[Biopython-dev] Biopython website is down

[Peter Cock]

Hello all,

We've just switched the DNS settings over so https://biopython.org
will soon take you to the GitHub Pages migrated version of the site,
the source of which is here:

https://github.com/biopython/biopython.github.io

This is by no means a "finished" website, but it is much better than
no website. Please do check the issues listing and report any
problems you find at:

https://github.com/biopython/biopython.github.io/issues

If you are planning to contribute to the website directly via GitHub
pull requests, please wait a bit longer as I am going to re-run the
migration at least once more to deal with the user pages:

https://github.com/biopython/biopython.github.io/issues/6
https://github.com/peterjc/mediawiki_to_git_md/issues/14

If anyone is interested in the internal details, there's another
thread on the development list about the migration:

http://lists.open-bio.org/pipermail/biopython-dev/2016-April/021309.html

Apologies for the outage, we (the OBF) plan to post something
about this on the news blog later:

https://news.open-bio.org

Regards,

Peter
(Biopython developer; OBF secretary; etc)

On Thu, Apr 7, 2016 at 11:28 AM, Peter Cock <p.j.a.cock at googlemail.com> wrote:
> 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