Authentication changes at Eclipse.org

As you may have heard, we've changed our authentication scheme at Eclipse.org. Instead of having Committer accounts in one database and Bugzilla users in another, both of those databases have been brought together.

We did this for many reasons: it felt strange to ask users to create a "Bugzilla" account to be able to participate on Forums; it was confusing; our sites, such as Wiki and Marketplace, needed to keep track of two auth sources; Eclipse Committers essentially had two accounts, which made no sense; for every new software tool we'd install, we needed to write custom plugins to allow authentication against the Bugzilla database.

Now everything is consolidated, and although we don't have a complete Single Sign On solution, this change has paved the way towards that. It was also a required change in order to deploy the Gerrit code review system.

As with any migration, it wasn't without its bumps and glitches, but overall it went well. Thanks to everyone who tested, re-tested and wrote in to report problems and bugs.

Meeting the people is what this is all about

I attended the Ottawa DemoCamp yesterday, where a bunch of Ottawa Eclipse community members gathered for a bit of food, a bit of beer and a lot of cake to celebrate Eclipse's 10th birthday.

These informal gatherings are not only about food, beer (and cake) and idle chat -- there is some quality learning happening at these events, and a great opportunity to meet some interesting people.

Yesterday I made some new friends who work on Eclipse technologies for the federal government of Canada right here in Ottawa. The Department of National Defense, no less (yes, Canada has one of those).

I also had a short but interesting talk with Ken Hussey about his work on Puppet-related tools at Cloudsmith. I've had Puppet on my list of tools to investigate for quite some time now, and seeing Cloudsmith in that space may help precipitate things.

A gentleman named Antoine also talked to me about Sonar -- a code quality and analysis platform. He made it sound really good, and the screenshots make it look even better. Definitely on the radar.

Ericsson was also in the house, and I had a short conversation with someone whose name I unfortunately cannot remember. But she was very nice, and explained that they use Eclipse and the CDT. I wanted to introduce her to Mr. CDT ("I pity the fool") himself, since he was also present yesterday -- but alas, that never happened.

Lastly, being seen in public with such local celebrities as Kim Moir, John Arthorne and Pascal Rapicault is always a great way to boost one's image.

Cheers!

Crowdsourced translations make Eclipse in English better too

A few years ago I actively worked on the Babel project -- a crowdsourced solution to Eclipse globalization. Since then the translation tool has been doing its job -- allowing the community to contribute translated strings, which are then turned into downloadable language packs.

Lately, one of our contributors in Japan has been opening a series of bugs outlining issues with the English strings in the message files. Pure awesome.

You have to love the power of OSS -- the more eyes we have looking at code, the better it becomes.

My first EclipseCon Europe!

I'm in Germany this week for my first EclipseCon Europe. I had heard rumors that the Wifi's performance wasn't comparable to that of EclipseCon NA so I came here to help.

Just to be clear: I'm not involved in the network or Wifi setup at either conference, but I do bring a copy of download.eclipse.org with me. I then set up a mirror and some redirects so that your Eclipse bits aren't sent over the Internet.

This morning was a typical EclipseCon Day 1: although the conference Wifi is great, as attendees start up Eclipse, the p2 downloads pile up against the poor Internet connection, making it nearly impossible to do anything else. But after some caches, redirects and tweaking compression on www.eclipsecon.org, the local mirror is putting out over 800KB/sec and the rest of the world feels accessible again.

I'll keep monitoring the situation throughout the conference and tweak content as I can to help make sure your Wifi experience at econ2011 is the best it can be.

10 years of Eclipse as seen by /etc/passwd

If you've worked on a *nix system, you're likely familiar with the /etc/passwd file -- the main list of accounts on that system. Although eclipse.org does not use the passwd file for user accounts, examining the compatible getent passwd tells the story about who was involved in setting up the original dev.eclipse.org way back in 2001.

Keep in mind that we delete accounts of committers who have been completely decommitterized; therefore, the people you see mentioned below are still active participants in the Eclipse community even after 10 years.

First up, the standard root, mysql and other system accounts, then here's what I see:

500:kmoir

I wasn't there in 2001, but judging by her UID=500, I'm guessing Kim Moir was the one who inserted the first Linux CD in the drive and installed a computer called "dev.eclipse.org".

Next up:
512:mmartin

Mark was a webmaster@eclipse.org for a long time. Although he and his account are no longer active on dev.eclipse.org, he gave me my webmaster training at the IBM Queensview lab back in October 2004. So his account stays for my own nostalgia :-)

Judging by Mark's UID=512, I'm guessing a few other webmasters were blessed with accounts on dev.eclipse.org before his.

Next up:
1000:droy
1002:jeff

I am an imposter in that list, since Jeff McAffer predates me by a few years. But I have root@eclipse.org, so I faked my UID=1000. Deal with it :-)

After creating Jeff's account, Kim wasted no time getting things set up:
7003:cvs
7004:viewcvs
7005:anonymous

The jump from UID=1000 to UID=7003 is likely an artifact of an IBM security policy for user ids, since there is nothing below 7003.

Then, we have the first Eclipse committers:
7008:pmulet
7012:mcq
7020:dj
7026:johna
7033:ggayed
7034:veronika
7036:steve
7037:silenio
7043:dmegert
7047:daudel
7048:jeromel
7050:oliviert

Although some of them are not very active anymore, some of them still are, but one thing they all have in common is that they helped shape Eclipse as you see it today.

Mailing lists on dev.eclipse.org came a bit later in 2002 with the creation of a 'mailman' account, followed shortly by a 'webmaster' account. At that time, I'm guessing the real webmaster became a few people who perhaps occasionally shared the job.

7336:david_williams

David Williams and some of the still-active WTP committers are listed next, which likely happened in 2003-2004 when the WTP top-level project was created. Today, David Williams is a name recognized more than even Eclipse itself.

A bunch of BIRT committers are listed in succession, which matches up to 2004's creation of the top-level project of the same name.

8249:mmilinkovich

Although Mike was on the Eclipse scene long before I was, he only got an account on dev.eclipse.org when the Phoenix project was created and he became a committer. Bye Bye Frames!

The Eclipse superstar with the most letter Z's in his name... circa 2005 ... followed by our own Conference Queen Anne Jacko.
8444:caniszczyk
8636:ajacko

I could go on... But I wanted to highlight the first years. Besides, I must be the only sysadmin dumb enough to put user id's and UIDs in plain text on a blog.

Fast forward six years... and we're up to UID=9826. Who will have lucky account UID=10000 ?

Hudson building Hudson

Ok, so I'm easily impressed. I think it's cool.

30.8 Terabytes!

Last month, Eclipse.org servers have moved 30.8 TB of data to the Internet. 30.8 Terabytes! That is a first -- even during the yearly release, we've never moved so many bits in one month. And September was a short month :)


It's been a steady climb since we started tracking bits in 2006, but it appears that since early 2010, things have really taken off like a rocket.

So I decided to compare our monthly bit throughput with the size, on disk, of the Eclipse code repos.

Code size is increasing quite linearly, with a noticeable boost in size midway though 2009.

Next up is the same bit throughput and SCM size on disk, compared to our binary downloads footprint.



As we prepare for Eclipse's 10th anniversary next month, these numbers show that there's no slowing down the momentum that Eclipse has gained during that time. Cool stuff!

Going to EclipseCon Europe: is there enough beer in Germany?

In the years past, I was told I could not attend EclipseCon Europe because there wasn't enough beer in Germany to satisfy this thirsty Canadian. I'm not sure how much truth there is to that, but it's what I was told.

Anyway, as the European edition of my favourite gathering has grown, so has the need for some official IT support. I'll be flying in Tuesday, Nov. 1 to help (however I can) with WiFi setup and to set up a download mirror like I do at EclipseCon North America. The download mirror is a real Internet saver -- these conference venues typically don't have tons of Internet bandwidth, so bringing a local copy of all your favourite Eclipse bits helps a lot. I look forward to seeing all my European friends, and to making some new ones!

In the interest of saving thousands of dollars in airline fees, I'll be staying over Saturday for some local sightseeing. Since this will be my first time in Germany, if you have any hints as to what I should do during my stay, please post up in the comments.

Edit 9/23: Apparently comments were disabled on my blog. Sorry 'bout that.

Indigo early access to Friends of Eclipse

An email was sent out to the Friends of Eclipse, announcing early availability to the Indigo bits. Less than 2 minutes later, here is the resulting spike in usage on the Friends of Eclipse Mirror:



If you're a Friend, you can access the download links right now. If not, consider becoming a Friend today as part of the Indigo 500.

Torrent files are also up for early access to our p2p users.

Anatomy of an outage - part II

Yesterday I posted about the first of two outages we've experienced last week. Today I'll post about the outage we had late in the early afternoon of June 2.


Similarly to our previous outage, we suddenly lost our ability to talk to our primary switch -- a Cisco 2970 24-port Gigabit switch, in service since October 2004.

We feared the worst -- a tripped power circuit caused by a faulty power supply. Again? Not this time -- the switch was simply 'frozen' with an orange alert lamp. After cycling the power, we were back in business.

But why did it just freeze? Was it beginning to show signs of fatigue? Matt and I took no chances -- with enough available ports on our much newer 48-port Cisco 2960 (part of a hardware donation made by Cisco for EclipseCON 2009), we migrated all the connections off to the new switch.

Accurate graphs and documentation allowed us to migrate port settings, VLANs and QoS rules quickly to the 'new' switch.