SoundSoftware Code Site

We're aware that some users have been experiencing problems pushing large changesets to the repository, and attaching files to project pages. We believe we have found the cause of this and are working to resolve it.

Please accept our apologies for this morning's downtime to this site (and to our project site). Both were inaccessible for some hours, after an interruption to the server room power supply knocked out the cooling for our servers. We had to wait for the power company to respond before we could bring our services back up. As far as we can tell, this should be an isolated incident and no data was at risk.

What's changed?¶

The SSL certificate for this site has just been updated. You shouldn't notice any difference when simply browsing through https, but if you have stored the host fingerprint in your Mercurial configuration, you'll need to update it.

The new certificate has fingerprint

0d:ff:f3:46:55:7a:be:4c:00:4c:82:9b:cf:71:13:03:b2:08:25:4d

Background, or, Why would I need to do this?¶

When you use Mercurial to pull from an https URL that is unknown to the hg client, Mercurial will complain about it with a warning like this:

warning: code.soundsoftware.ac.uk certificate with fingerprint 0d:ff:f3:46:55:7a
:be:4c:00:4c:82:9b:cf:71:13:03:b2:08:25:4d not verified (check hostfingerprints 
or web.cacerts config setting)

You can avoid this warning by storing the certificate fingerprint in your Mercurial configuration.

To do so, add the following lines to the .hgrc file in your home directory:

[hostfingerprints]
code.soundsoftware.ac.uk=0d:ff:f3:46:55:7a:be:4c:00:4c:82:9b:cf:71:13:03:b2:08:25:4d

Then Mercurial will check the certificate and continue silently if it is correct, but will refuse to continue at all if the certificate doesn't match (because that could indicate a serious security problem).

But this does mean that if the host key ever changes legitimately (as it just has), you will need to update the configuration by hand. The lines above show the new fingerprint, so if you have the old one stored, you should change it to that.

Yesterday morning we completed a major update to the code site. Most of the changes were behind-the-scenes updates and upgrades, but there were some visible changes as well.

We've brought together a tag cloud, the Latest Projects box that used to appear on the front page, and some new boxes showing project and institutional activity, into a new Explore page. This is now where the Projects link in the main menubar takes you: formerly it showed a list of all projects on the site, but that was becoming very unwieldy. (The list of all projects is still there, of course, and is linked from the Explore page.)

We're planning to update the Explore page with some new ways to find more relevant work, and code that is likely to be mature or stable. If you've any suggestions for other things you'd like to see here, please let us know!

We also have a new block available on My Page, called "Active projects for people I'm working with". This gives you some idea of what the people you work with on your own current projects are also doing (on public projects at least). You can add or remove this box from My Page using the Personalise link at top right.

Do let us know if you run into any problems with the updated site.

We're planning an update on the morning of Thursday 20th June 2013, from around 10am BST which will involve some downtime while upgrading and testing the update. We expect the site to be offline for around one hour during this time. Our apologies for any inconvenience this may cause!

This week we've made some improvements to the publications module, including adding support for retrieving BibTeX format records. Take a look at a project with some associated publications in it (like this one) and you'll see a new BibTeX link next to every publication.

We've also added a DOI field for publications, where you can supply the Digital Object Identifier associated with your paper.

Also in this week's updates, we've clarified the "public or private" choice in the "New Project" page -- previously it defaulted to public, which has occasionally caught people out who didn't read the form closely enough! Now there is no default, so you have to make a decision when creating a project. We hope the descriptions are also a little clearer.

Finally, we've made some small visual and typographic updates which we hope give things a friendlier air.

More improvements in the pipeline, particularly in the area of exploring and discovering projects, so watch this space!

We've finished our server move and reconfiguration, and all services should be running again normally now. Please drop us a line if you see any problems. We had around 55 minutes of downtime during the move, which is quite a bit longer than we had intended — our sincere apologies if this has affected your work.

We're planning a server relocation on the morning of Tuesday 23rd of October. This will take place during the period between 9.30 and 11am BST. During this process, the SoundSoftware site and code hosting facility may be unavailable for a short time.

Any outage will include not only the website but also associated services including Mercurial push and pull.

Our apologies in advance for any inconvenience this may cause.

Owing to a necessary network router upgrade, the SoundSoftware site and code hosting facility will be unavailable for a short period starting from 6pm BST (5pm UTC) on Thursday 5th of July 2012.

This outage will include not only the website but also associated services including Mercurial push and pull.

Our apologies in advance for any inconvenience this may cause.

The LDAP problem that was causing some users to be unable to log in earlier this afternoon has now been resolved. Our apologies for the inconvenience!