Blog de Mageia (English)
Our equipment is getting a makeover!
To do a good job, we need good tools. Some of our servers are old, no longer powerful enough and have limited disk resources to meet the needs of developers. RPM manufacturing takes a long time and this is detrimental to the efficiency of maintaining and evolving the distribution. In short, the machines are well depreciated.
This is why our infrastructure is first getting a makeover. Better adapted to new technologies, it will allow our developers to work faster and more efficiently.
So where is this new infrastructure?
We received 5 new servers:
– 2 new nodes for building packages: HPE ProLiant DL 360 Gen10 – 2xXeon 6126 (12C/2.6GHz) –
256GB RAM – 2xSSD 3.8TB HW Raid 1 – 2x10Gb/s NICs
– 2 servers to replace sucuk and duvel: HPE ProLiant DL 380 Gen10 – 2 Xeon 6126 (12C/2.6GHz) –
256GB RAM – 2xSSD 3.8TB HW Raid 1 – 10xHDD 12TB HW Raid 5 – 2x10Gb/s NICs
– 1 server for deployment and backup: HPE ProLiant DL80 Gen9 – 2xXeon E5-2603v4
(6C/1.7GHz) – 256GB RAM – 6xHDD 6TB (donated, with some renewed parts)
– 1 Arista 7120T switch 20xRJ-45 10Gb/s 4xSFP+ 10Gb/s for interconnecting the machines
One of the ideas is to use the latest server to deploy quickly and as automatically as possible the construction nodes and other machines. The method is ready for x86_64 nodes and is being finalized for ARM nodes. The preparation of the servers takes time because the teams anticipate the future and future developments.
Once the preparation part of our servers is finished, the integration part into the Data Center will remain.
We are therefore taking our time to do things well in order to perpetuate the future and future versions of Mageia.
In the meantime, the future version 10 of Mageia continues to bubble in its cauldron! But we are not ready yet to plan a release date for the moment.
Feel free to come and strengthen our teams.
And here is new MADb!
That was fast: we have only just explained why our Mageia Application Database was offline and now papoteur tells us that new MADb is ready to be used.
Open the site and at first glance you might think you have somehow connected to the old site as the differences between it and the new one are hard to spot (the top one is the old site):
However, this is only the outward appearance, as the style sheets (CSS) were re-used with little modification.
The tool itself, previously written in PHP, has been completely rewritten from scratch, using Python, Flask, Jinja2 and DNF5, so the runtime code is entirely new. Papoteur showed two code snippets as an example of what really changed (again, the top one is old):
That is as different as a page from an English book compared to a page from its Indonesian translation!
About 3000 new lines of code were written for this new MADb, which is now live and ready to answer your queries about Mageia applications.
As you use the site, we ask you to think about what questions you feel an integrated help function (not yet available) should answer, and also what you feel we should include in a new wiki article about MADb. Please note your suggestions in the comments to this post, as you are all the Mageia community and this tool is for you.
Thanks to the MLO community for hosting new MADb.
Out with the old MADb and (almost) in with the new
UPDATE: It is now possible to visit the new MADb here https://madb.mageialinux-online.org/. It will take a bit longer for https://madb.mageia.org/ to link to it.
Written by aguador.
In Mageia, MADb, the Mageia App Db, has been an essential tool, particularly for QA (Quality Assurance) testers. It is the goto site for information on applications in our repositories with links to bug reports, priorities for updates, version comparisons and more. Searchable by Mageia version and CPU architecture, the site has not only been key for developers and testers, but many users as well who have found it an alternative to searching with our MCC control center or the command line when looking for a package to do (“whatever”).
But, er, “Houston, we have a problem.” If I go to MADb (https://madb.mageia.org/) all I got was the error message below and now a redirect to this post!
MADb was not affected by the move of Mageia’s servers announced on this blog (https://blog.mageia.org/en/2024/10/08/most-of-our-servers-will-be-offline-because-they-are-relocating/) early this month because it was originally developed by two of our contributors many years ago, and running on a different server. Mageia.Org took over ownership of their rented server a few months ago. Unfortunately, that server passed away and since the technology behind the old MADb is not compatible with newer infrastructure (mostly newer php-version), we cannot bring it back as it was. However, not all was lost!
Back in April, papoteur had submitted his initial work on a new version of MADb for testing…and since then it has undergone numerous revisions and improvements. However, it still remains “under wraps” for most users (like the author of this post!) until everyone, above all papoteur, is satisfied that it is not only a solid db interface for users, but is even better than before.
Since MADb has played such a vital role in testing, the development version is available to the QA team and other testers. It is only fair that they get the first look and use given all the work they do to assure that Mageia remains a quality distro. The rest of us simply need a bit more patience.
Ah, and not to forget the servers, not only was the move successful, with the other services affected now back up and running smoothly, but we expect to announce more good news about our servers, soon. Apart from that, most Mageia mirrors are in a good shape (they are all hosted on external servers, which we do not control).
