The main DNS record for the FreeBSD wiki (wiki.FreeBSD.org) has now been updated to include the IPv6 address record.
The server hosting the wiki, sky.FreeBSD.org, has been running with bz’s latest IPv6 jail patch for 10 days without issues.
See the freebsd-jail list for patches: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-jail/2008-July/000379.html
As I have been asked several times why we use moinmoin for the FreeBSD Developers Wiki and the answer is mainly “historical reasons” I decided to write the history up so I can just point people at it :-).
The history, as I recall it, can now be found on the WikiHistory wiki page.
A month or so before EuroBSDCon 2007 conference the FreeBSD.org systems at Yahoo! had gotten IPv6 connectivity with the main web server and mail servers being accessible via IPv6. The FreeBSD wiki was still IPv4 only as was (and still is) is running in a jail.
At the conference I talked to Bjoern A. Zeeb (AKA bz@) about the issue with IPv4 only jails and he was interested in making a patch so FreeBSD jails could support IPv6 and the FreeBSD wiki could be accessible via IPv6.
I should poke Bjoern regularly about making the patch, which I failed miserably at, but he got work done on the patch anyway. A few weeks ago he sent me the IPv6 jail patch for me to try out. Since life should be interesting I didn’t try it on a test server, but on the production web server sky which hosts the FreeBSD wiki and more. Just in case there were any problems I made sure I was around to recover things in case the system blew up, but none of that happened. In fact, since I installed the patch on sky a week ago there haven’t been any problems (that I know of at least). Granted there aren’t much IPv6 traffic, but the IPv4 part have been under its normal load.
So far the main FreeBSD.org DNS record for the wiki has not been updated to include the AAAA records, so people will use IPv6 if they have it, but that expected to come soon. For now people can try out the wiki using IPv6 by accessing http://v6.wiki.nitro.dk/. It has a slight (100%) likeness with the IPv4 wiki, but… IPv6!
For people interested in the patch the work is being done in the FreeBSD Perforce repository at //depot/user/bz/jail/.... I am sure Bjoern will post appropriate public patch when he think it is ready. Credit should also go to Pawel Jakub Dawidek (AKA pjd@) who made the multi IP(v4) jail patch which Bjoern based his patch on. Thanks to Bjoern and Pawel for the work making this possible!
Now I just need to actually get around to setting up IPv6 at home, so I can actually try out the IPv6 wiki myself in anything other than lynx from other hosts… any year now.
I finally got tired at looking at the hostname “wikitest”, so I decided to move the FreeBSD wiki to sky.FreeBSD.org. This also means that the wiki can now be fully “official” and has been renamed to wiki.FreeBSD.org. I took the opportunity to familiarize myself some more with how a moinmoin installation works so I did spend a good part of a weekend doing the migration but now there are fewer direct hacks in the wiki and I actually somewhat knows where the files are. The small downside to moving the wiki, and the main reason I haven’t done this before, is that I have a bit less freedom configuring the jails on sky since I now have to be a bit careful not to accidentally break the wiki. The move actually happened over a week ago, I just didn’t get around to writing about it before.
The current FreeBSD.org “monitoring system” consists of running “ruptime | grep down” from cron every hour. This is actually very effective compared to the simplicity, but it doesn’t catch e.g. when squid on www.FreeBSD.org die due to the disk being being full. To better detect this kind of errors I have I have been working on setting up Nagios for FreeBSD.org to be able to find out quickly when stuff crash. The configuration of the Nagios installation still isn’t complete, but at least it does warn me about major outages now. Thanks to the Nagios install by Erwin Lansing I also get mails if the FreeBSD Nagios crash so that part is also covered.
In unrelated news FreeBSD 4.X is no longer supported by the FreeBSD Security Team, so that is very nice that we finally could drop the support since FreeBSD 4.x has diverted quite a lot from FreeBSD 5/6/7 by now (or rather the other way around). It was getting increasingly difficult backporting fixes etc. for Security Advisories. RIP FreeBSD 4.