Wed May 15 11:53:09 UTC 2013: Hello, we have a routing issue between the frontend and the backend database of Indefero. The database is safe, nothing to worry, this is just that the frontend cannot connect to the database server like if suddenly a firewall was cutting the connection. We are investigating.
Wed May 15 13:54:26 CEST 2013: Our provider is having an issue, we keep an eye on it.
Wed May 15 13:55:39 CEST 2013: Ping between the machines went from 5 ms to back under 1 ms, it looks like our provider is doing something.
Wed May 15 14:02:45 CEST 2013: Our provider changed some configuration of their routers and they are now observing the situation, Indefero is back online.
Reminder: The Indefero hosting will stop June 30 this year, yes, 2013. You were informed about a year ago, so I hope you had time to migrate.
If you are a Subversion user, Assembla can import your dump of your repositories. The daily Subversion dumps are available in your account area. They also offer Git hosting. If you are using Git only, you have 1000's of offers.
Of course you can install your own version of Indefero and go ahead with a self hosted solution as Indefero is a free software.
Thu Apr 11 07:27:29 UTC 2013: There is a pretty serious update of PostgreSQL to be done for security reasons. Indefero will be done for a couple of minutes the time to update the server. I am sorry this is an unplanned update.
Thu Apr 11 07:30:54 UTC 2013: The slave has been updated and is correctly picking up the updates from master, now going to update the master. From the slave update sequence you can expect about 2 minutes downtime of Indefero.
Thu Apr 11 07:33:36 UTC 2013: The master has been updated, the effective downtime was less than 20 seconds.
Wed Mar 6 16:21:45 UTC 2013, we have an electrical issue, for the moment Indefero is down, it will come up as soon as the electrical issue is resolved. More details will soon be available from our provider.
Mon Jan 21 14:22:30 UTC 2013 A large array of servers are down in our datacenter. Saddly, the main database server of Indefero is down too. The backup server is running ok and is up-to-date. We are expecting feedback from OVH to assess if we need to switch over the slave or if we can expect the main server to come back fast enough.
Mon Jan 21 14:24:25 UTC 2013 It was fast, power supply issue for RBX4. Still waiting for more information.
Mon Jan 21 14:35:20 UTC 2013 Everything is up again, sorry for the inconvenience.
Our provider has some issues. Not so fun, the servers are down and I hope they will come up again as soon as possible. Basically, we have a split on the internal network, some servers can talk to each other, some cannot. Very annoying because it makes split brain situation. All the data are safe, but we have to wait until this is solved (and they are doing it manually).
Update: Everything up again, down-time of approximatively 30 minutes, I hope it was at the time of your coffee break.
5 years, the time is flying. In May 2007, I created Céondo Ltd, in September 2007, active trading started and in August 2008, I started to pay myself a regular salary. Wonderful time and even better time to come, after 5 years of working hand in hand with the industry, I finally know where I can make a change, where I can really add value and make the work of the chemical and process engineers easier, safer and faster.
Many thanks to all my customers up to now and of course, all the people I have been in contact with during these 5 years, you gave me a lot and I hope you have the feeling I gave you a lot too. The next 5 years are going to be fun!
I happily participated at the CAPE-OPEN European Conference in Lyon. I sadly missed the special interest group meetings at the end of the conference as I kind of skipped them in my planning (I though one had to be part of the SIG to participate but they were open to everybody).
CAPE-OPEN is a great set of standardized interfaces (API) — mostly COM but also CORBA in theory — to allow a unit operation model or a thermodynamic model to be used in nowadays a large array of simulation software. The API is slowly growing to cover nearly all the needs in the process and chemical engineering area.
Some companies have shown how a single implementation of a model can then be used in several simulation software all used within the same company. In large chemical companies, for historical reasons and to avoid a dependency on a single vendor, they tend to run several simulation software to do basically the same thing but not exactly.
In some other cases, I am a bit more sceptical, for example, if you have only one simulation tool in house and the tool is providing a clear and simple interface (for example the Fortran UAS in PRO/II) using CAPE-OPEN would require both mastering Fortran and C++ to implement a COM wrapper. This may not be the best choice depending on the in-house know-how.
As for any technology, you need to have a pragmatic approach but seeing an open standard used every day a bit more in the industry is always positive news. I am looking forward to do a bit more in the field while keeping a pragmatic approach, sometimes simple good old Fortran is better.
Very good news, after a lot of discussion (because I want to be sure of the quality of the offer) the Indefero hosting offer will continue as it will be taken over by a small companies already used to work with hosting data and user information under strict security rules. The transition will be totally transparent for the current customers and users. I will keep you informed.
Front matters: This is the email I sent to all the current users of the hosting offer.
Dear Indefero Users and Customers,
today is not an easy email I am sending you, this email is to announce you the wind down of the Indefero hosting platform. The Indefero hosting will be stopped at the following dates:
To help you in the changes, the period of transition is as long as possible. Now that you know the meat of the subject, let me provide you with the whys, how and details. But first, stopping a service is not an easy task, it is especially hard because you, as customers, trusted me to provide long term high quality service and by stopping the service I am breaking this trust. For me, it is also hard because it means that I failed to correctly predict the future.
Thanks a lot for the trust you had in using Indefero and please accept my sincere apologizes for not providing you continued services for another couple of years.
If you paid a renewal or a new forge in the past 45 days, I can issue you a full refund. In this case I will ask you to migrate out before the end of the year. 45 days is the limit of the banking system.
Simple, login here:
https://www.indefero.net/account/
and download the backups (down the page). You get everything related to your forge and the data are compatible with Indefero, that is, you can install Indefero on your server and import the data.
Login in your account:
https://www.indefero.net/account/
Click on the "configure your forge" link:
https://www.indefero.net/account/bp/
and update the personal domain to use a domain you fully control. If you are working for the foobar.com company, put something like code.foobar.com and get a CNAME record in your DNS pointing code.foobar.com to yourforge.indefero.net. Then, start asking people to use code.foobar.com to access your forge. After a while, nobody will use the indefero.net address and you will have full control over your forge.
The next step is to setup your own Indefero instance and import the data from the hosted forge, then switch the DNS to point to your own Indefero instance.
The end result is a migration without downtime and without disturbing your end users.
In October, you will get ready to use Amazon EC2 images which will allow you to do nearly "One Click" migration of your data from the hosted platform to your own Indefero instance. With an EC2 micro instance, it will cost you about $15 per month to run your own Indefero instance. I will also work with the current providers of Debian packages to be sure you can easily setup and import your Indefero forge on a fresh Debian system.
Because of focus, when I started Céondo Ltd, I had not really a clear picture of where I wanted to go and how, now, I know and the key is "Science", that is, I will fully focus on scientific software and consulting. In the last months, I was able secure 2 to 3 years of consulting pipeline in science, this is a clear indication that this is the way to go, a specialization in an extremely technical area where the barrier to entry is very high.
Surprisingly, I expect it to be positively affected. The last year I have been slowing down my involvement in the software because changing the software would also mean for me, applying the changes to 3000+ forges on a system not designed in the first place to accomodate so many forges. I was afraid of the consequence of a bad upgrade at such scale.
The time used to manage the hosting will in part be redirected to improve the software and the migration tools will also be used in parallel to allow us to perform automated testing of Indefero. We will be able to start an EC2 micro instance, test and stop.
The Indefero community is very active with an increasing number of users and packages for nearly all the current Linux distributions, the current goal is to have the Indefero packages distributed officially by all the main Linux distributions to ensure long term support. You will soon get the distribution specific packaging scripts be part of the source code of Indefero. This is critical for the long term support of Indefero and will help testing on a larger scale.
The code hosting space is crowded, so crowded that it is hard to recommend someone. First, the real question is:
how critical is your code? Can you accept to have it hosted by a third party? Of course you currently have it hosted by a third party right now, but it may be a good time to rethink this question. I think it is critical enough to have full control over it, this is why I gave full control with CNAME, backup and OSS dump compatibility to you when providing Indefero hosting. I could not provide something I could not use personally.
then of course, you need to define what you want in terms of functionalities, version management software (Git, Subversion, Mercurial, etc.) and the contractual constraints (hosting location within/outside the US, price, owned by a big/small company independent/partially owned by venture capitalists). This is not simple, I have seen an increase of the number of forge creations since GitHub took venture capital money on board. So, it looks like some of you do not like to be dependent on venture capitalist controlled companies. You have the time to think about it.
If I had only one service to recommend, I would recommend Pikacode under the lead of Benjamin Jordan. They have been hosting code repositories for a long time and have been active contributors to Indefero. I trust them and they are real system administrators, used to managed some of the biggest website in France, saturating Gbps of bandwith during big events. They know their job very well.
Here is the "inline" advertizing from Benjamin for you:
Pikacode.com offers Git and Mercurial repositories hosting. Formerly knows as Intuxication, thousands of repositories have been created by our users since 2008. Pikacode goals are simple : easy, sleek and fast code hosting. We offer you 90 days of free trial for unlimited private repositories and collaborators with the following voucher : HELLO-PIKA.
If some of you can recommend code hosting companies, just let me know. Note that Pikacode also offer free public repositories.
I will setup in September/October a migration website:
http://www.indefero.net/migration/
this will be your portal to have everything you need to get a successful migration without disturbing your users and losing your data. It will be updated with the latest information, tutorials, possible alternative offers — basically, everything to help you.
At the end, I can only thank you for your trust and the bit of travel around the Sun we did together. I am proud of what was achieved with Indefero and I am honored you trusted me, I am also sure you will find a good way forward.
Best regards, loïc