Dear Mike,
We've been experiencing intermittent issues with download.eclipse.org over the course of four months. In order:
- misconfiguration due to the transparent mirroring system
- Apache httpd bug
https://bz.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=53555
- Weekly DoS attack since beginning of August from China
- puppet configuration error (our mistake)
We used
bug 515596 to track the issues, and
an email to eclipse.org-committers on Aug 30 to help keep everyone informed.
The issue was also pointed out and briefly discussed on the
cross-project-issues-dev mailing list. In general, that is the mailing list that you should subscribe to if you want to stay informed about any infrastructure issues. The usual pattern is that an issue is first raised there, and if it is not immediately
resolved a bug is created. Mailing lists and bugs are the main public channels that we use at Eclipse.
Thank you for the heads up regarding the download.eclipse.org server status and the pointers to the relevant bugs! Yet, in our opinion, there is still room for improvement in terms of communicating to the ‘general public’ (as opposed to eclipse developers).
Typically, large open source projects use a status page (http://status.apache.org/ ) or use ‘low volume’ announce or dedicated infrastructure mailing lists ( https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/announce )
to communicate about such issues. Download issues are not a developer only thing.
I personally took the following (non-successful) actions, without arriving at any of the items you described above:
·
Searched on bugs.eclipse.org (too many items, most of them very old)
·
Went over the descriptions in the mailing list summary page (https://dev.eclipse.org/mailman/listinfo ) to search for an appropriate mailing list to report/be informed about infrastructure
issues
·
Did a couple of google searches “download.eclipse.org download problems” both with and without the additional “site:eclipse.org”
Several of my colleagues did similar things, and neither did they arrive at the pointers you gave above.
At least improving the mailing list description from the cross-project-issues-dev mailing list seems to be a very lightweight action that might
help preventing other users from being frustrated.
At this time, we have identified the patterns and are confident that all issues with download.eclipse.org will be resolved soon.
Great!
Best regards,
Klaas