AJAX for Bugzilla

Bart wants to pay for AJAX in Bugzilla. If you think you can help him out, go have a look.

Personally, I would absolutely love to get some of that stuff working in Bugzilla. 🙂 I’m a big fan of clean user interfaces. Bugzilla has a legacy to clean up after though. There’s been a lot of UI work on Bugzilla in recent months, but there’s a ways to go yet.

My main rule for getting it contributed back to the Bugzilla project: Don’t replace functionality, only add to it. There’s a lot of people that use Bugzilla from text-based browsers or small devices, and we can’t break that. Make it really cool and easy to use if your browser can handle it, but make sure you can still get the job done (even if you have to jump through a few more hoops) on a less-capable browser.

Bugzilla 2.20 is out

Bugzilla 2.20 was released last night! Go get it!. Thus starts the 1-month countdown for comments prior to freezing for 2.22 (only a month because 2.20 was slightly late and we’re trying to catch up — the trunk has actually been open for a while).

Make sure to go read the status update as there’s a lot of new stuff going on with Bugzilla that will be pretty exciting.

One correction, if you already read the status update, is that we’re waiting a month after the 2.20 release before freezing for 2.22 (the status update originally stated 2 weeks, but that’s been corrected). So October 30th is the freeze date (only 45 days late) and the countdown timer on the right-hand side of my blog is correct.

I’ve had way less time than I’ve wanted to spend working with Bugzilla lately (and even less updating my blog). It’s great to have good people like Max Kanat-Alexander and Frédéric Buclin and the rest of the Bugzilla team staying on top of everything and giving me less to worry about. My congratulations to the entire Bugzilla team for an outstanding job with the release itself and dealing with all the last minute problems that always come up (thus the late release).

My involvement should be improving before too long, as I’m no longer the only sysadmin at Mozilla. The intern we had this summer is contracting part-time during the school year, there’ll be an additional full-timer starting in a week or two, and we still have at least one sysadmin position open that I’m sure will eventually be filled. Even with the new help it’ll take us a while to catch up, but it won’t be forever, and I can always look forward to that.

Firewall upgrade successful

Most of this was written by Myk, but since he doesn’t have a blog, I’m paraphrasing it and posting it here. 🙂

Our firewall upgrade at the Meer colocation facility this evening was successful. The upgrade caused 23 seconds of downtime while we switched firewalls and several minutes of slowness until we fixed a misconfigured firewall parameter. The new firewall (plus redundant failover firewall) is now up and running, and normal access to all services is restored.

We’ve been in the process of moving from one facility to another, and for the interim, there is a direct ethernet link between the two facilities, but behind our firewall. There are only 6 machines left at the old facility currently, and until tonight our traffic was still being routed there (and then across the cross-colo link to get to the other 50 or so servers at the new facility). The new firewalls we upgraded to are located at the new facility, so our Internet traffic now goes directly there, and only those 6 machines are still depending on the cross-colo link now.

Many thanks go to Alex Polvi, Joe Rhett (of meer), Myk Melez, and Chase Philips for their excellent work making the upgrade happen!

Potential Mozilla.org network outage Friday evening

We’re going to upgrade the firewall in our meer.net colocation facility this evening (Friday) at 6pm PDT (Sat 1am UTC). The upgrade affects many services, including Bugzilla, Bonsai, Tinderbox, LXR, CVS, mozilla.org mail, mozillafoundation.org mail, devmo, the wikis, IRC, and the mailing lists. We expect no more than a few seconds of downtime, but we’ll work for up to an hour to resolve unexpected problems before rolling back to the current firewall, so there may be up to an hour of downtime.

If you have any problems trying to reach any mozilla.org services after the changeover has occured, try first to find us on IRC at irc.mozilla.org #bmo, or if the IRC server is unreachable, mail me at justdave@bugzilla.org (which isn’t handled on mozilla.org’s network).