Hab Hub Servers EOL ?

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Anthony Stirk

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Feb 15, 2021, 5:48:20 AM2/15/21
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Hi All,

 

The current HABHub Servers are hosted a HP Proliant Server which is coming up to its 8th year. The O/S is I believe Ubuntu 12. At some point both of these are going to be a liability. Rather than having to just terminate the servers at some point in the future with no notice due to critical hardware failure or compromise I would like to give the community notice of our intention to shut them down. Unfortunately the original team behind the servers no longer have the time to actively develop or upgrade the software and there is no one in the wings willing to take over.

 

I’m open to suggestions but my proposal at this time is to give people 6 months notice of the servers being shut off. If someone wants to take the job lot and host it somewhere at their risk I’d be open to that option.

 

If anyone has any thoughts let me know. If no one has any reservations or other options I’ll put this out to the wider mailing list shortly.

 

Cheers

 

Anthony

 

CC’d in Steve as I don’t know if he’s party to the UKHAS Tools mailing list.

 

 


Nevis

Anthony Stirk
Managing Director
T: 01274 550910
E: Anthon...@nevis.co.uk | W: http://www.nevis.co.uk
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James Coxon

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Feb 15, 2021, 6:36:47 AM2/15/21
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Been along time since I’ve replied to this group. I’d be willing to take on maintaining HABHub. I’ve got a fairly good dedicated server running in a datacenter in the UK, it’s definitely under utilised as it’s just doing a single other task, lots of spare cpu and memory.
Happy for help with the maintenance etc.

James

Sent from my iPhone

On 15 Feb 2021, at 10:48, Anthony Stirk <Anthon...@nevis.co.uk> wrote:



Hi All,

 

The current HABHub Servers are hosted a HP Proliant Server which is coming up to its 8th year. The O/S is I believe Ubuntu 12. At some point both of these are going to be a liability. Rather than having to just terminate the servers at some point in the future with no notice due to critical hardware failure or compromise I would like to give the community notice of our intention to shut them down. Unfortunately the original team behind the servers no longer have the time to actively develop or upgrade the software and there is no one in the wings willing to take over.

 

I’m open to suggestions but my proposal at this time is to give people 6 months notice of the servers being shut off. If someone wants to take the job lot and host it somewhere at their risk I’d be open to that option.

 

If anyone has any thoughts let me know. If no one has any reservations or other options I’ll put this out to the wider mailing list shortly.

 

Cheers

 

Anthony

 

CC’d in Steve as I don’t know if he’s party to the UKHAS Tools mailing list.

 

 


<imagea1992d.PNG>

Anthony Stirk
Managing Director
T: 01274 550910
E: Anthon...@nevis.co.uk | W: http://www.nevis.co.uk
Nevis Computers is a limited company registered in England and Wales. Registered number: 3356647.
Registered office: York House, 16 Wool Gate, Cottingley Business Park, Bingley, West Yorkshire, BD16 1PE.

Emails may be monitored for the purposes of security and staff training.

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Mark Jessop

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Feb 15, 2021, 6:52:11 AM2/15/21
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Can we perhaps get a description of what the Habhub ecosystem contains at the moment?

I know of at least two VPSes - tiamat and kraken, though I think there are more. I don't really know what runs on what.

There are a range of services running:
- The main habitat database (an old version of CouchDB)
- All the bits that surround that database and insert / process data.
- The prediction systems, including the tawhiri downloader, the tawhiri predictor itself, and the 'old' predictor which is still the primary predictor for tracker.habhub.org
- The web interfaces themselves (tracker, habitat, predict)

What kind of resources are required to run all of this? 

There's also the issue that a lot of it was written years ago, and various libraries and things have moved on since then. I think the Python stuff is probably not a huge deal to port to a modern system, but the version of CouchDB is old, and I just tried and failed to get the tawhiri-downloader running on a modern system (though thats probably my lack of knowledge of ocaml/opam). Is there anything else in Habitat which is tied into old library/software versions?

Cheers,
Mark



Charles N Wyble

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Feb 15, 2021, 4:22:49 PM2/15/21
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Happy to provide a mirror in Canada at OVH , can provide a VM on our
dedicated server.

This is mission critical infrastructure (certainly for us at subo, our
partners at High Flight Network Operating Coop and many individuals
around the world) , and Suborbital Systems Development Company LLC is
happy to step in and assist however we can.


Charles Wyble

Founder/CEO Suborbital

818 280 7059

cha...@turnsys.com

Feel free to coordinate with me/others directly as needed, happy to help!

Mark Jessop

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Feb 15, 2021, 4:44:04 PM2/15/21
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What parts in particular are mission critical to you? The tracker? The predictor?

73
Mark

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Charles N Wyble

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Mar 1, 2021, 10:27:40 PM3/1/21
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Any update on this? Can I help in any way? Shall I spin up a couple virtual machines and provide wireguard access? Please let me know , we at Suborbital Systems would like to keep this moving and ensure continuity of operation for the community.

Anthony Stirk

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Mar 2, 2021, 3:36:46 AM3/2/21
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Morning Charles

 

My apologies for not responding. At the moment we have a plan in action. James Coxon is going to rebuild the platform on his newer servers and take it from there. Like I say there are three issues that need to be addressed age of the O/S, age of the hardware and the general maintainability of the platform. Moving to new servers should address 1&2.

 

Cheers


Anthony

 


Nevis

Anthony Stirk
Managing Director
T: 01274 550910
E: Anthon...@nevis.co.uk | W: http://www.nevis.co.uk
Nevis Computers is a limited company registered in England and Wales. Registered number: 3356647.
Registered office: York House, 16 Wool Gate, Cottingley Business Park, Bingley, West Yorkshire, BD16 1PE.

Emails may be monitored for the purposes of security and staff training.

Charles Wyble

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Mar 2, 2021, 7:41:32 AM3/2/21
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Is the platform in git somewhere , so that anyone can rebuild it ? 



——-
Charles N Wyble
Founder TSYS Group
Matrix: @Charlesnw:turnsys.com

From: ukhas...@googlegroups.com <ukhas...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Anthony Stirk <Anthon...@nevis.co.uk>
Sent: Tuesday, March 2, 2021 2:36:36 AM
To: ukhas...@googlegroups.com <ukhas...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: RE: [UKHAS Tools] Hab Hub Servers EOL ?
 

Anthony Stirk

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Mar 2, 2021, 8:19:22 AM3/2/21
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Hi Charles,

 

Yeah its all here but warning its complex and fiddly to set up (one of the issues).

 

http://habitat.habhub.org/

 

Cheers


Anthony

 


Nevis

Anthony Stirk
Managing Director
T: 01274 550910
E: Anthon...@nevis.co.uk | W: http://www.nevis.co.uk
Nevis Computers is a limited company registered in England and Wales. Registered number: 3356647.
Registered office: York House, 16 Wool Gate, Cottingley Business Park, Bingley, West Yorkshire, BD16 1PE.

Emails may be monitored for the purposes of security and staff training.

Mark Jessop

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Mar 2, 2021, 3:40:14 PM3/2/21
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It's worth clarifying this a bit, and we *really* need one of the original developers to chime in here and explain how the current system is operating. There's lots of little fiddly bits that are tying everything together, and I don't think the full extent of how everything talks is documented in any one place.

For example, while the Habitat DB setup is on Github (though it uses an old CouchDB version...), I'm not sure there's any documentation for the bits that sit in between it and the current tracker map (which *is* on github). There's a Postgres layer which is essentially caching the data from Habitat so it can be queried by the tracker - this is what provides datanew.php and predict.php.

Unfortunately pretty much all of this was written a long time ago, and there are a lot of dependencies which are now unavailable. As an example, I was trying to get the Tawhiri Downloader (https://github.com/cuspaceflight/tawhiri-downloader which downloads the GFS wind model used by the predictor) running on a more modern system, and gave up because I hit far too many OCaml dependency issues that I couldn't resolve..

73
Mark VK5QI

Charles N Wyble

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Feb 13, 2022, 11:43:21 PM2/13/22
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Do you have a log of the dependency errors you could paste bin?

Sorry to revive an old thread. I still would like to help modernize the HAB tool stack and make it (more) maintainable.

Mark Jessop

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Feb 14, 2022, 2:05:56 AM2/14/22
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The issues with tawhiri-downloader have already been resolved. 

Daniel Richman updated the dependencies in August 2021: https://github.com/cuspaceflight/tawhiri-downloader
We also now have a docker container builder here: https://github.com/projecthorus/tawhiri-downloader-container

It would still be nice to have a re-write of the downloader in something like Python, but what's there works for now.

73
Mark VK5QI

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