VyOS Networks Blog

Building an open source network OS for the people, together.

Migration and restructuring of the (dev).packages.vyos.net hosts

Daniil Baturin
Posted 8 Jan, 2018

The original host where the packages.vyos.net and dev.packages.vyos.net web servers used to live has kept having serious I/O performance issues ever since a RAID failure event, and the situation hasn't improved much. After we've started having very noticeable latency even with bash completion (not speaking of very slow download speed for our users and mirror maintainers), we decided that it's time to move it elsewhere.

We do not blame the hoster, to the contrary, we are grateful for hosting it for us at no cost for so long despite its bandwidth consumption, and for offering it to us at the point in the VyOS project life when it has exactly zero budget for anything. But, it seems now it's time to move on.

The dev.packages.vyos.net host is used for the package repositories of the current branch and for nightly builds, as well as experimental images we make available for testing. It is already migrated to the new host and operational, even though some things are not working as well as they should, including temporary (we hope) loss of IPv6 access to it, and somewhat untidy directory links generated by the (otherwise very nice) DirectoryLister script.

We are sorry for the migration taking longer than it should have and for not communicating it to the community. The dev.packages.vyos.net stayed inaccessible for a whole day because of miscommunication: we have migrated the data, but I assumed that Yuriy (syncer) will setup the web server, while he assumed I will. Our maintenance procedures definitely could use some improvement.

Note that apart from physical data migration, we have also done some directory restructuring. We hope it's now more logical and that it will not have any impact on anyone, but if it does, we can setup redirects to make old direct links work again.

The packages.vyos.net server will stay on the old machine for a bit as we also need to migrate the rsync setup that the mirrors are using. We are still not sure whether to use downloads.vyos.io as a central server for mirrors too.

As of building VyOS images, we'll make adjustments to the build scripts to make them use the new paths by default and images will be buildable again.

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