Thursday, December 10, 2020

Unexpected FPR30 changes because 2020

Well, there were more casualties from the Great Floodgap Power Supply Kablooey of 2020, and one notable additional casualty, because 2020, natch, was my trusty former daily driver Quad G5. Yes, this is the machine that among other tasks builds TenFourFox. The issue is recoverable and I think I can get everything back in order, but due to work and the extent of what appears gone wrong it won't happen before the planned FPR30 release date on December 15 (taking into account it takes about 30 hours to run a complete build cycle).

If you've read this blog for any length of time, you know how much I like to be punctual with releases to parallel mainstream Firefox. However, there have been no reported problems from the beta and there are no major security issues that must be patched immediately, so there's a simple workaround: on Monday night Pacific time the beta will simply become the release. If you're already using the beta, then just keep on using it. Since I was already intending to do a security-only release after FPR30 and I wasn't planning to issue a beta for it anyway, anything left over from FPR30 will get rolled into FPR30 SPR1 and this will give me enough cushion to get the G5 back in working order (or at least dust off the spare) for that release on or about January 26. I'm sure all of you will get over it by then. :)

Wednesday, December 9, 2020

Floodgap downtime fixed

I assume some of you will have noticed that Floodgap was down for a couple of days -- though I wouldn't know, since it wasn't receiving E-mail during the downtime. Being 2020 the problem turned out to be a cavalcade of simultaneous major failures including the complete loss of the main network backbone's power supply. Thus is the occasional "joy" of running a home server room. It is now on a backup rerouted supply while new parts are ordered and all services including TenFourFox and gopher.floodgap.com should be back up and running. Note that there will be some reduced redundancy until I can effect definitive repairs but most users shouldn't be affected.