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SourceForge Outage Affecting Downloads (Feb 28 - Mar 4, 2018)

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March 2, 2018 - 5:42pm
#1
John T. Haller
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SourceForge Outage Affecting Downloads (Feb 28 - Mar 4, 2018)

There was an ongoing outage at SourceForge which is affecting some downloads both from our website and the PortableApps.com Platform. As of 10:30am NY time on Mar 4 it appears to finally be fully resolved.

Background

Our open source software as well as our open source live installers that download freeware are currently hosted at SourceForge. We have hosted with SourceForge since the early days of PortableApps.com through three owners of their site. They provide free bandwidth for millions of app downloads both via the browser (where they show ads) and via the PortableApps.com Platform (which downloads directly without ads).

Recent Outages

In the past two weeks there have been three significant outages of SourceForge's download services. The first was due to a datacenter move. The second, earlier in the week, was due to distributed denial of service attack (DDoS). This current multi-day outage which appears to have begun on Feb 28 is due to an unknown cause. There is currently no ETA or explanation. No details have been posted to the SFNet_ops Twitter feed and a full day will go by without updates.

Freeware and Publisher-hosted apps unaffected

Our self-hosted freeware apps as well as publisher-hosted freeware and open source apps are unaffected by this outage (except for publishers hosting on SourceForge, of course).

Current Mitigation

Downloads of the PortableApps.com Platform for both new and existing users have been switched to our own servers that host our freeware offerings. I'm currently working to move the most popular open source apps to a backup download from the same location.

Longterm Mitigation

I'm working on configuring a hot backup solution for use during the current outage as well as future outages. I'm also exploring self-hosting our open source downloads as well as two other providers for free open source downloads. More details will be made public as they are available. We're exploring possible paid features of the PortableApps.com Platform and site that would help to cover a more robust download infrastructure as well.

My personal apologies for the inconvenience in your portable app-ing adventures. And thanks from all of us at PortableApps.com for your patience during this time.

Sincerely
John T. Haller
PortableApps.com Lead Developer

UPDATE: Continuing into Mar 3, SourceForge posted a few hours ago that there is still no ETA

UPDATE (Mar 3): Most of the open source apps in our top 50 most popular apps are now available within the PortableApps.com Platform. Some are available on-site as well with the rest to follow shortly.

UPDATE (Late Mar 3 / Early Mar 4): All downloads should be working again now that SourceForge has corrected their issues. We're continuing to monitor. Our apologies again for the inconvenience. And thank you for your patience and support!

UPDATE (Morning Mar 4): Direct downloads are still failing. We're continuing to monitor and move files.

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March 2, 2018 - 7:05pm
John T. Haller
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New Hosting Testing

I'm starting to make apps available under an updated hosting solution similar to how we host our freeware for users to test before rolling this out more widely. It's using a new page generation routine for the app homepages as well. I've started with our most popular apps that don't require a ton of page engineering changes for testing purposes as well as testing localized apps (separate downloads per language) and online installer listings specifically.

Apps Now Available On Site and in the PortableApps.com Platform

These downloads should work from the standard app homepage URL's download button as well as from within the PortableApps.com Platform

7-Zip Portable
Firefox Portable (Stable)
Google Chrome Portable (Stable)
McAfee Stinger Portable
PortableApps.com Platform
PortableApps.com Platform Beta

Apps Now Available in the PortableApps.com Platform

These apps will work as new or updated installs in the PortableApps.com Platform

Apache OpenOffice
Audacity
calibre
CDEx
ClamWin
FileZilla
FocusWriter
GIMP
Google Chrome Beta
Google Chrome Dev
Google Chrome 64 Test
GPG Plugin
jPortable
jPortable64
KeePass
PeaZip
PortableApps.com Installer
PortableApps.com Launcher
Thunderbird
uTorrent
VLC

Please let me know if this works as expected for you in the browser and in the platform for your preferred languages.

Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!

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March 3, 2018 - 10:07am
Drazick
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Testing

I tested on a computer which hasn't been able to update in the last 3 days.

It managed to update McAfee Stinger Portable.
Other updates are different than the 3 you listed above hence those are still failing.

Thank You.

P. S.
Is there an option to use GitHub?
They allow downloading the releases directly from their servers, don't they?

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March 3, 2018 - 9:31am
(Reply to #3)
John T. Haller
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Not Really Their Target

github is more designed for projects with code that also do binary releases. So, it'd be a fit for the platform, installer, launcher, etc. It isn't designed for projects with tons of different binary releases with differing licenses. And it doesn't offer SFTP or similar uploading, just in-browser, which is less than ideal.

Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!

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March 3, 2018 - 12:53pm
(Reply to #4)
Jim Oblak
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GitHub has been affected by

GitHub has been affected by DoS in the past few days as well. It's odd that so much open source material is being attacked in this way.

https://www.wired.com/story/github-ddos-memcached/

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March 3, 2018 - 1:33pm
(Reply to #5)
Drazick
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Ability to Survive

Indeed both were attacked.
Yet their ability to supply service while / after the attack is significantly different.

GitHub, probably, has better system and more resources.

Anyhow, as John wrote, they need different features than offered by GitHub hence it is not relevant.

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March 3, 2018 - 11:37am
Bart.S
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MuseScore Portable

The MuseScore team is serving the portable version from OSUOSL too.
See #.

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March 3, 2018 - 6:51pm
ki4jgt
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Using Bittorrent

I've always thought it would be interesting if Ubuntu's repositories linked to torrent files of the packages they hosted. Then users could share server loads. Their servers are already hosting the files to begin with, so it's not like it'd cost them more bandwidth. I don't know if it'd work for you guys but it would be an interesting approach if something like this were to happen again.

WebTorrent (JS library) could be used to download the files in the browser while a server could be coded so that anyone could build a mirror host with just a VPS. The server would have to be WebTorrent-capable as this would ensure browser compatibility. The main platform could just download packages via the torrent URLs.

EDIT:

The main platform could use LibTorrent as the servers would be Webtorrent and torrent compliant. They'd be the bridge between the platform and the web.

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March 3, 2018 - 11:41pm
(Reply to #8)
John T. Haller
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Torrent = Blocked

If we incorporate torrent abilities into the platform proper, a ton of places will outright block its use. Plus, we need to run a main server to serve all the torrents and base files anyway.

Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!

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March 4, 2018 - 2:24am
(Reply to #9)
ki4jgt
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First point well made and on

First point well made and on that note, I dismiss the idea but on the second point:

I'm assuming you serve a central repository manifest (assuming that's what loads when the platform gets the list of apps). If not, disregard this because I haven't looked at the code and don't know what I'm talking about. When I said to write a server, I meant to write one which was distributable to anyone who wanted a copy. They could then put it on their own server/home computer. It'd work like this:

1) It'd download the central manifest file (manifest containing torrent URLs).
2) It'd download all the apps from said file (or the admin could choose which apps) from other servers who were already seeding.

Then it would be a seed for the app in question. Once the files were on a number of mirror servers, there'd be no need for a central server and the initial seeding could be done from a personal computer.

That being said, I didn't consider blocked torrents. Perhaps just setting up mirror servers and listing them in the manifest would suffice. I mean, there are tons of mirror servers for Linux software. They're hosted by universities and agencies and trusted third-parties. I don't know, I love this software though and it's literally saved my butt this week after my laptop hard drive died.

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March 4, 2018 - 12:11am
John T. Haller
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Top 50 Available In Platform

The affected open source apps in our top 50 most downloaded apps in the last month are now available within the PortableApps.com Platform with our updated hosting. Some of these are available on site with the rest to follow shortly. You can follow along in the first comment at the top of this page.

Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!

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March 4, 2018 - 12:15am
John T. Haller
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SourceForge Back Online

SourceForge is back online as of an hour ago. I'm continuing to test actual downloads to ensure they're working. All downloads should be working again now that SourceForge has corrected their issues. We're continuing to monitor. Our apologies again for the inconvenience. And thank you for your patience and support!

Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!

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March 4, 2018 - 7:50am
thollenberg
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Not yet functional

From here (The Netherlands) the downloads are not working yet.

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March 4, 2018 - 8:16am
John T. Haller
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Downloads Still Failing

It appears that downloads in the form "http://downloads.sourceforge.net/portableapps/2048Portable_2.2_English.p..." and similar are still failing via direct download (Wget, platform, and similar).

And they're continuing to fail via the website as well. It seems nothing is resolved as far as we're concerned.

Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!

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March 4, 2018 - 8:49am
(Reply to #14)
Chronos
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F.Y.I.

At this time (20180304-0838H Montreal time), VLC and InfraRecorder still do not update.
Everything else who required updating, (about 10 apps), has updated properly.

At this moment, I can live with that.

Good luck with bringing back things to normal.

And Thank you very much.

André Fortin, prof. eng.
Portable apps user

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March 4, 2018 - 10:32am
John T. Haller
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Resolved

SourceForge has resolved the remaining download issues. We have confirmed that downloads via the site and the platform are working as expected. Thank you again for your patience.

Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!

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March 4, 2018 - 10:42am
(Reply to #16)
JeremyNicoll
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VLC download failed

I just got a 404 using the framework installer to update VLC. If I transcribed the error message correctly,I think it said:

Download Error: File Not Found (404) on file
http://portableapps.com/redirect/?s=p&a=VLCPortable&t=http%3A%
2F%2Fdownload3.portableapps.com%2Fportableapps%2FVLCPortable
%2FVLCPortable_3.0.0.paf.exe

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March 4, 2018 - 11:51am
(Reply to #17)
John T. Haller
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Separate Issue

That was a separate issue due to VLC 3.0.1 being on our download servers. It's been resolved if you check again.

Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!

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March 4, 2018 - 1:01pm
(Reply to #18)
JeremyNicoll
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I've successfully updated VLC

I've successfully updated VLC to 3.0.1 now, thank-you. But, how did the manifest (if that's what it's called) that the updater grabbed think that 3.0.0 was the current version if 3.0.1 had superseded it?

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March 4, 2018 - 2:55pm
(Reply to #19)
John T. Haller
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SourceForge

SourceForge had 3.0.0 but 3.0.1 has been done for 3 days awaiting the issues to be fixed. When I switched it to our updated hosting, I uploaded 3.0.1 but the updater database still referenced 3.0.0 which it couldn't find in the new hosting.

Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!

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March 4, 2018 - 3:17pm
(Reply to #20)
JeremyNicoll
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Thanks! That makes sense.

Thanks! That makes sense.

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March 4, 2018 - 12:16pm
kensai
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still not 100% reachable

still not 100% reachable

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March 4, 2018 - 12:52pm
(Reply to #22)
John T. Haller
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Files or Mirror?

Is it a specific file or mirror? Downloads are working in my testing here.

Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!

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March 4, 2018 - 4:17pm
(Reply to #23)
kensai
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i went through the normal

i went through the normal update via sub menu; i can not replicate this, because in the meantime, i managed to piece updates together using multiple tries.

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April 19, 2018 - 5:23am
jonmo
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scandal

Just a few days ago, the below article became a Hacker News topic.
I think Portableapps will have to consider leaving SF.net.

SourceForge Hiding Fact that They Have Lost the Latest Revision of SVN
https://medium.com/@jonykatz/sourceforge-hiding-fact-that-they-have-lost...

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