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Submitting News

Project and new-channel announcements should be submitted to the editor by 18:00. They may be submitted in person on channel #openprojects, sent via memoserv using "/msg memoserv send Editor [content]", or sent to email address web at openprojects dot net. All times on the news pages are in UTC.

10 March 2001

Happy Saturday. A brief disruption of service occured at about 16:30 yesterday. Several servers disappeared and returned. Around 22:00 your editor rehubbed to clean up some lag that remained from this incident. Pohl has been a bit unstable but not too bad. The return of bear has been delayed due to time demands on our technical contact. No word on the status of zheng, which may need to be removed from config files entirely for the time being. Late note: sterling is off-net, we get "no route to host" one hop into ALTERNET. No information yet.

Thanks to garrett who is working on a series of banner ads which we hope will appear on the site soon. We can still use help in this area.

For the time being, we're going to take an odd mix-and-match approach to the CVS tree. Keep working on the old tree (dancer-hybrid-6) or use the new tree (dancer-hybrid) if it seems easier. We'll probably regenerate the new tree several times before we have all the patches to make it current. Help speed things up by submitting patches for files in the debian directory if you are familiar with Debian packaging techniques. Regardless of what patches you'd like to work on, please come by or click on #mistertoad.

No new contributions to report. Please help us out a bit by contributing to the operating fund if you've a mind to. :)

Deadline for announcements remains 23:00, drop by #openprojects or "/msg memoserv send Editor [content]". All times UTC. Have a great morning!

--lilo

09 March 2001

Welcome to the Friday edition of OPN daily news. It's been an interesting day for publicity; one of our residents, keskoy from userlocal.com, had his site mentioned in Newsforge, yesterday. They feel he's running a pretty darn good good site for Slackware users.

Your editor spoke to keskoy just prior to press time. He was happy to get the notice. I asked him what he's planning and he says he'll be keeping his current focus on Slackware, adding a bit of FreeBSD coverage and a section for new Unix programmers, and automating the site with PHP, Python, and an SQL RDBM. He can use help with automation and with content. Message him online or maybe drop him an email at the site if you're interested.

Other publicity yesterday included an interview with me on linux.com. I had the chance to talk about OPN a fair amount and I hope it will be useful publicity for the expansion project. Time for the obligatory recruitment speech: If you're interested in helping us by doing banner art or working on the server code, be sure to click on or come by #mistertoad.

Current status of the server project: I've moved the debian directory and the various scripts over to the new tree (debian-hybrid), but have not had time to start modifying it all for the change in CVS tree organization. If you are familiar with debian rules files, are good at scripting and would like to submit patches, we could use some help in this area. One of the new developers picked up the "channel invite-only forwarding" TODO and seems to be nearly done with it. Other patches are in process.

The upgrade on pohl appeared to have been successful, but at press time it was back down and we're checking on status. The sponsors of bear hope to have that server back up by late morning. No word yet on zheng but jcl is working hard on the problem and we hope it'll be back soon.

No contributions to the operating fund yesterday, so if you've been using the network and feel like chipping in a bit, this might be another good time. Regardless, we've gotten a lot of good support from our users and we appreciate it!

That's the news for today. If you want to make an announcement for tomorrow's news, the deadline is still 23:00. Please drop by #openprojects or "/msg memoserv send Editor [content]". As usual, all times are UTC. Have a great day and an excellent weekend.

--lilo

08 March 2001

Happy Thursday to all. Yesterday was an interesting day for contributions to the operating fund; we received 235 USD in contributions, including our largest single contribution yet (125 USD from Binary Freedom). Many thanks to you, to Ken Causey (nikos) and to MiDS for keeping things going.

I've rearranged the ledger so that most recent items appear first, which will make it easier for you to see the fund balance and any recent goings-on. If you're interested in helping out with the fund or with other contributions to OPN, please take a quick look here for more information. Thanks!

Still working on finishing up the new dancer-hybrid archive, which took a bit longer than expected, due to time demands on your editor. The new tree will include numbered patch sets, oodles and oodles of tagging and per-tag patch set files in debian/patches to facilitate quick branching for the CVS lame. :)

The key point is that the new CVS tree will appear as flat source rather than patches and an original tar file. Some of you have commented on the difficulties associated with the old tree and we hope this will motivate you to contribute more actively. We've got all of the patch sets in and just need to add the TODO/ChangeLog stuff and a modified debian directory for those of you who want to continue building those .deb's. At that point we'll do a bit of testing and tag it as dancer-hybrid 0.1 (interim) and then we'll go back to committing patches.

As usual, if you're interested in working on our key projects, click on or come by #mistertoad. We'd love to have you involved.

Pohl, one of our hubs, will be upgraded in the next day or so, replacing the current K6-2 450 box with a 1GHz Thunderbird. If all goes well, this will occur between 22:00 today and 01:00 tomorrow morning. We'll need to do rehubbing, so expect a global announcement sometime during the day and several minutes of split and rejoin as we attempt to get stabilized before driz is ready to shut down the machine. That box will be down for several hours. Apologies for the inconvenience and thanks to our sponsor for the hardware improvements!

We have outages on two other servers; bear's hard drive has expired and the folks at the Experimental Computing Facility at Berkeley are working on getting the server back up. Our server in Hong Kong, zheng, has also died due to an outage on their UUNET line and Jason Lim at Zentek spent the night camped in their datacenter working on it. Hope you're back up soon! On the whole, though, things are running well.

The deadline for project and new channel announcement remains 23:00. Please drop by #openprojects or "/msg memoserv send Editor [content]". All times UTC. Thanks to everyone for your participation and support, and have a great morning!

--lilo

07 March 2001

In Wednesday's news, thanks to Richard Braakman for completing the research on TODO item C2 for the server conversion; thanks to Peter Abrahamsen, Peidran, for completing I6.

Potential coders will be pleased to hear that we've finally bitten the bullet and are reformatting the CVS archive, removing the "original tar file plus patches" format that so many have commented on and replacing it with direct source updates. That process should be completed later this morning. If you'd like to get involved with the ircd server conversion, click on or come by #mistertoad.

Yesterday morning staff noticed multiple client pingouts and some attacks against servers, including the hubs. We located a control channel and things quieted down fairly quickly, though GLINES for those hosts are still being activated this morning.

No new contributions to report to the operating fund yesterday, which is not unexpected, but if you're considering a contribution now might be a good time.

Deadline for new channel and project announcements is still 23:00. Please stop by #openprojects or "/msg memoserv send Editor [content]". All times on the news page are UTC. Have a great morning!

06 March 2001

The week continues. Light DoS activity. One GLINE necessitated by denial attacks on Debian's apt bot was unfortunately broad; apologies to Belgian users. That GLINE has been removed temporarily and we are substituting frequent status checks. We'll see if we can manage on those alone.

One interview completed by email today. Discussions with a distribution vendor later in the week which have interesting overtones. But, not to worry, the content of OPN continues to be implemented by the projects which are its users, which is the only way it can actually work.

There's a flurry of little patches submitted and in process. We're still sorting them out. We could definitely use some assistance with TODO items like channel forwarding, a CTCP-blocking user mode, changes to user masks to specify identified, registered users and a reimplementation of the MAP command. Check with us on IRC channel #mistertoad. for more information. Sourceforge CVS appears to be down from here, so let us know if you're having trouble getting access and we'll be happy to provide source.

Again, the daily news is put to bed at 23:00. Please drop by with your announcements or send a memo to Editor earlier in the day. All times UTC.

Have a great morning!

05 March 2001

Hope this Monday morning is treating you well. Yesterday we had some possible server attacks in the morning and three denial attacks with staff on hand against two channels and an info bot, through the day. Thanks much to Kenneth Schwartz for contributing to the operating fund, near the end of the day. I've added a passage to the contributions page to let people know that they should specify whether they want to be acknowledged by realname, by nickname or as "Anonymous".

Light work on patches, it being Sunday in some places and Monday in others. As always, please consider getting involved by stopping by or clicking on #mistertoad. The deadline for project or channel announcements on the news page is 23:00 each day. Drop by #openprojects around that time or "/msg memoserv send Editor [content]" early enough to let us verify with you. All times UTC.

Here's hoping you had a good weekend, and thanks for your support!

--lilo

04 March 2001

A most pleasant Sunday morning to you. Yesterday's scheduled restart of services was accompanied by much excitement when yours truly accidentally restarted barnes.openprojects.net in the process. I plead lack of sleep, a condition which is rapidly being remedied now that the new content site is mostly up. InnerFIRE, dark, robster and I worked for a while on #mistertoad in the evening, going through the patch backlog and rearranging the TODO list; some committing of changes was done and a bit more will be done this morning. Thanks to dark for popping in a patch to do the important part of C2, which we split into two pieces. And larne dropped by to offer some comments.

No new stories in the media that we've discovered. If you notice any, send them our way. Our web hits have dropped to about one third of yesterday, a fairly normal reduction. We'll be doing a bit more PR next week. If you're interested in participating in our most crash projects, please stop by or click on #mistertoad. Thanks.

Enjoy your Sunday, and don't forget, the deadline for announcements for tomorrow's news is 23:00 UTC. Stop by #openprojects by 23:00 UTC or "/msg memoserv send Editor [content]".

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Current network date and approximate time: Friday, 14-Jun-2002 23:45:01 GMT.
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