Hi all. Sorry for the massive cross-post, but I think the following is important enough to justify it.
You probably noticed that last weekend the DNS servers which are responsible for the madwifi.org domain did not work for at least two days. It's been yet another in a series of such outages that affected the availability of our website during the past months. Unfortunately there seems to be no other way to restore the reliability of our internet services, so with heavy hearts we have decided to switch to a different domain for our project. The new domain is: madwifi-project.org See below for more details about the background of our decision. What changes for you ==================== For now, madwifi.org can still be used to access our website. But as explained below we can't tell how long this lasts, since we have no direct control over that domain. We recommend to use the new domain from now on. madwifi-project.org is set up as a drop-in replacement for madwifi.org, which means: * our website now is at http://madwifi-project.org instead of http://madwifi.org * go to http://madwifi-project.org/ticket/1192 instead of http://madwifi.org/ticket/1192 to access a ticket * snapshot tarballs can now be downloaded from http://snapshots.madwifi-project.org * and so on. In other words: simply replace "madwifi.org" with "madwifi-project.org" in all project-related URLs you use. Please update your bookmarks accordingly. Are you working with our subversion repository? =============================================== The Subversion repository is now at http://svn.madwifi-project.org. We recommend updating your existing working copies using "svn switch" [1]. Let's assume you have a working copy of the MadWifi trunk. To relocate it to the new location of the repository use: $ svn switch --relocate http://svn.madwifi.org/madwifi/trunk \ http://svn.madwifi-project.org/madwifi/trunk Then run: $ svn update This second step is important to make sure your repository picks up the changed "svn:externals" property which is used in many of the MadWifi branches to "import" the source of the ath_info tool from its own repository - which of course also has moved to the new domain. If anything goes wrong ====================== Switching a project like this from one domain to another is a lot of work. Chances are that we forgot something which now needs to be fixed. If you run into any trouble with the new domain, please contact me by e-mail ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) or via IRC (user "otaku42" in Freenode or OFTC). Why we decided to switch to a new domain ======================================== The owner of the domain "madwifi.org" is Alvin Oga of Linux Consulting. Out of history the project never owned the domain, but Alvin allowed us to use it for our website since October 2005. He controls the authoritative DNS servers and the madwifi.org zonefile, and when we need a change made to that zonefile we ask him to apply it. In the beginning this was fine. The DNS servers were working stable, and Alvin responded quickly to our few requests. Things began to change in mid 2007, since when several DNS server outages occurred. While the first outage got quickly solved, response times became worse over time; some of the outages lasted several days and seriously affected the availability of our internet services. In late 2007 an unfortunate event took place [3]. We have explained the reasons and appologized for it. It seems our appologies have not been accepted; communication with Alvin remained being seriously flawed from then on. Whatever we tried to resolve or at least improve the situation, it has failed. Many of our mails were never answered, other requests were declined [4]. We have been told "there is no DNS issue per se". We have been told that we have become "a nuisance", and that among the "1000+ domains" Alvin/his company is responsible for "madwifi.org is the least critical domain". Still, our offer to buy the domain (for a negotiable price, starting offer was 250 USD) was answered with "madwifi.org is NOT for sale". At this point we gave up and decided on a new domain. The main reason for our decision was not the fact that the DNS servers sometimes failed, but the way these incidents have been handled by Alvin. We have taken care to follow widely accepted "best DNS setup practices" for the new domain, to avoid bottlenecks like those we have experienced lately. For the time being we have two authoritative DNS servers for madwifi-project.org; they are hosted in separate colocation facilities, use separate uplinks, are homed in different IP networks and autonomous systems (AS). A third DNS server will be added soon, run by SPI, the non-profit organization that legally represents our project. The project has full control over all aspects of this domain; necessary changes to the zonefile can be applied at any time by several team members. We are confident that with these measures we finally regain the level of reliability that we and our users expect for the internet services we provide, such as websites, mailing lists, subversion repository, etc. If you have any questions or suggestions, please send them to the [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list. Thanks. Bye, Mike [1] http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.5/svn.ref.svn.c.switch.html [2] http://madwifi-project.org/wiki/About/History [3] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.drivers.madwifi.devel/5209 [4] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.drivers.madwifi.devel/6490 _______________________________________________ ath5k-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ath5k.org/mailman/listinfo/ath5k-devel
