The server that hosts trac-hacks.org along with the websites of the MadWiFi project has been suffering from a kind of hardware malfunction. It became unresponsive for short timespan first, then worked for several hours without any signs of problems. Things became pretty borked during this night, then at 04:22 UTC+2 the server failed. Power cycling plus a little prayer :-) helped to finally fix it at 07:00 UTC+2.

As requested in #8521, the NewsFlashMacro has now been installed on trac-hacks.org. Feel free to make use of it in wiki pages where appropriate.

You certainly have noticed that trac-hacks.org was down for more than 24 hours. I apologize for any inconvenience caused by this incident. Here is what happened:

trac-hacks.org is hosted as a virtual server (based on ​linux-vserver) on the physical server of the ​MadWifi project. That server suffered from an issue that caused the host server to more or less hang. Our monitoring notified me of the problems by SMS. At that time I was on a holiday trip without internet access, so I asked my "remote hands" to reboot the server. That indeed helped to fix the original issue and the monitoring reported the server to be up and running again. Unfortunately the trac-hacks.org vserver encountered an issue during startup, preventing it from coming up normally, which remained unnoticed by the monitoring - and me. I only noticed it when I came online this evening after returning home.

On the positive side, this incident pointed out how to improve the monitoring and the startup process of the hosted vservers to prevent these issues in the future. These things will be taken care of asap.

trac-hacks.org will be down for some hours tomorrow, beginning at about 2009-06-04 06:00am UTC+2 (see ​here for your local time). It will be moved to another, more powerful server. Yes, unless anything unforeseeable happens this should be the last move required for t-h.o for some time. :-)

Update:

The work started on 07:00am, with a one hour delay. Things went smooth, so the website went online on 07:50am on the new server. Thanks for your patience.

trac-hacks.org will be offline for approximately 10 minutes on March 24, 2009 sometimes between 5 and 6am, UTC+1 (see ​here what that is in your local time). A central switch is going to be replaced, which affects the connectivity of the rack our server is in.

We're happy to announce a new mailing list: th-users@… (subscribe ​here).

The list is meant for discussion about trac-hacks.org, i.e. the services that are provided here for the Trac community. Use it to suggest new features, discuss ways to improve the website, report issues that you come across, stuff like this. Any feedback is highly appreciated.

Please note that th-users is not meant for support requests for any of the plugins provided on trac-hacks.org by their authors. These should still be directed to the ​trac-users mailing list instead.

https is back again for accessing both, the website and Subversion. We encourage all users to use https://trac-hacks.org now. If you experience any problems with it, please let me know.

The move of trac-hacks.org to a new server has finished, any read-only restrictions that were applied during the move have been reverted.

Thanks for your patience, everyone. In case you experience any problems, please contact me either by e-mail or ​via IRC.

Why has it been moved?

trac-hacks.org was started by Alec Thomas, who hosted and managed the website since the early days. He recently ​wrote to the trac-dev mailing list:

I haven't had much time to work on Trac for quite some time, and realistically I don't think I will for some time.

With that in mind, I can't really justify the hosting costs for trac-hacks.org anymore. With the pathetic state of the Australian dollar at the moment, the hosting is costing around $300AUD a month, which is ridiculous. This started at $130USD with roughly a 1:1 currency rate, but prices went up and our dollar went down.

Which brings me to my point. Does anybody have server capacity for hosting trac-hacks.org?

I volunteered to jump in, and Alec accepted my offer.

Who are you?

My name is Michael Renzmann, some of you may know me as otaku42.

I'm one of the folks that run the ​MadWifi project, my main task is to take care of the web and mail services of the project. We started using Trac for the MadWifi website in late 2005, and since then I'm in love with it. I hacked Trac and some plugins a bit for that site, and wrote a few plugins (such as NavAddPlugin) that may be of use for other sites, too.

I feel honored about this special opportunity to give back to the Trac community, and I'm looking forward to work with you.

What about the "old" admins?

The team of administrators remains unchanged, means: asmodai, athomas, coderanger, osimons, pacopablo and retracile are still around as administrators. The only change here is that I now also have administration permissions.

What has changed?

The website is back in almost the same old shape, with only few changes so far:

1. Location: the new server is located in Germany, near Frankfurt/Main, while the old one was located in the USA.
2. Timezone: the server timezone is now CET (UTC+1), while it was CST (UTC-6) before.
3. No more ads: hosting and bandwidth of this server is sponsored by my employer, ​true global communications, which voids the need of placing ads on this site.
4. Server: on the downside, the new server is slightly less powerful than the old one, but I'm confident that this will have only little (if any) impact on the usability of this site.
5. SSL: at this point there is no SSL support available yet, but that will be fixed soon.

What will change in the future?

Well, let me first mention the one most important thing that will NOT change: using trac-hacks.org has always been free of charge, and it will remain so in the future.

As for improvements, there are some rough ideas. One of them is to set up a mailing list for discussion about this site, which would also include exchanging ideas for further improvements. Besides reenabling SSL this is probably one of the first things that will be taken care of once the dust has settled. A mid-term goal may be to upgrade to Trac 0.11, so that we can benefit from the many improvements that went into Trac and the plugins we use.

Anyway, in the meantime please feel free to contact me (see above) for suggestions and/or fair comments.

As you might have heard lately, trac-hacks.org is going to ​move to a new server. Things have been prepared as much as possible, and the actual move will start in about 24 hours.

To make the move as painless as possible for everyone, the Trac instance on the old server will be switched to a read-only mode. This is done to make sure that no changes are made while the move is in progress. During that time no wiki pages can be edited, no tickets can be created or modified, no changes can be committed to the Subversion repository, and so on.

This will happen on Wednesday, February 4 2009, 6:00am UTC+1 - ​see here to translate that to your local time.

If everything works as intended, the read-only mode won't last longer than maybe two to three hours. If ​Murphy should strike it may take up to one day. As soon as the move is finished the DNS will be adjusted to point to the new server, where trac-hacks.org will be available in "read/write mode" again.

Thanks for your patience and understanding.

If you should have any questions about the move, please feel free to contact me (otaku42) via IRC, I'm available in ​#trac on Freenode.