CGI/ssh Upgrade

This is just a short note to reflect a couple of upgrades.

First, we have upgraded the ssh environment to more powerful hardware in order to allow for continued growth and to make sure scheduled tasks (still coming soon) will have enough resources to run without driving anybody’s site into the ground.

Second, we have updated Perl in the CGI/ssh environment from 5.8.8 to 5.8.9. Despite being a minor-version upgrade, this required the rebuild of nearly 1,000 CPAN modules and dozens of supporting libraries. Thus, we wanted to let people know to be on the lookout for resulting weirdness or incompatibilities. A few CPAN modules bought the farm on this upgrade, and we’ll list those below.

Two modules have been permanently removed. The first is Apache::Test, which can’t build because Apache isn’t actually present in the CGI environment. The second is Weather::Google. It seems the API used by Weather::Google is intended for desktop “widget” use and they don’t really want it used from other sites; they’ve blocked our entire network from using it. (This is speculation on our part, as there is little public information other than that this is an “unofficial” API for widgets to use, and so far we haven’t gotten a definitive response to our inquiries about it.)

Four other modules have been temporarily removed because they’re too badly broken to function in their current incarnation. They are:

• Catalyst::Engine::Test (fails its own tests)
• LWP::Parallel (appears to be badly out of date compared to LWP)
• Template::Alloy::XS (also appears out of date or obsolete)
• WWW::HostipInfo (fails its own tests, looks really broken)

We’ll keep all four of these modules on our list. If they start working in the future with new releases, they’ll reappear.

if you have any problems arising from either upgrade, please let us know via a Secure Support Request.

3 Comments

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1. Very cool.

   How do you guys handle the rebuild of the CPAN modules? Do you distribute the work load across your entire network or is it handled by some dev machine somewhere?

   It’s not really feasible to cluster-build most software modules due to the complex web of interdependencies, especially where something like CPAN is involved. Most of our network is focused on doing your stuff, not ours. 🙂 -jdw

   Comment by Cameron Eagans — February 17, 2009 #

2. Thanks for being so diligent about this, and for reporting back with such detail. Totally appreciated.

   Comment by Baz — February 18, 2009 #

3. Can’t wait for scheduled tasks 🙂

   Comment by Dawson — March 3, 2009 #

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