Blender.org Down
Notice: Blender.org is currently down. The Blender Foundation is aware of the issue and is working towards a solution. We’ll keep you posted!
Update: the service has been restored.
I Like America (Joseph Beuys)
Notice: Blender.org is currently down. The Blender Foundation is aware of the issue and is working towards a solution. We’ll keep you posted!
Update: the service has been restored.
come on people, yes, we said “please test the rc before release”… but keep calm and use torrents if possible… :-D
Most people are probably like me and don’t understand Torrents.
Think stuff will be stored on your computer.
Can get viruses easily.
Think you have to install a program to use it.
Torrents are associated with pirated material.
Then again, maybe it’s just me.
It might just be you. (source: http://www.techzim.co.zw/2013/01/legitimate-uses-of-bittorrent/)
Yes, torrents are great but where can an official torrent for Blender be found? A google “blender torrent” search pointed me to a large number of “Pirate Bay” like sites. Since I dont want to spend the rest of the week removing viruses, I´m not going there.
good question… I thought there were torrents, but even for official releases, no torrents anywhere… torrents were used for open movies or conference video… probably blender.org people does not fear mass downloads, since blender it’s a small package and there are mirrors…
Never had problems with viruses. A good anti-virus program will hold them back. But why torrents for Blender? Go the the buildbot site of blender and find the latest stable version.
…perhaps they could be useful when a new official version is launched and many users download from the same mirrors (?), but maybe blender.org servers/mirrors can handle the traffic peak… anyway my (first) post here was just a joke because just after 2.68rc was out, blender.org went down…
I’ve noticed that Blender.org is down quite a lot, ussually during the nightly hours (Amsrterdam time). I once read they’re using Mac OS X for their webservers. Is this still the case?
I mean, how difficult can it be to keep a relatively simple site like Blender.org running reliabily?
Are you looking for a serious answer? There’s a *lot* more to that than the operating system or how “simple” the site may appear from the outside.
I mean, how difficult can it be to understand a relatively simple concept like that reliably?
(If the wording of this reply sounds snippy, it’s because it uses the manner of wording of the original question.)
Hi BigPilot,
Actually, the blender servers all run FreeBSD. As for the blender.org server (nicknamed “Emo”), it has a quirk with the raid card that detaches the root file system and requires a reboot every now and then (which was watch caused today’s outage). There are also other issues that plague that particular server with nightly maintenance, but that problem goes away on its own after the nightly maintenance is done.
Hope this cleared some stuff up. o/
You use hardware RAID? Don’t use hardware RAID. Linux software RAID is so much easier to manage, and has less to go wrong.
Hi Lawrence,
Yup, I believe all the machines are hardware RAID. Although this particular machine seems to be the only one that has a glitch (it is an old install). There is actually a published workaround that could be tried, so maybe will be solved some day until the machine can be upgraded.
As for Linux, I am a Linux fan myself, but BSD is pretty cool in its own right. Also, enterprise class hardware RAID can be nice (and mandatory) depending on the setup. Stuff like battery backed ram would be nice, but these cards are old. In fact, many of these machines are pushing a decade in age, you realize. And being in a data center with the admin all living in different continents makes some tasks a challenge! :)
In fact, if you look at the rack:
http://www.blender.org/blenderorg/blender-foundation/servers/
You can see just how old Emo is. The 3 dells are the only “new” machines there, and they are already 3 years old themselves! I think the machines like Emo were actually donated by the data center (although it might be the Sun boxes, I would have to double check), and are the original servers that blender web site used, and still uses. Talk about work horses! :)
Anyways, just thought I would share some history :) o/
I don’t understand what you mean by “enterprise class”. My experience with hardware RAID is that it has spotty and inconsistent OS support. And of course the drive format is proprietary, so you cannot change controllers without having to wipe the drives.
Software RAID is far easier to manage, test, diagnose, maintain, and fix when something goes wrong. How much more “enterprise class” do you want?
The only experience I had with hardware RAID was a couple decades back. We evaluated a couple solutions and saw a nifty RAID-5 configuration that was a hot-swap affair that was evenly distributed over all three drives, meaning there was no “compact spare” so to speak. I don’t actually know but can hazard a guess that if a fourth drive had to be added, the whole thing would need to be taken down and re-distributed. The software-solution is another thing I haven’t heard of since I don’t work in the data-storage end of things anymore but it sounds interesting.
I’ve used RAIDs for almost 20 years on close to 100 servers. I try and use only hardware RAID, it’s not expensive and very, very easy to setup. Hot swap type drives add a fair bit of cost but have served me very well and makes replacing hardware trivial. It’s just plug and go. RAID 5 is good, it’s a low cost and decently robust but for better redundancy, RAID 10 is quite nice (I use it on our corp Exchange server).
Hi Lawrence,
Well, I meant enterprise as in not the cheap software based “hardware RAID” that comes on some motherboards. These cards are actually pretty good (and yes there is a fully working user land tool to manage it in FreeBSD). Also, I am pretty sure that if not mdadm, there was a utility in Linux repos that can read all the main RAID on disk formats. But in that case, I would argue that you are wasting your time and should just restore from backup (your backups work, right? :)
I totally agree that software raid can be nice though. I am a regular user of mdadm on my Linux machines myself, and even prefer it over my older LSI/AMI MegaRAID cards (cept for the fact that I loose battery backed ram).
That being said, keep in mind that these are existing installs that are older than the time most of our user base has even been using blender I bet. Sure, if we had a rack of blank blank servers and could plan out the whole setup, things might be different in terms of technologies and setup, but these are the cards that were dealt.