The [Perl programming] Authors Upload Server

PAUSE History

2001-10-10

• mldistwatch (the indexer) now parses $VERSION with the help of CPAN::Version which is included in CPAN.pm. The effect is that modules that use v-strings for $VERSION get indexed better, e.g. diagnostics.pm now is indexed with version v1.0 instead of undef.

2001-05-20

• New SSL certificate for PAUSE. Official hostname for PAUSE now is pause.perl.org. Expiration of the self-signed certificate is 2003-05-20, Fingerprint is 0E:E2:E9:AC:81:D0:DC:80:81:25:E5:BA:66:32:33:E5
  Revised 04pause.html to reflect the new procedure for namespace registration.
  Upgrade perl to 5.6.1, apache to 1.3.19.

2001-05-10

• Form to apply for namespace registration declared stable.

2001-04-19

• New form to apply for namespace registration goes into beta test.

2000-10-27

• The whole memory of the PAUSE has been exchanged after some weird system failures.

2000-10-26

• Database converted to UTF-8. Revisited Todo List:
  • add pages to apply for registration of both developers and modules DONE for modules 2001-04,
  • improve security of the whole CPAN,
  • slurp the Tk, Apache, and XML module lists DONE 2000-11,
  • parse vX.X.X style numbering correctly DONE 2001-10-10,
  • per-author inventory page,
  • trigram search for authors and modules which directs to a page with item-related menues,
  • fix false positives in mldistwatch and mail the reports to the authors DONE 2003-02-10,
  • open perms table DONE 2002-04,
  • arbitrary voting ala Slashdot Disapproved on later reconsideration,
  • make more error conditions visible via web interface, DONE (by indexer emails) 2003-02-10
  • Date/Time chapter and flexibility to add more chapters,
  • symlink tree washer

2000-10-15

• PAUSE gets new hardware: Athlon 700 and 2x20 GB IDE disks, mostly RAID1 mirrored. Linux kernel is 2.2.18pre15 and distribution is RedHat 6.2. Installed software has hardly changed to make transition more secure.

2000-10-13

• As our sponsor Speedlink is moving, PAUSE is relocated too from Dircksenstrasse to Hardenbergplatz. Thanks to the whole team that made the move in just a few hours with not a single incident.

2000-06-23

• After reading on bugtraq about yet another root compromise of wuftpd, I killed it and replaced it with proftpd version 1.2.0pre10.

2000-05-23

• During the last two weeks the whole directory tree below authors/id/ has got a cosmetic operation. All directories are now living in depth 2, i.e. ANDK/ has now been moved to A/AN/ANDK/ and the old directories are now symlinks to the new ones. The reasons for this were: Doing it this way opens at least the option to deprecate the symlinks in the future. And by deprecating them we can some day really get rid of them. And anyway, if we make the canonical name the same as the real filename we avoid confusion for future implementors (i.e. for anybody who does some programming related to the CPAN). And there is the effect of generating a two class community: I have been asked already if I could "pretty please" assign such a "real" CPAN ID to a new user instead of a second class one:-/

2000-04-02

• Added the action add_mod to the admin menu. It's a page that speeds up registering a new module considerably and what is more important, makes more teamwork possible.
  The Todo list is untouched since December and new demands pop up: Change the site/URL layout to be more natural, add pages to apply for registration of both developers and modules, improve security of the whole CPAN, invent something to slurp the Tk, Apache, and XML module lists, prepare yourself for the first module with vX.X.X style numbering, balanced directory structure in the authors/id directory, etc, etc. But above all this is the desire to catch up with tons of messages that have remained unanswered.

2000-02-04

• Creation of the backpan (not even a working title). It's the seed for a project of the history of the PAUSE where all uploads of all times are kept. See ftp://p11.speed-link.de/pub/backpan/README

2000-01-06

• Upgrade to linux-2.2.14, wu-ftpd-2.6.0.

1999-12-09

• My current Todo list is mostly unchanged since October: UTF8-ification, trigram search for authors and modules which directs to a page with item-related menues, per-author inventory page, fix false positives in mldistwatch and mail the reports to the authors, open perms table, arbitrary voting ala Slashdot, make more error conditions visible via web interface. Longer term: Date/Time chapter and flexibility to add more chapters (e.g. symlink tree washer).

1999-12-09

• In addition to the old 4GB disk PAUSE gets my spare 9GB disk. Indended use: public archive of all authors directories starting with day zero (i.e. as if no deletions had ever happened).

1999-10-26

• Entry page now has short blurb about all available menu items, both for users and admins.

1999-10-25

• Mailinglist representatives now supported (beta).

1999-10-22

• Repair tool for unsuccessful uploads now available (beta).

1999-10-22

• Bugzilla declared inappropriate for PAUSE. Closed the Bugzilla tables by dropping database "bugs" after making a backup.

1999-10-21

• Module list catchup posting.

1999-10-20

• Edit module form now available for authors.

1999-10-19

• Installation of a form that lets at least people with admin privileges edit the mods table of the database directly. At the same time the scripts to produce a new module list have been made lighter and use the modulelist template only for formatting and sequence hints. This revolutionary step was inspired by Kurt Starsinnic during the Perl Conference 3. I've uploaded the very last module list that was produced by the old scripts, version 2.58. There's still a lot of work to do to make the form usable for the authors, but we have a step forward.

1999-08-31

• Installation of a passwordmailer. Users can now lose their password and aren't locked out.

1999-08-07

• PAUSE database switches to mysql.

1999-08-05

• PAUSE has a new interface. 80% of the old stuff seem to be ported and the core of the old scripts has redirectors to the new style.

1999-07-04

• Loic Dachary installs Bugzilla.

1999-07-03

• Andreas König and Loic Dachary roll up their virtual sleeves to start improving PAUSE. They rewrite the schema of the database to fit as good as possible for both mSQL and mysql for an easier transition path.

1999-05-17

• Upgrade to perl5.00556, apache 1.3.6, modperl 1.19-dev, openssl-0.9.2b, Ben-SSL 1.34.

1999-04-23

• Upgrade to Linux 2.2.6. Security checked with nessus-alpha2-fix3.

1999-02-15

Up to apache-1.3.4, mod_perl-1.18, Ben-SSL-1.31. Perl untouched.

1998-12-22

Better luck with Ben-SSL 1.29. SSL server up again. I don't know what was it that was misconfigured.

1998-12-20

PAUSE moves to speed-link.de, my future employer who is sponsering a 2 MBit line. The new machine is an AMD K6-2/300 with 128M memory and a 4GB disk. As it has an UW SCSI controler, it will be easy enough to add a bigger disk in a year or so. While moving I upgraded to perl5.005_54 with apache 1.3.3, mod_ssl 2.1.2, and mod_perl 1.16_03-dev. SSL didn't work with the setup.

1998-09-21

Apache upgrade: now perl5.005_51 with apache-1.3.1 with Ben-SSL 1.24 with mod_perl 1.15_01. Finally we're running with the gcache enabled and hopefully will enjoy the speedup.
For the future I'm planning to make pause.perl.org a CA. I'm not yet sure what's the best upgrade path to achieve that. It seems to need yet another name for PAUSE, but it's possible that this name will last for a longer time than those of its predecessors. Suggestions from SSL pros welcome. Thanks!

1998-06-03

PAUSE has a new home. The old server was a 68040 NeXT 25 MHz which started to behave peculiarly. It was both slow and a risk. The new machine is a 100MHz 486 Linux machine. Not a thrill, but it should do for the job for a while. What matters more than performance is that I do not have to port so much software to the box, because I have all the things I need easily available.
A necessary side effect of the relocation is a new SSL certificate. This time I was clever enough to let it expire in >10 years from now. I hope this works out well.
I apologize to all those who had to wait for quite a while to be registered, I hope all future requests can be served within 3 days. If we cannot manage that, we definitely need a new approach, but I'm quite positive that we can make registering easier and faster.

28 Dec 1997

Upgrade to mod_perl 1.07_02.

24 Oct 1997

Upgrade to perl5.004_04, apache 1.2.4 with Ben-SSL, mod_perl 1.05_01.

1 Sep 1997

Upgrade to perl5.004_03, apache 1.2.4.

2 Aug 1997

Upgrade to perl5.004m2t2, apache 1.2.1, and mod_perl 1.00. Upgraded to MakeMaker-5.42 which has the new parse_version method that sets $VERSION to "undef" if the $VERSION is undefined.

6 Jul 1997

Upgrade to perl5.004_01, apache 1.2.0, and mod_perl 1.00b1

26 May 1997

Authentification handler now case-insensitive, so users may log in as lwall instead of only LWALL. This was the most prominent mistake people made and cause for lots of grief. With mod_perl, this business is a breeze.

27 Apr 1997

Server up to apache-1.2b9-dev, perl5.003_97i, mod_perl-0.9701, the first with CGI.pm and no CGI::XA.

16 Mar 1997

Server up to apache-1.2b8-dev, perl5.003_93, mod_perl-0.94.

24 Feb 1997

Server up to apache-1.2b7, perl5.003_28.

11 Feb 1997

Server up to apache-1.2b6, mod_perl-0.93, perl5.003_26, LWP 5.07, HTTPD-Tools-0.53.

25 Jan 1997

Server is now close to apache-1.2b5, mod_perl-0.92, perl5.003_23. LWP 5.05 is patched to use overload instead of %OVERLOAD.

21 Dec 1996

HTTP Server is upgraded to apache-1.2b2, mod_perl-0.86, perl5.003_13. majordomo is now 1.94.

27 Sep 1996

Installed ssh-1.2.14 and disabled all r* commands.

21 Aug 1996

All scripts are now available both as traditional CGI scripts and as mod_perl scripts. On PAUSE the /perl/ directory is just a symlink to the /cgi-bin/pml/ directory. So the traditional and the mod_perl scripts are identical. Most scripts here on PAUSE require a password, but if you have no password, I have prepared a simple read-only example for you. Here is one and the same script

• running slow as traditional CGI,
• running fast as Apache::Registry subroutine.
• Read the source code.

You should be aware that this is running on a 25 MHz Motorola NeXT over a 64k link, so you may not see a big difference.

20 Aug 1996

Pause gets as a birthday present a new apache-1.1.1 server with perl-5.003_02 embedded. If you have missed the statistics posting, Here it is again (slightly enhanced):

		     20 Aug 1995                20 Aug 1996

Files:                       35                        201
Files-passed:                35                        916
MB-passed:                    0.5                       68.1
Authors:                     53                        179
Namespace:                    ?                       1009
Httpd:                        ?            Apache with embedded perl

Files are the most recent versions of distribution files. Foo-1.00 and Foo-1.01 count as one.
Files-passed are the distributions that have been passed through PAUSE. Not the readmes and checksums and indices nor those that went through more than once.
MB-passed is the size of the files in the previous line in Megabytes.
Namespace are package declarations found within the *.pm files.