Sage Notebook shutdown

[William Stein]

Hi Sage Developers,

We've posted the following message on the http://sagenb.org site:

"This Sage notebook server will be shut down April 17, 2015. Please
download any work you'd like to preserve before then. You can download
a zip archive of all of your active worksheets by clicking the
"Download All Active" link at the top left of your worksheet listing
page. We encourage users to migrate to SageMathCloud, the next
generation web interface for Sage. You can upload Sage worksheets or a
zip archive of downloaded worksheets to SageMathCloud to migrate your
worksheets to SageMathCloud."

The reasons for *me* personally not running sagenb.org are many,
including liability, time, etc. In fact, for the past few years
Jason Grout was doing all administration of sagenb.org, but he's no
longer available to do that. I can't run it anymore, and I think
from a security point of view it is terrifying to run one completely
publicly. That said...

... if there were somebody reputable who wanted to setup, manage and
run a big public sage notebook instance, open to the world, I would be
happy to point the sagenb.org DNS at it and also give them all the
files (note -- part of the motivation for the April 17 deadline is
that Google is shutting down the authentication system sagenb uses).
They would, of course, have to provide the compute, since I'm
nervous continuing to run this at Univ of Washington.

sagenb.org currently takes less than 1TB of disk space and runs on
exactly one 24-core Sun computer with 128GB of RAM, which was
purchased using an NSF grant over 6 years ago.

-- William

--
William (http://wstein.org)

[kcrisman]

 

Is there any use case for sagenb.org, or a potential replacement, that isn't covered by SageMathCloud?

A public notebook server gives people an opportunity to try out sage with exactly the interface they would be able to have with a local install. The interface provided by SageMathCloud is hard to replicate otherwise.

Good point, though the sagenb.org version of Sage is fairly old.

(And as I've said before, for all SMC's interesting traits, the interface is still not really as simple as sagenb's.) 

[Andrey Novoseltsev]

On Thursday, 26 March 2015 13:49:50 UTC-6, Nils Bruin wrote:

On Thursday, March 26, 2015 at 12:45:20 PM UTC-7, Christopher Swenson wrote:

Is there any use case for sagenb.org, or a potential replacement, that isn't covered by SageMathCloud?

A public notebook server gives people an opportunity to try out sage with exactly the interface they would be able to have with a local install. The interface provided by SageMathCloud is hard to replicate otherwise.

That's actually quite a serious problem with SMC that I didn't think much about before, although it surely has been mentioned by others: new users of Sage introduced to it via SMC are quite locked in since they cannot use their worksheets without SMC, even though they can download them, and they can't even start from scratch on a local installation without learning a new interface first, with all the differences between interact and plotting implementations. These users are also likely to lack knowledge necessary for writing/improving conversion scripts...

[William Stein]

1. This seems like a good place to advertise the GSoC project "Create
a personal GPL-licensed version of SageMathCloud
(https://cloud.sagemath.com) that is included with every copy of
Sage.", which nobody applied for (deadline tomorrow?):

http://wiki.sagemath.org/GSoC/2015#SageMathCloud

This will get done one way or another eventually, but I can't make it
my top priority right now.

2. The following comment isn't necessarily very important in the
context of our discussion about sagenb, but it's worth making. I
think (based on data not just making things up) that most users of SMC
are unlikely to ever consider using Sage outside SMC. This is because
the majority of SMC users (maybe 90%?) are students in courses who are
being asked to use it for that one class by their instructor. Then
there's people collaborating on a research project and using the
latex/coding/markdown/ipython notebook functionality of SMC, but not
Sage itself much. There are some traditional research-oriented core
Sage users using SMC, but they are definitely in the minority.

3. Another relevant data point: last week there were 5,455 "returning
users" of SageMathCloud versus 768 "returning users" of sagenb.org.

William

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--
William (http://wstein.org)

[kcrisman]

2. The following comment isn't necessarily very important in the
context of our discussion about sagenb, but it's worth making.  I
think (based on data not just making things up) that most users of SMC
are unlikely to ever consider using Sage outside SMC.  This is because
the majority of SMC users (maybe 90%?) are students in courses who are
being asked to use it for that one class by their instructor.  Then
there's people collaborating on a research project and using the
latex/coding/markdown/ipython notebook functionality of SMC, but not
Sage itself much.  There are some traditional research-oriented core
Sage users using SMC, but they are definitely in the minority.

But... shouldn't we *want* these users to eventually download Sage? 

[Kovács Zoltán]

Hi William,

Thank you for your great work on Sage!

I used to upload supplementary materials for research papers to sagenb.org and I cited them also.

E.g. www.sagenb.org/home/pub/4299 is a normal citation in one of my papers published back in 2012.

Now this link reports "Public worksheets are currently disabled.", so this worksheet cannot be downloaded by a normal visitor any longer. (Since when?)

Maybe it would be fine to find a way to redirect such materials to a different location (perhaps to SMC).

Thank you,

best regards,

Zoltan

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Zoltán Kovács
GeoGebra | Software Developer
www.geogebra.org

[William Stein]

On Mon, Mar 30, 2015 at 9:55 PM, Kovács Zoltán <zol...@geogebra.org> wrote:
> Hi William,
>
> Thank you for your great work on Sage!
>
> I used to upload supplementary materials for research papers to sagenb.org
> and I cited them also.
> E.g. www.sagenb.org/home/pub/4299 is a normal citation in one of my papers
> published back in 2012.
> Now this link reports "Public worksheets are currently disabled.", so this
> worksheet cannot be downloaded by a normal visitor any longer.
> (Since when?)

Since 2012. The university of washington regularly completely banned
network access for sagenb as a result of spammers/crackers posting bad
content as published worksheets. I had no choice but to disable the
feature.

The arxiv or github is a better place to upload supplementary
materials for research papers right now.

> Maybe it would be fine to find a way to redirect such materials to a
> different location (perhaps to SMC).

Since the pub stuff has been disabled for many years already, I don't
plan to redirect it now.

William (http://wstein.org)