(This is a stripped-down version of the monthly news letters sent out to members of Codeberg e.V.; as usual published here with due delay. Not member of the non-profit association yet? Consider joining it!)
Dear Codeberg e.V. Members and Supporters!
It's time for some updates. We feel bad that our outgoing communication is currently worsening quite a bit, yet our core team is currently super busy, members formerly focusing on communication are now dedicated to infrastructure work (and for many of us this summer left less time for contributions than usual). So if you have some free cycles to do some public relation work / communication, please reach out via email or in our Matrix Chat!
Some Bad News
First of all, a few words about recent unexpected downtimes. On August 16, 2022, following a routine server update and reboot of our rented infrastructure at netcup, the main Codeberg service – Gitea – was unavailable for about 65 minutes.
The reason was a configuration issue with our network filesystem (Ceph) that failed to properly mount upon reboot. Running to a computer with console, identification of the problem, fixing the configuration and reconnecting cluster took us about an hour, much more than we would like to admit.
On August 29th and September 6th we encountered short downtimes of a few minutes each, caused by TCP connection requests flooding the network interface that might be (D)DoS attempts (from a pool of IPs), or might be linked to an attempt to write a bot/crawler gone bad. We look (and appreciate all contributions) to improve our rate limiting and traffic shaping. If you have proven configurations at hand and would donate these or like to help setting such up, please reach out.
Gitea is still running with a single instance only. This is a pretty cool thing as nobody of us expected a single-instance Gitea to be able to scale to the current capacity.
Our work in the last year focused on scaling out horizontally, starting with distributed file system and database, in parallel Gitea developers are steadily working on making Gitea distributable (to the best of our knowledge we are almost there, but this needs a lot more testing).
The backflip of distributed machinery is additional complexity, paying off only at much later point in time. In our case this stretched our team to the extent that errors and mistakes creep in that we would rather like to avoid. Of course the mission is to continue on our path towards scalable and redundant infrastructure, yet we need to improve on focusing our resources on building manageable infrastructure.
One aspect of the current work-in-progress is that half the workload is handled on production VPS, the other half including storage, on bare metal instance. Added complexity in setup, and uneccessary network latency does not help, and our long planned schedule aims to move all services from the current production VPS to our own server as soon as possible (and deploy machines we received as hardware donation for added redundancy).
Helping hands very welcome!
Highlights
Gitea 1.17 deployed!
Early August, we updated Codeberg to Gitea 1.17, after weeks of careful testing. Special Big Thanks to the Gitea team and all contributors who made this possible. It seems to us that this release still contains a few unexpected regressions, but we have no doubt that these will be fixed in no time. Please don't hesitate to report and file issues, and help with PRs, fixes, resolution!
The most notable features were a new package registry for users, marking files in PR's as viewed (along with a PR UX refresh), and first steps towards federation. We hope you enjoy these news, and invite you to take part in making the next Gitea release possible, by reporting and triaging bugs as well as implementing fixes and features.
New Landingpage!
Together with this new Gitea release, we launched a redesign of our landing page, an update long looked forward to. The previous version provided only very basic information about our platform. This update conveys information about our mission at Codeberg.org, the platform and our community. Thanks to mray for the design, and McTom234 for implementation!
Codeberg will now inform interested users at a glance without the need to dig through historical blog posts and docs to find more about us. Blog and documentation still provide incredible value, much deeper than any landing page could. Yet we have to admit that many users never click through to our in-depth documents.
And: The frontpage stats are updated automatically.
Where we need help
As mentioned earlier, we have Ceph up and running as announced in our last letter. Now we need some helping hands for moving more and more services to bare metal, and continuing our transition towards a public repository of configuration-as-code.
If you have experience in infrastructure-as-code, mail servers, systemd, debian machines, lxc, Ceph, please consider donating some of your time, and join our infrastructure team!
Also we are looking for typing hands for improving our communications and public relations work (social media, announcements, blog). Please reach out if you are interested!
Our moderation and community issue tracker at https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/Community/issues remains an active place to discuss bugs, features, and community-related needs. If you have some free cycles, please go through the recent issues, help out users, forward bug reports and feature requests to upstream Gitea at https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues if they aren't reported yet, and consider joining our group of active community maintainers: see https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/Community/issues/571 for details.
If you are experienced with software development, we are having some Go, Rust and PHP projects. Please reach out to us, if you'd like to help us in your free time to get some thing done.
Number Games
We are hosting 39391 repositories, created and maintained by 31836 users. Compared to one month ago, this is an organic growth rate of +4149 repositories (+11.8% month-over-month) and +2611 users (+8.9%).
Our SSD-backed VPS is running at about 71% storage capacity. Since we are easily able to move data to our Ceph cluster (usage at 6%) and every bit on the SSD makes our service faster, we won't try to bring this down for now, but rather scale up the Ceph cluster when necessary. Once migration of the instance is due, the SSD data will be moved to the Ceph cluster.
Codeberg e.V. has 230 members in total, these are 163 members with active voting rights and 65 supporting members, and 2 honorary members.
Your Codeberg e.V.
Friendly reminder: membership in the account group "Members" on codeberg.org is not automatic (this group enables access to Codeberg e.V.'s internal repos and discussion between Codeberg e.V. members therein). For privacy reasons we add members on request (your membership is visible to other members). If you are not yet in this account group, but would like to join, please send an email to codeberg@codeberg.org and tell us your username. If you need access to Codeberg e.V. report documents without being listed in the account group, please send an email.
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Codeberg e.V. – Gormannstraße 14 – 10119 Berlin – Germany
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