[sword-devel] Downgrading eBible.org ftp repository service; upgrading https service

[Kahunapule Michael Johnson]

Greetings from Maui!

tldr: upgrade your Sword apps to always use https instead of http or ftp to access repositories ASAP.

As many of you are probably aware, the last week was not a model of reliability for the eBible.org repository, or for the rest of the eBible.org site. On the 19th of February, the eBible.org server hardware failed. Exactly what failure, I don't know, because it was in a data center over 4,000 miles from my house. I just knew that it wouldn't talk to me in any of the 3 ways I can normally access the leased dedicated server. No worries, because I have a fast backup, right? I allocated a new dedicated server 
from the same company (Ionos) and attempted to restore from a backup. That failed with about 80 error messages. Next plan: restore from a mirror image of the server in my home office. That actually worked, but it took more than 3 days to get all of the data there (about 300 GBytes), plus time to get all of the configuration right. In the mean time, my other leased server (the one that didn't crash, hosting 24 other sites) gave early warning signs that it was not going to be in service much longer. Then 
everything worked except that I forgot a couple of tweaks I had to do to make the ftp server compatible with Sword. I fixed that, and things were still not OK. EBible.org availability kept going up and down like a yo-yo, mostly because the remote control software I was using was not designed to handle multiple IP addresses per server and anonymous ftp sites. Also, the cost of allocating multiple IP v4 addresses has gone up. Anonymous ftp is pretty much obsolete. I will be dropping it, but slowly.

I am upgrading eBible.org (and my other sites) to have a hot standby server, with both primary and standby servers in a data center with high reliability power and fast Internet connections. Normally, the load will be split between the two with some sites on one, and some on the other. If one fails, I can switch the DNS (with a short TTL) to the other in less than an hour after I notice the problem and am in a position to do anything about it. Then I can recover or replace the dead server, as appropriate, 
with data from the working server. (If two die, then I'm back to restoring from a very long distance and a slower Internet connection, again.) The good news is that this will provide higher availability for the https repository on eBible.org. The bad news is that I'm no longer going to try to swim upstream by maintaining a separate IP v4 address for ftp.ebible.org on those servers. This means that I can't use Plesk to maintain an anonymous ftp service on eBible.org, any more, reliably. (I have a manual hack 
in place that works for now, but it is not guaranteed to keep working.) For now, ftp.ebible.org points to another machine in a nice data center that just does anonymous ftp for the sword repository, but that is a rather expensive solution for an obsolete protocol, and I'll be replacing that with an ftp server in my home office, meaning that I don't have to pay nearly as much to operate it. It also means that whenever my Internet goes down, which it does whenever Hawaiian Electric's service goes down, even 
though I have battery backups, that service will go down. Extended outages can and do happen on this island. Internet could also go down if an undersea cable gets cut. My home internet connection is about 10% of the speed of the data center's Internet connection, so that might be noticeable with heavy use.

In other words, the availability and reliability of the eBible.org https Sword repository should be improving. The anonymous ftp Sword repository at ftp.ebible.org will become less reliable, and will eventually be discontinued. The ftp server at eBible.org (not ftp.eBible.org) actually works right now, but could stop working at any time, probably associated with a software upgrade or security patch or with a server migration. The best address to use for anonymous ftp access to the Sword repository is 
ftp.eBible.org.

Any questions?