Brief reports on changes and temporary problems with the computing system at Nordita.
During the Code User Meeting in 2008 it was decided that we shall move from CVS to subversion (SVN). It is in practice rather similar to CVS and has some advantages: links, renaming, and unique version numbers for the entire repository, so it is easier to track down the order of changes that were done. A temporary version of the SVN repository is available under https://norlx01.albanova.se/svn/pencil-code/. This system also comes with its own wiki with its own bug tracker; see https://norlx01.nordita.org/trac. Trac is now our reference bug tracker and incorporates previous entries that were done under bugzilla. However, while SVN is working, its content will later, at a moment still to be decided, be overwritten with whatever the state under CVS is, and CVS will then be closed.
This command comes with the Pencil Code. You can also get it from this address:
http://www.nordita.org/~brandenb/pencil-code/utils/pc_cvs_chroot
On some machines we seem to get the error "Unknown host cvs.nordita.dk".
pc_cvs_chroot :pserver:$USER@cvs.nordita.dk:/var/cvs/brandenb :pserver:$USER@130.225.213.198:/var/cvs/brandenb
If you know already that your machine doesn't resolve the name, and you haven't yet fixed your CVS/Root files, you could say
pc_cvs_chroot :pserver:brandenb@norserv.nordita.dk:/home/brandenb/CVS :pserver:$USER@130.225.213.198:/var/cvs/brandenb
The Pencil Code is now available under a new CVS repository name. It is still located in Denmark, but will hopefully be moved to Sweden eventually. The RAID disk crash in Copenhagen was probably a technical error, not a break-in. No incremental backups were available. Among many other developments during that time, all the history of what the students did last week in Boson is gone, so we are left with independent versions from everybody that now need to be merged manually. To prevent this from happening in the future, we are now planning independent mirroring on an hourly basis.
The cvs stuff works again, alhough under a new name (see below), but be *very* careful and don't do "cvs up", unless the material in your own directory is older than 10 June. In the other case you need to copy a freshly checked out CVS/Entries into your directories with cpio, see below.
Current working repository names are:
setenv CVSROOT :pserver:$USER@cvs.nordita.dk:/var/cvs/brandenb setenv CVSROOT :pserver:$USER@130.225.213.198:/var/cvs/brandenb setenv CVSROOT :pserver:brandenb@cvs.nordita.dk:/var/cvs/brandenb setenv CVSROOT :pserver:anonymous@cvs.nordita.dk:/var/cvs/pencil-public
The former one is the Pencil Code developers, the latter one is the anonymous repository for checkout only. If you just want to update the name of CVS/Root, Pencil Code users could say
pc_cvs_chroot :pserver:brandenb@norserv.nordita.dk:/home/brandenb/CVS :pserver:brandenb@cvs.nordita.dk:/var/cvs/brandenb pc_cvs_chroot :pserver:$USER@norserv.nordita.dk:/home/brandenb/CVS :pserver:$USER@cvs.nordita.dk:/var/cvs/brandenb
If you now were to say "cvs up -d" you might lose your own changes since June 12. To avoid this, you must overwrite all the CVS/Entries files in your old tree by new ones. This can be done by checking out the entire tree somewhere else, and copy all the CVS/Entries files into the old directory, e.g.
cd fresh-checkout-directory find . -name Entries | cpio -pdu normal-checkout-directory
setenv CVSROOT :pserver:pkapyla@cvs.nordita.dk:/var/cvs/brandenb cvs login cd ~ mkdir axelnew cd !$ cvs co tex/petri cd !$ find . -name Entries | cpio -pdu ~/axel/tex/petri find . -name Root | cpio -pdu ~/axel/tex/petri
It seems we will have to work with a back-up of 11 June. The CVS repository cannot yet be put online, because users would delete their own developments since 11 June. It looks like we have to fix each file manually.
The youngest files in the backup are from Tuesday, 12 June, at 11:51. By issuing a command of the form
find . -mtime -9.35 -type f | xargs ls -ldt
in some relevant cvs directory, you can get an idea what are the file modified since then. The number 9.35 gives the days since the update, but this time increases that later you use it.
Since Tuesday, 19 June, around 6pm, ns1.nordita.dk is unavailable. All RAID disks have been reported to have failed simultaneously. At least one disk seems to be corrupted, but others seem to be ok. It is suspected that this is caused by a break-in into the system. Details are still under investigation. It is believed that this has been caused by a hacker who, unlike many other hackers, had malicious and destructive intent.
To all users of the Nordita CVS repository (e.g. Pencil Code), please stay tuned for further instructions. We hope that there will be more news by Thursday noon.
On Saturday, 10 February, emails to the nordita.dk domain bounced back to the sender. The problem was fixed by Sunday morning.
