting somewhere.

Hosting does not seem to be the problem. He can't actually get the data from the servers hosted at Skiplink because they have been switched off altogether.

honeymak · Post by **honeymak** » Wed Oct 22, 2008 3:41 am

i guess gentoo-wiki.com is a volunteer site? isn't it?

so bad that any site and every site is affected by SP.........
but this is the fact.......no never down SP
so.......
hope they get well soon

gentoo-wiki is so invaluable to me
it's great stuff and contributions from everywhere and everyone who loves gentoo ^_^

think4urs11 · Post by **think4urs11** » Wed Oct 22, 2008 6:31 am

yngwin wrote:Doesn't he have a backup? We should be able to organize hosting somewhere.

seems as if he hasn't... and the status looks really bad

http://www.gentoo-portage.com/ wrote:... all this aside I have definitely learned the use of off-site backups.
... if this is not resolved I might be SOL. If anyone happens to know anyone who works in that building that might be able to "borrow" the server or the hard drives for a few hours so that I might be able to just copy off the data it would be greatly appreciated. other then that I dont have much to report, and I honestly dont know what to do.

Strayer · Post by **Strayer** » Wed Oct 22, 2008 10:15 am

I always use gentoo wiki when I'm at work... Sometimes I even had problems with our stupid Ubuntu servers that could only be fixed by searching through gentoo-wiki. It's a very good resource, would be sad if it is lost...
Maybe it should get some more work to clean out horrible articles - but that lies in the will of the community. It works for wikipedia.org, so why not for gentoo-wiki.

I do understand why it is not an official resource, but I still think it is important to get it up again.

meadow · Post by **meadow** » Wed Oct 22, 2008 12:46 pm

meanwhile there ist nothing to see, when visiting the url

kernelOfTruth · Post by **kernelOfTruth** » Wed Oct 22, 2008 2:08 pm

meadow wrote:meanwhile there ist nothing to see, when visiting the url

you need to look on gentoo-portage.com !

Gentoo-Wiki, Gentoo-portage Down
What's Happening?

At approximately 1:00 AM October 17th both websites went down. heres what i know:
Wednesday, October 22nd 7:00AM EST

Where We Stand:
well another somewhat sleepless night but... I have gotten into a little bit of a "talk" with skiplink via text message to his cell phone. and I have talked to a couple of people at TelX (they have been very helpful). as it stands here is my options:

1. Pay to power up the entire cage for a few hours (I would pay TelX for this), however I'm 99% sure skiplink has terminated his outside lines.
2. Give TelX the serial numbers (or something identifyable) about the servers; they would go in and borrow them is i sign a waiver. (however skiplink refuses to give me such information)
3. Pay TelX to turn on each box with a monitor handy to check the command prompt to look for my internal server names.
4. Wait 120 days until they can legally repo the servers and claim mine

Obviously option #2 is the best, and I'm convincing skiplink to allow me to do this (e.g. give me something identifiable about the servers). #3 is another, albeit expensive option, however would put me at risk of potentially damaging other peoples servers and being held liable. and #4 would be my fall back option of last resort. these seem to be my only options short of hiring a lawyer to help with #2.

I'd like to talk the staff at TelX for being very helpful and professional about the whole thing. Hopefully Skiplink will get back to me with some serial numbers soon. once again i'll keep you all posted; and thanks again for everyones support.

P.S. a couple people have suggested a 5th option of hiring Ninjas and/or Pirates to retrieve the data... I'll work on that.'
Tuesday, October 21st 5:49PM EST

Confirmed that skiplink is locked out due to lack of payment. Talked to a few people at TelX, best they can do for me at this point is power up the entire cage (I pay for it) and hope my stuff turns on etc. however I also got a few text messages from Skiplink and he has obviously already canceled the network connections into the unit and there would be no chance of them being visible. so I'll keep trying to convince skiplink to tell me the serial numbers from the boxes or something else to identify them so i can actually get the boxes hooked up. *sigh*

I'll keep everyone posted if I get anywhere.
Tuesday, October 21st 8:46AM EST

Well I've been reading through my backlog of about 200 emails, and i found one from someone who has said that skiplinks assets are being held by TelX for non-payment of bills. if this is not resolved I might be SOL. If anyone happens to know anyone who works in that building that might be able to "borrow" the server or the hard drives for a few hours so that I might be able to just copy off the data it would be greatly appreciated. other then that I dont have much to report, and I honestly dont know what to do.
Tuesday, October 21st 7:00AM EST

Still nothing from skiplink, i REALLY wish they would just get back to me with something, or a timeframe for getting back up.

Thanks for everyone who is offering hosting, I have figured out what I'm going to do once i can get ahold of the data again. for now there is nothing to do but wait.

ianw1974 · Post by **ianw1974** » Wed Oct 22, 2008 3:47 pm

Gentoo-wiki has the same info as gentoo-portage. Maybe it's redirecting to one or the other. This makes sense, as then he only needs to provide updates on one page.

meadow · Post by **meadow** » Wed Oct 22, 2008 5:42 pm

kernelOfTruth wrote:meanwhile there ist nothing to see, when visiting the url

you need to look on gentoo-portage.com !

I did check both. in fact the sites were offline, when I checked them.

Anyway, things seem to turn to good account

M · Post by M » Wed Oct 22, 2008 5:59 pm

I made a script to fetch pages from google cache, just in case, I got panicked when I found out about this drama

You can find script here . My ip was banned while I tested the script but now I started script from work and it fetched about 300 pages so far. Anyway I hope everything will be ok.