back to article SourceForge staggers to feet after lengthy STORAGE FAIL outage

Popular open source code-hosting repository SoureForge has been battling a significant outage for days and is slugglishly recovering from a lengthy Total Inability To Support Usual Performance (TITSUP) drama. On Thursday, the site slipped into "disaster recovery mode" and since then it has been a torrid time for sysadmins …

  1. Justin Clift

    Hopefully...

    Hopefully this motivates more projects to move. :)

    1. PleebSmash
      Flame

      Re: Hopefully...

      Stay down, SourceDice scumbags.

  2. DN4

    GitHub-like portal?

    Whatever you say about SF, it has been here for much longer than GitHub and at some time (long ago) it was close to being ‘the’ open source hosting portal. Is it already necessary to introduce it to people as ‘something like GitHub’? Sad.

  3. Bod

    Malware

    Given the attitude of forcing malware into installers for a lot of SF hosted software I'd say this is a big hint that people should be moving their software elsewhere to something more reliable, reputable, and not commercially driven, at least not enough to force malware on people via fake download links or messing with the binaries.

    SF is now a dodgy download site and should be blacklisted.

    1. DN4

      Re: Malware

      > SF is now a dodgy download site and should be blacklisted.

      There's still lots of good software hosted on SF and from your comment I suppose you tend to use it to download binaries -- which important but somewhat auxiliary function of such site. And it's the one most fucked up on SF.

      Anyway, what are the suggested alternatives that offer beside SCM some basic auxiliary stuff such as

      - mailing lists

      - forums

      - web hosting

      - download of packages/binaries

      ?

      1. Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

        Re: Malware

        If you can't trust one aspect of an organisation, how can one have confidence in any other aspects of the organisation? Have they slipped anything that will subsequently be found to be sinister into any of the other facilities/services they provide? Of course the provision of these facilities/services need to be funded, but enveloping binaries with Potentially Unwanted Programs is a good way to alienate the people they are trying to serve.

      2. Rich 3

        Re: Malware

        - mailing lists

        - forums

        Google Groups

        download of packages/binaries

        Github

        Maven/GEM/Aptitude/Google Play/Macports/etc/etc

        Web hosting

        Everyone and their dog. But you don't really need it, unless you are promoting a big project to make money, in which case you can probably find $100 a year for a paid hosting account. Really.

    2. Orv Silver badge

      Re: Malware

      For me the egregious thing isn't malware in actual downloads, it's the ads with fake 'click here to download' buttons that try to shovel you malware. They have a lot more control over ads than they do over individual projects, and this suggests a disturbing level of not-giving-a-shit.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Malware

      Because, of course, this will never happen to GitHub, never I tell you! And reddit will never turn into another slashdot which no-one reads any more. Oh wait, hasn't that already happened to reddit?

  4. Orv Silver badge

    I'll miss them if they go, if only because they're the one of the few remaining sites that doesn't try to force everyone into using git for everything.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      At least if you use git, your local clone is a full and complete copy of the repository with the entire history.

      Therefore (a) you have lost nothing if the main site goes down; and (b) it's easy to migrate to another service, even while the main site is still down.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Just wondering if the fact they are not using Git is one reason its taking a long time to restore the scm.

      I remember dark days when I used to run some other scms and the backup restore taking a long time.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Who's the "storage vendor"?

    https://sourceforge.net/blog/sourceforge-infrastructure-and-service-restoration/

    Given this is Ceph, and Inktank was bought by Red Hat just over a year ago, does this mean the "storage vendor" was Red Hat? However, the page suggests that everything is open source, mentioning CentOS but not RedHat.

    Or is the "storage vendor" just a hardware vendor who sells vanilla servers and disks, and Sourceforge are running Ceph on top of it themselves? But in that case, why consult with the storage vendor if there is a Ceph issue?

    Or is someone other than Red Hat selling and supporting Ceph appliances?

    Whatever it is, it would be interesting to know.

  6. ZenCoder

    I'm shocked.

    Until recently I didn't realize how far Sourceforge had fallen since it was last sold.

    Seems like they are as trustworthy as that guy who keeps emailing me from Nigeria.

  7. batfastad

    Marketing

    It tells you something about a site's irrelevance when a marketing dept request a 4 day outage to try and drum up some publicity. Oh... you mean... 4 days? For real? Fail.

    1. Will Godfrey Silver badge

      Re: Marketing

      Good point. I must admit I was surprised at the length of time its been taking. I wonder if the asset strippers bean counters senior staff have been removing expensive and 'unnecessary' backup systems.

      I also thought it interesting that SourceForge and Slashdot are on the same hardware these days. Eggs & baskets?

      1. fortytwo

        Re: Marketing

        > Good point. I must admit I was surprised at the length of time its been taking. I wonder if the asset strippers bean counters senior staff have been removing expensive and 'unnecessary' backup systems.

        Well from their blog post http://sourceforge.net/blog/sourceforge-infrastructure-and-service-restoration/ I see:

        "Our backup solution is Open Source, backing on to popular cloud storage platforms."

        ...

  8. Vic

    You can believe everything they say.

    SourceForge directory, download and project summary pages are back online

    Mine aren't. It's time I hosted the project elsewhere. Which will mean finding that image again...

    Vic.

    1. Flat Phillip
      Unhappy

      Re: You can believe everything they say.

      My download and summary pages are back, the hosted website isn't.

      Glad I moved some of my projects off there already,I wasn't happy with the way they are going so I'm glad I did the move.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Github please

    As a long time user and occasional contributor to open source projects it was a jarring 'back to the future' moment to have to evaluate some software hosted on SourceForge as I haven't looked at it for at least 5 years and use GitHub regularly.

    So it was pretty horrific to see a site littered with low-grade advertising and the greasy tricks of the internet marketing brigade around the site... the user experience horrible making me wonder why people bother with it.

    The dev. outage came after that unpleasant reminder of how bad the internet of the 1990's used to be.

    To heap injury on insult, the outage has created a significant blocker in a project I'm doing for a client where I am evaluating a number of open source offerings. The source has been unavailable now for over a week.

    To those supporting Sourceforge I would say there is one massive reason why GitHub has a better future... I pay a regular monthly subscription that is entirely reasonably priced for the service offered. As a result, GitHub are motivated to support their customers and there is a sustainable business model that means I don't have to look through a UX cluttered with dreadful crap. Now that is worth paying for alone... even if outages still occur, though they are planned and last minutes instead of weeks.

  10. J 3
    Mushroom

    10 days later...

    Well, almost. Nine days. It's 2015-07-28 and SourceForge is still not fully functional -- try adding a new project.

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