Disruption of CVS services

[Jason Cater]

Greetings, everyone.

As you may have noticed, GNUe's CVS repository has either been very slow
or completely inaccessible during the last week.

We use the Free Software Foundation's savannah.gnu.org service for CVS.
Unfortunately, a project has listed savannah.gnu.org in mldonkey's server
list. mldonkey is a distributed p2p client. This is causing GNU's project
server to be depleted of resources, causing extreme slowness and
instability. During the past week, it was not uncommon for a CVS update to
take 4-5 hours.

Unfortunately, there is not much more we or the volunteers at FSF can do
to remedy this situation.  We will most likely have to wait until people
remove savannah from their servers file. Also, given the distributed
nature of the client, it is not as simple as blocking a range of IP
addresses to stop this madness.

Please bear with us until this is resolved. Also, please do not complain
to the savannah hackers, as they are fully aware of the problem.

The announcement from savannah.gnu.org is below:

      Server exhausted, mldonkey clients charged
      ------------------------------------------

      The Savannah server is currently exhausted because hundred of
      mldonkey clients are trying to download differents files as
      servers-list or motd (server.met, motd.html, motd.conf, peers.ocl).

      Despite the fact that we now fordib access to this kind of data,
      it still creates tons of http connections and generates lot of CPU
      usage.

      Please keep in mind that Savannah is a free software *development*
      tool, not a part of a p2p network. Offering data to be downloaded
      which is neither documentation or software is unacceptable here.

      If you use a software like mldonkey, please configure it to stop
      looking for these files here - or shut it down if it's not
      configurable.

      If you are member of a project creating such troubles (mldonkey
      frontend or whatever), please remove this "feature".

      If you notice similar "feature" in an another software hosted on
      Savannah, please tell us at address@hidden

You can still access our nightly CVS snapshots from

     http://www.gnuenterprise.org/downloads/snapshots/

Make note of the file sizes. Any archives that are only 1k or so in size
were not created properly (due to, of course, this service distruption.)
Most of the nightly snapshots are happening correctly, but an occasional 
one will time out. 

Thanks,

Jason Cater
GNU Enterprise