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

Thu Feb 27 03:03:14 EST 2025

Hi Michael,

Does anything need to be changed here?
[Official and Affiliated Module Repositories - CrossWire Bible Society](https://wiki.crosswire.org/Official_and_Affiliated_Module_Repositories#eBible.org)

Everyone: Except for the note under AndBibleExtra, there's no mention of https !
Do we need to make any wider changes to be future proof?

Best regards,

David

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On Thursday, February 27th, 2025 at 7:13 AM, Michael Johnson <kahunapule at eBible.org> wrote:

> On 2/26/25 17:12, Greg Hellings wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Feb 26, 2025, 7:33 PM Kahunapule Michael Johnson <kahunapule at ebible.org> wrote:
>>
>>> Greetings from Maui!
>>>
>>> tldr: upgrade your Sword apps to always use https instead of http or ftp to access repositories ASAP.
>>
>> While technically any network acess other than anonymous FTP support is optionally supported only with a build dep, in reality there is no need to support anything other than HTTPS. Every Linux distribution, and Windows build of note has libcurl, the Brew version is also built against it, and the HTTP(S) support was added because mobile often blocks FTP.
>>
>> So you're basically completely safe.
>
> Awesome!
>
>>> 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.
>>
>> A Herculean effort, but I'm glad for you that your recovery was successful! I'm curious why you need 4 separate addresses? What is the need, there?
>
> So far, I have been using Plesk to set up virtual hosts. I have 25 sites (and some aliases for those), some of which are much more important than others. Plesk lets me share one IP address with all sites except any site that has an anonymous ftp service associated with it. The only site I have that has an anonymous ftp service associated with it, of course, is the ftp.eBible.org Sword repository. So I had to assign 2 IP version 4 addresses to the server. For a long time, I was running 2 servers with every site on them for redundancy. I had stopped doing that because the sites grew too large for one of the servers I was renting, and I thought I had a workable fast backup/restore plan, unlike when I had extremely slow and expensive Internet in Papua New Guinea. (I have some serious space in audio and video Bibles.) So that is 2 servers x 2 IP addresses = 4 IP addresses. But that configuration was unstable, so I went to just one IP address per server by fighting my old ally, Plesk, using manual ProFTP configuration (and a cron job to slap my configuration back whenever Plesk rewrites it). That is not a really good long-term solution, though.
>
>> ...
>> Would you like a hand building up some DR or deployment automation so you can avoid needing to remember settings? IT automation is one of my primary skillsets, so if you'd like any sort of help setting it up, let me know. For instance, it's not too hard to put together automation scripts to run on a provisioned box to stand up the web server, ftp server, etc so that you don't need to manually edit files and the like.
>
> That would be useful. That could be a way to escape my dependence on and fight with Plesk.
>
>> Alternatively, have you considered an alternative way to host the data? You could probably build a Container image with all the files in it and host that on something like Amazon Container Service or any of the many cloud Kubernetes hosts around. A container image would also make it easy for someone to grab the whole collection and make it available in an offline context the way they can with the old CD images Troy used to distribute.
>
> I have looked at alternatives in the past, but it may be worth looking again. When I last looked, AWS was more expensive at my traffic levels and site counts than using a rented dedicated server. Another alternative might be hosting at my house when (if?) Hawaiian Telephone makes good on its promise to bring fiber Internet to my neighborhood. (It is actually available about a half mile away, right now, but I haven't seen them working on it around here.)
>
>> Or even put the files into an object storage container if you're dedicated to eliminating FTP access eventually. With just a small shell script you can push the needed files and their indexes into an S3, Ceph, etc object storage service and then you wouldn't need to run a dedicated server with them to manage uptime. All of those services offer ways to expose the files over HTTPS.
>>
>> As I said on Facebook, I'm happy to lend a hand if there's anything I can do to help smooth your infrastructure! I can even host an emergency mirror if need be, as I have pretty reliable Internet and electric when my neighbors don't drive into the electric poles. This year I'm dedicating some of my time to working on home electric backups!
>
> Thank you, Greg. I may take you up on that...
>
> --
>
> Peace,
> Michael Johnson
> 26 HIWALANI LOOP • MAKAWAO HI 96768-8747 • USA
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