[Haskell-cafe] Status update on {code, trac, projects, planet, community}.haskell.org

[Duncan Coutts]

All,

As you will be aware, some of the *.haskell.org websites have been down
recently, specifically:

code.haskell.org
trac.haskell.org
projects.haskell.org
planet.haskell.org
community.haskell.org

These are all hosted on the community server. The community server was
hacked on the 26th January and we took it offline. The server was
running an old version of debian that was no longer supported with
security updates. (Ironically, two days previously the infrastructure
team had been discussing the fact that nobody seemed to have any time
available to do the planned migration to a new host). The hacker
replaced sshd which we noticed because the ssh host signature changed
and it started prompting for passwords (we use key-based rather than
password based logins).

MSR kindly allowed Ian to take time off from the GHC 7.0.2 release to
work on migrating the services to the new host (that had previously been
partially prepared). Thanks to Ian's efforts and some help from other
members of the infrastructure team, the migration is now nearly
complete.

planet.haskell.org should now be working, along with email, project
mailing lists and trac instances.

We have not yet re-enabled user login accounts, nor re-enabled access to
code repositories. The support ticket system is not yet enabled.

We will send a further update when these are re-enabled, or procedures
for people to re-enable them are finalised.

On a more positive note, the new VM that we are using is a lot more
powerful than the old one, in particular about 5x more memory. As many
of you will have experienced, services on the old server tended to go
AWOL which was primarily due to running up against memory limits,
causing services to get killed off. In the case of the web server it was
mainly due to having to use a very small number of concurrent
connections, again to minimise memory use. So all in all we expect the
new server to be a good deal more reliable.


Duncan
(On behalf of the Haskell infrastructure team)