[Biopython-dev] Biopython website is down

[Peter Cock]

Dear Biopythoneers,

I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news:

We've got some problems on the main OBF web server, which has
been on AWS since 2012:

https://news.open-bio.org/2012/11/04/server-transition-to-aws/

This runs biopython.org, bioperl.org, biojava.org, biosql.org etc.
and will likely need a rebuild to get us back online again...

This will delay the planned Biopython 1.67 release - although we
could do it anyway on PyPI only, and share the Windows Installers
etc once the website is back?

Good news:

We'd already migrated the main OBF website www.open-bio.org
(aka www.obf.io) to a separately hosted MediaWiki site, and the OBF
news blog to a separately hosted WordPress site, news.open-bio.org
aka news.obf.io - so they are not affected.

Migration:

You may recall the AWS MediaWiki server would periodically fail
with a MySQL outage. Also we had some problems with the OpenID
authentication when Google dropped support for the legacy API.
In general keeping MediaWiki & WordPress up to date was a burden
and potential security problem.

This is why we started looking at migration options last year, with
a front-runner being GitHub pages for the project websites. I'll
write about that (and how people can help) in another email.

Regards,

Peter