We have had some trouble with a "standby" (backup) slave this weekend.

We experienced a short power loss across our server infrastructure, and in the subsequent automatic reboots an offline "standby" (virtual) slave has also been mistakenly powered on - allowing it to receive direct traffic intended for the main server. When the standby-slave periodically synced from its master, any changes recieved by slave directly was cleaned out.

Your changes between Sunday January 31st ~04:00 CET and Monday February 1st 14:00 CET may be affected by this. Please check your project to see if anything is missing.

If you have committed new revisions to a repository, or updated your working copy with changes from others, your local working copy may well be out of sync. The safest option is to check out a new, clean working copy and then transfer any missing changes to the new working copy and commit them there. Please Contact Us if you are unable to resolve this easily, and we'll help you take corrective actions.

For any non-repository changes and registrations affected by the incident, the only real solution is to re-type and post the new/updated information.

We are really sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused you, and have now taken measures to prevent this situation from arising again.

We experienced an unexpected downtime this afternoon - roughly from 16:00 CET to 17:00 CET. The error occured when a new planned link was configured by our ISP before it was planned to be physically connected, making it impossible to reach our network.

After locating the error we also then connected the new fiber-based line. With the recent server upgrade and this new fiber-based Internet connection, the site should now have very good performance.

Sorry for any inconvenience the downtime may have caused.

We will be upgrading our server infrastructure on Friday night, and this will likely involve some downtime as we migrate. The window for making the changes is Friday Oct 10th 21:00 CET to Saturday Oct 11th 06:00, so during this time the services may not always be available. Naturally we will try to keep the actual downtime to a minimum.

Update: The upgrade is completed and everything should be working normally. The site was offline for approx. 25 minutes during the upgrade time window. Hopefully you will all notice that the site is much more responsive now, and please contact us if you experience any problems.

The CodeResort API is based on the  http://trac-hacks.org/wiki/XmlRpcPlugin with some custom extensions. We have now taken over maintenance of this open source plugin, and have recently put a lot of effort into upgrading and improving it.

Today we have launched the updated API, and among other things it includes a new JSON-RPC interface in addition to the XML-RPC interface we've had for quite some time.

A simple illustration of what that the JSON-RPC interface looks like:

1. Make a POST request to https://www.coderesort.com/p/<projectname>/login/jsonrpc with header Content-Type set to application/json and a request body like:

   {"method": "wiki.getPage", "params": ["WikiStart"]}
   

2. Parse and use the response:

   {"id": 123, "error": null, "result": "= Welcome to....
   

There are clients that work with the API, like Eclipse Mylyn and some of our own tools we have made available. Further, the API can of course be used for any custom integration with your own information systems - for instance as an interface with a customer support system, or with internal reminder, scheduling, or publishing tools.

See the api project for all the details on how to get started.

Lots of exciting possibilities!

A project at CodeResort is a container for source, documentation, tickets, news and more. Our intention is being able to capture and track history for all formal and informal aspects of project progress.

With the addition of 'Talk' for all projects, there is now also a way for interactive group chats in projects. This new feature can be used for many cool things:

• Do online project meetings. No travel needed. No typing of minutes with the full transcript always being available.
• Make a Talk for general project chat, and have the project members 'hang out' there and post their questions for all to see and share. Enlighten everyone.
• Make a Talk to act as a Twitter-like stream of notes from the project progress. Stay updated.
• Create a Talk to act as a pasteboard, post snippets and insights for discussion, solve code problems, do code reviews.
• Use a talk to log events - like a 'deployment log' or 'build log' for information and follow-ups.

Curious? See screenshot (from early testing at the Epicode chat).

Talk is enabled for all projects by default, but some configuration is needed to take full advantage of the feature:

1. Users of talk rooms, need TALK_USE permission. Creators of rooms need TALK_CREATE.
2. Create rooms. Start with as few rooms as possible to focus attention - increase as needed.
3. Activity in Talk rooms are recorded at hourly basis, but remember to tick-off to include 'Talk logs' in your view. Not least if you already have added Timeline RSS feeds - if so you need to grab a new feed, or edit the feed adding &talk=on to the pre-existing query parameters.

As usual, the code for the Talk plugin will be made available as open source (soon) - based on our customer promise that any project created or used at CodeResort is yours to set up anywhere else, whenever you want.

We would welcome feedback on this feature - add a comment to the blog post, or contact us with your input.

We have updated our SSL certificate. If you see a message similar to:

Error validating server certificate for 'https://www.coderesort.com:443':
 - The certificate is not issued by a trusted authority. Use the
   fingerprint to validate the certificate manually!
Certificate information:
 - Hostname: *.coderesort.com
 - Valid: from Fri, 13 Feb 2009 11:58:50 GMT until Mon, 04 Jul 2011 10:58:50 GMT
 - Issuer: Equifax Secure Inc., US
 - Fingerprint: ee:79:36:14:81:be:cb:d8:90:ca:80:3c:48:0d:32:0e:49:48:c5:e2
(R)eject, accept (t)emporarily or accept (p)ermanently?

... then please accept it.

It should not be an issue with browsers, but as Subversion clients usually come without any pre-approved Certificate Authorities, all certificates must be explicitly accepted.

We have been running Subversion 1.5 on the server for some time, and tonight we have also upgraded the repository format for all existing projects. If any users are still using pre-1.5 clients, now is the time to upgrade.

Subversion 1.5 brings many improvements and new features:  http://subversion.tigris.org/svn_1.5_releasenotes.html

First and foremost is the automagic merge-tracking support. This has been a much-requested feature, and it basically means that Subversion stores properties on your branches to remember what revisions are already integrated between them. It makes for easy copying (branching), merging and reinterating.

Take a look at these short blog posts for a quick introduction to merge-tracking:

•  iBanjo: Subversion 1.5 merge-tracking in a nutshell
•  MXUnit Blog: Subversion 1.5 Merge Tracking

And for those keen to learn even more, there is always the definitive reference...:  The Subversion Book

Do you have further links or insight? Add a comment!

Today I did a talk at  GoOpen 2009 - a two-day conference about sharing and open source.

My talk - and its description was in Norwegian:

Deling av egen kode

Et åpent tankesett har verdi for alle utviklingsprosjekter - uansett grad av faktisk ekstern åpenhet. Bli kjent med format og metoder for gjennomføring av åpne prosjekter, og erfaringer og praktiske hensyn knyttet til deling av egen kode med andre.

OpenOffice slides og alt som ble sagt som slide notater kan lastes ned her, alternativt som PDF (slide notater).

We have just released a new feature that allows 'README(*)' files to be rendered when browsing the source through the web interface ('Browse Source' menu item). This is a great feature for connecting the source with getting started and further information, licensing issues and similar.

The feature is documented in the 'Help' section as HelpUser/RepositoryReadMeFile, and it should provide the information you need to get started providing your users with better and more immediate information about your source code.

A simple example can be seen in the reiseregningen project.

As usual, we have made this feature available as Open Source - see  ReposReadMePlugin by  osimons.

Hope you like it!

A new public project from Fornyings- og administrasjonsdepartementet (FAD) - a department of the Norwegian government - has just launched on CodeResort.

The site hosts a public project for the development of  http://www.reiseregningen.no - the 'official' way to document your travel expenses in many Norwegian public and private institutions.

Visit the project (in Norwegian): reiseregningen

Almost everywhere on CodeResort we use Wiki Markup to enter text. It allows for simple and easy plain-text based input that gets converted and nicely formatted for display.

We've now made a simple 5 minute tutorial for you to get started with text input, formatting and linking - as a basic introduction to those unfamiliar with wiki markup, or as a refresh for those who have used other wikis but are unfamiliar with our markup syntax.

The tutorial is available in Help for each project as HowTo/5MinutesWikiMarkup.

Happy reading and writing!

In recent weeks and months we have experienced an issue whereby the web projects become unresponsive - basically unable to serve your requests. During this time we have kept a very close watch to make sure we get it back online as soon as possible. Still, we know that some of you no doubt have been inconvenienced by these short downtimes.

The good news is: We have discovered and fixed the cause of the issue.

A bug in [[TOC]] wiki macro only appeared when requests where made to a page in a project that used the macro, and such a project would then permanently claim one database connection. It 'infected' a project on first view, but it did not get worse by itself. However, at random intervals pages with the macro was requested on other projects tying up new connections until at some point no further database connections could be established.

(Those that are technically inclined can read about the issue and see my fix at  http://trac-hacks.org/changeset/4366)

Finding this bug has taken much longer than we had imagined. However, it has led us to review all the central parts of the code, and fixing and reworking some parts that were not optimal. Additionally, we have updated all server software to the latest and greatest versions. The service is now in very good shape.

We can only apologize, and thank you all for being patient with us trough this period.

We now have backups... Just joking - we have of course done central backups every day since doors opened back in 2006.

The big news is that if you are a project administrator, you can generate and download full backups of the web project yourself:

The new Backups Admin page is available for all regular projects, and it also has pointers to Subversion syncronisation (svnsync) and WebDAV file share access.

Together this means that every single byte of data, history and settings related to your project is available to you whenever you want it.

Enjoy!

As all projects include a WebDAV-based file share for non-repository files, we have of course also made a 'Help' page with information on how to connect. It turns out that the how-to section for 'Windows' was XP-only. Vista does this differently, and a plain Vista install even needs a fix to get it working.

We have just updated the Help page with a new 'Vista' section - look it up inside your project Help (HelpUsers/Files) to get started with WebDAV on Vista.

There seems to have been an e-mail delay today with our ISP (Broadnet.no).

We have contacted them, and the have confirmed that the there was in fact a problem, and that the problem should now be corrected. However, they warned that some further delays can still be expected as the e-mail servers catch up on the backlog of outgoing e-mails during the coming hours.

Sorry for the inconvenience, and please contact us if the delay persists longer than can be reasonably tolerated!