[Zope-dev] Re: Collector down - status and potential help request

Ken Manheimer klm@zope.com
Mon, 10 Sep 2001 18:28:46 -0400 (EDT)


I reported last week that we had lost the disk running the Zope bug
collector - and only then discovered that our ISP was not doing backups of
it.  Well, the story is turning out to have some legs.

Unfortunately, the precautionary copy of the host that matt burleigh, our
internal systems guy, did (in great foresight!), was incomplete - and
apparently missed the collector site.  (Great initiative, flawed
follow-through!-)  Fortunately, about a month and a half ago i did a .csv
dump of the collector db, in order to examine the schema for a possible
project to transfer the db to a tracker.  I never had time to work on the
transformation, but still have the db - yay!  This means we have all the
records up to about 2.5 months ago.

What we're planning to do at this point is develop a _minimal_ replacement
for the tracker, duplicating its essential features in a way that could
serve as a basis for a CMF-based tracker - a sort of minimal evolutionary
prototype.  We'll then be able to populate it with the items we have.
(We'd rather go with a rudimentary application we can build on in the CMF
than with a tracker, from which we'd later have to migrate to a preferred
CMF implementation...)

What, you may ask, about the issues from july 26 to last week, when the
collector went away?  Well, there are a couple of avenues for recovering
those items - we probably have internal mailling list archives with them,
and also could scrape them from google searches where they're cached, if
needs be.  The issue is converting them to a form we could use to populate
the new collector.  What we're hoping is to engage volunteers from the
community to stake out some portion of the remaining items and enter them
in - perhaps to some CSV-producing application, or perhaps directly to the
new collector.  This is a heads-up for such a request - we need to scope
out exactly what we're going to do before enlisting the support (and
establish how many items we're talking about, anyway).  I'm not sure what
we'll do - it may be easiest to collect the items from a maillist archive
and use a simple transformer to convert them into csv format - i don't
recall how completely the email notices covered the collector items.

That's the story for now - i expect to have more details (and a start on a
new collector) by the end of the week.

Ken Manheimer
klm@zope.com

On Wed, 5 Sep 2001, Ken Manheimer wrote:

> The Zope bug collector, normally at
> http://classic.zope.org:8080/Collector, isn't at the moment...
>
> The machine didn't come up after some maintenance - as can happen with
> long running machines - and unfortunately the service provider for that
> machine didn't have a recent backup(!)  Fortunately, we have a fairly
> recent backup of our own(!), which we hope to get online sometime soon.
> We'll be reporting back when it's back on line.  Sorry about the
> disruption!
>
> Ken Manheimer
> klm@zope.com