MùPùF.org

You may know our server is hosted by OVH and is SAN-based. This means that the / of our server is not stored on a local hard disk drive but it is instead stored in a distant SAN. We already encountered "little" uptime problems because of some OVH service down-times. Well, last week has been the most horrible week ever[fr].

We had terrible throughput down to 70KBit/s, latencies up to 2 seconds and several down time that could have been as long as 8hours in a row.

On top of that, we had updates for the website that we could only apply by crossing our finger because some of them require the website to be rebooted. But, when rebooted, the django-based website touches a lot of files and with such a terrible latency, it could take up to 10 minutes to launch.

The problem was that cherokee was trying to spawn too many processes which in turn slowed down the website's boot sequence and this often lead the server to lack of RAM just as a bomb fork would operate.
I have fixed this problem by putting a lock on the beginning of the boot sequence.

A few hours ago, OVH switched our server to a new SAN which delivers close-to-normal performances. We are using this time to fix as many problems as we can. If you spot any problem, please send us a message.

Anyway, we are sorry for the inconvenience it may have caused.

After one year and more than 300 commits, PPassKeeper 1.0 beta 2 has finally been released !

What is PPassKeeper ?

PPasskeeper is my main personal project. It is a library that intends to create a portable way of storing sensitive information, such as passwords or private keys, into a safe place. In order to be portable and flexible, the library allows third-party developers to improve it by creating more plugins that can be free (as in freedom) or proprietary.

The goals of this project is to :

• Provide a common interface for desktops and operating systems to access secure password storages
• Be modular
• Allow third-party developers to easily create new modules
• Be backwards compatible

This project is developed under the LGPL v2.0 or later license.

What has changed since the beta 1 ?

Well, a lot of things have changed. As a summary, I can tell that it is way more mature, it is now thread-safe, has a better API/ABI, supports blobs, has support for the Gnome-Keyring, initial support for modules parameters, created unit tests, switched to CMake and fixes a lot of bugs !

The title says pretty much all what I wanted to say, but, whatever, let's say it again !

The research category is now up !

OK, now I hear your comments : "What the heck is this category all about ?!?".

(Nice announcement in the end of the article !)

MùPùF.org has been down for 16 hours, we want to apologize for this downtime.

What actually happened ?

There have been a problem on the SAN of the server and the main partition has been inaccessible for quite a long time. Then, the server has been rebooted by OVH but the e2fsck failed and I had to reboot in the recover mode to get it back online again.

Once again, sorry for the inconvenience.

Hello there,

Writing this (superb) blog post in order to present me, since I seem to have settled in that wonderful octopus cave. This is my first blog, and it's weird to think about the incredibly high amount of people who will praise those lines (means me, when checking for typos).

So, who am I ? If you wanna know, you shall click that nasty little 'Read more' link just below ! :p

PPassKeeper, my main project, intends to become a plugin-based portable way to store passwords in a secure and easy fashion.

The API for getting and setting passwords is quite simple and is good for modules like the Gnome-Keyring or the KWallet but there are some cases where this simplicity is just disastrous. For instance, for modules like WebDAV or LDAP (these modules have not been coded yet). In fact, there are loads of parameters needed by some modules and the only way they had was to use configuration files.

This time is over as PPassKeeper now provides a way to handle parameters !

One month after, MùPùF.org is still under construction. The user interface begins to settle and what you see is almost what the website will look like in a near future.

It's time to review what we have done and what is still left to do.