csmuk

Why?

POWER is really nice. I mean properly awesome, but no one seems to use it these days. Even our ex-AIX financial orgs have gone x64 and a lot to windows...

That's what I thought when we tried to move one of our projects to CMake. By the second platform, we'd given up.

Not only that, some of it doesn't actually work properly and it refuses to compile itself on HPUX.

I don't build for windows so that's moot for me. Well I do but not C.

I've quite happily built makefiles that work on Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris and HP/UX that aren't fragile or laborious. It just takes appropriate knowledge of the platforms. I've built some stuff on OSX (small SDL project) and it wasn't too obtuse apart from some paths.

CMake, much as all of these things, works up to a point at which point it tries desperately to kill you at every available opportunity.

Another dependency here but I use APR pools. You can keep your allocations to a defined scope then which makes free'ing easy and you can also have some guarantees inside the pool that it will have some bytes to give you. Less error checking and expensive malloc'ing required inside critical sections then.

I think in this case, unlike say a network server, failures are not the end of the world. Those particular checks are quite useful though when it comes to debugging as working out where that pointer got shafted isn't all that easy once you've stepped past it so failing early is a good plan.

Either that or it's operating how I do which is putting asserts everywhere and when it's stable, removing them. I do this with macros though.

This.

CMake is another barrier to entry.

what happened to a nice simple makefile? Been using just standard makefiles for literally 20 years.

The only thing I do is put a checkdeps dependency on which tests for the presence of dependencies, like autoconf but without the eye poking. Have built everything from small network servers to Motif behemoths doing only that.

I think the site is good. I have no problem with the technology ultimately but to put a fine point on it, I'm not paying the government lots of money to invent their own infrastructure components when perfectly good ones exist already.

The same applies to people working under me.

Nearly 4 duck houses though!

That made me laugh and I've upvoted you for that, but no, it's serious.

Various governments are already throwing money at Open Document Foundation (France, Germany come to mind) to support LibreOffice so why shouldn't we throw a few quid at nginx/apache?

Or should we go and write our own office suite?

Possible. Some good thoughts there.

Allowing non-technical users access to routes is a disaster waiting to happen. The whole thing should have a QA process around it. I'm genuinely surprised it's being run like this.

The biggest point of failure is always humans and you're basically handing them a gun there.

None of them although close.

You don't have to take my opinion seriously. I could work in Tescos and be splurging false information out on the Internet. I could be an elaborate hoax!

However, please don't write off people as "just some enterprise business that isn't exactly known for its technical competence" because we all know that startups get it right all the time as well...

As for do I know versus do I think, there is the third option do others know and that is all that is important when it comes to getting paid...

I don't need to add leverage to the conversation by mentioning my employer. My arguments have merit on their own.

It will come with proportionately less cost initially and over time though which is the issue.

Efficiency is a major problem in government. Government should have a low financial impact on society where possible. A government entering a market with an already solved problem is wasteful at best. If they'd contributed time to Nginx or mod_proxy then they would have a net positive social effect.

But they didn't. They built an inferior product at great cost to the taxpayer.

That's a silly argument. I'd rather not be pissing an estimated £6400+maintenance up the wall on a project which could have been realised with off the shelf technology.

Just because the organisation uses open-source software doesn't excuse them from public and professional scrutiny.

An MP spending £1645 on a duck house under expenses got a lot more attention than this little bit of waste. Just redressing the balance.

No we're just handling that 60 million people's mortgages, insurance, financial status, financial history, legal and personal data instead...

2 front end nginx boxes s01-s02:

1. take s01 out of pool.

2. migrate config on s01 to new config.

3. put s01 back in pool.

4. take s02 out of pool

5. migrate config on s02 to new config.

6. put s02 back in pool.

Ansible can handle this quite happily. Scales up to any number of boxes. For an (n-1)/n capacity reduction during deployment.

I've got a 450k apache config somewhere that takes <1 second to reload so I don't think that's a major issue.

Also if you have THAT much config, something is wrong with your information architecture (see my other points).

Oh definitely agree. I'm not dissing the site itself which is marvellous so far, but the technology churn is very concerning.

No but updating static routes via puppet/ansible and reloading is a piece of piss.

If your site is volatile enough that the routing needs to change that often then there is something wrong either with your information architecture or your development process.

Actually they're using the wrong tools for the job because they're having to rewrite bits regularly in different tech. There is obviously no evaluation taking place.

Establishing technical standards and homogenity is important on projects of this scale.

They're incredibly easy to build. I notice you use puppet. That's enough tooling to push configuration out and restart services for nginx or apache+mod_proxy. You can break configuration out into separate files per agency if you need to.

Varnish is different as that requires restarting.

We do the same with commercial kit (Riverbed) with over 140 HTTP application endpoints and that is higher friction than the equivalent setup yet we manage it with a mere 1 person...

Deployment is a solved problem. No offense but you're not Google!

I actually read that and thought nginx/mod_proxy.

Looks like they didn't actually try it or know about it which is worrying.

Either that or it was more interesting to do it in Go which is not a valid reason in a taxpayer funded site.

Agree entirely there!

However it doesn't excuse people working on a web site funded by the taxpayer using it as a technology playground.

Yep I understand that.

We publish several huge legacy applications, several huge new applications, several integrations, public web site, documentation, online support. A mere 80-100 million HTTP transactions a day.

Not once have we built something to do it all.

Not impressed.

I have nothing against Go (in fact I like it) but they seem to have built GOV.UK with every damn bit of technology there is available. I've seen Varnish, Go, Ruby, Python, Scala, Java, Mongo, MySQL, nginx, rails, sinatra, Django and PILES of Not Invented Here.

Also I'm not sure it's a great use of public money to build stuff like this when they should have nginx/apache up front and some configuration.

In fact this whole thing stinks of crappy information architecture resulting in a massive front end router hack that they did in Scala, binned and moved to Varnish, then binned and moved to Go.

This is not one "cohesive" web front end. It's a rat's nest and an increasingly expensive one.

Yeah I noticed that on 9.1. I tried it on one of our "monster" 48 core boxes and it was pretty good with some sysctl poking.

Waiting for 10 before serious evaluation starts when pkgng is default. That and freebsd-update pretty much nail it then for me.

Agree entirely but that would go against the state's current policy of limiting press freedom. They're already issuing warnings and roughing up editors. One step forward and we're there. To be honest we won't know if we're there when we are, if we're not already. A lot goes on behind the scenes that we don't see but probably should.

Our government plainly works on the principle of: better to ask for forgiveness than permission.

Inquiries are all lead by alumni of the same organisations as the politicians so it's hardly worth it. Plus they'll probably seal the verdicts.

Best option we have is to take the information from the government and publish it without the politicians or the paper's involvement.

Rather an honest criminal than a politician or a newsman.

Never had a CPU go on me.

RAM yes, PROMs yes, CMOS batteries yes, PSUs yes, drives yes.

They're probably the most reliable bit of a computer.

Before the revelations appeared, these companies did little to fight it. There are ways of acting against it proactively without breaking any NDA's and laws.

Only when confidence in their business declines because people found out exactly how complicit they'd been, they decide to do something about it.

We know where the priorities really are. In this case it's a publicity thing. They've been caught with their pants down.

If there's no source code or it's"cloud" based then I refuse to do business now.

Spot on. This and APR make stuff a lot simpler. Have used pool allocation on a number of projects.