CIA.vc service is down indefinitely
For those who haven’t seen it: CIA.vc is a web service I started about 8 years ago, as a way of Open Source projects tracking code changes in real-time over the web and IRC.
This is probably going to come as a surprise to most of you reading this, but today I’ve taken the CIA.vc service down indefinitely.
Update 2011-05-11: Wow, that was quick. Merely hours after this announcement, CIA is already in the process of being transferred to new ownership. The team at Atheme.org have volunteered to take on maintenance, hosting, and future development, and the future of CIA is actually looking pretty bright right now! I’ll have more updates later.
Update 2011-05-12: As of this morning the service is back up and running, now in the hands of the Atheme.org team. They’ll be ironing out wrinkles for a while now I’m sure, but the service is up and your existing accounts and bots should resume functioning. Congrats on the fast work, guys!
CIA had a good run, and I’ve really enjoyed the opportunity to create a project that the open source community as a whole received some benefit from. When I created the first CIA bot in May of 2003, it was just a quick hack for a single project I worked on, and I had no idea it would take off so quickly. Since then, it’s been rewritten a few times, grown massively, and become almost iconic in some circles.
However, a lot has changed in my life in the mean time. When I started the project, I was a college student with plenty of free time. Since then, I’ve had amazing amounts of Real Life occur, and my time for ongoing maintenance has dwindled. I am in debt to Karsten Behrmann for taking over a baseline level of maintenance for the last couple years, but unfortunately the project has stagnated. I frankly never wanted to manage a large web service, and as soon as CIA reached the scale it’s at now, I was hoping it would be taken over by a community of volunteers, or by a corporation. We’ve had some help from volunteers, and SourceForge.net has always been interested in the project. But there’s never been a critical mass of involvement. When I was working on CIA, I was pulling most of the weight, and since then it’s really just been on life support.
And as much as I loved the project when it was new and fresh, I hate to see it limp along like this. I’ve asked many people if they would want to help improve the service, and it’s really hard to find motivated individuals when the current service is good enough for most people’s needs.
So, I’ve decided to take the server down. There are many other projects which overlap somewhat with CIA’s feature set, so it’s possible that CIA’s users will find these projects sufficient and that will be the end. Or perhaps a new project will spring up to fill the vacuum. Or perhaps one of you will want to continue where I left off— improve the current service’s codebase, and build a real community around it.
Unfortunately, I really can’t be a part of this process. I have too much else going on in my life, and my interest in the project has long since been drained.
In the event that one of you are indeed serious about re-starting CIA with an active community, I’m preserving the database from the current server. I will be willing to transfer that, as well as the rights to the domain name CIA.vc, to a new owner only in the event that they’ve created a community of administrators and developers who can act as sustainable caretakers for the project. Additionally I have a friend who’s volunteered hardware and bandwidth to host such a site.
But I’m really hoping the community will re-form to fit the current state of the Internet. A lot has changed since 2003, especially in the area of web services for open source development. We have Ohloh, Github, and Twitter. It’s a new world, and we need new tools.
Resources:
- CIA.vc on Google Code
- Inside CIA document, including a brief history of the project
- How CIA Works document, describing the service’s internal architecture
Map of CIA’s Architecture:
Thank you.
Thanks for all your work maintaining this over the years. It was an awesome service, but obviously a lot to maintain (time-wise and financially, I gather). Hope somebody takes this up again. It was great for instant notification of what was happening on Review Board.
What were CIA’s requirements, in terms of bandwidth and CPU and cost and maintenance time and all that?
Thanks
Last time I looked, the bandwidth requirements were roughly 256 kb/s at 95th percentile. It was running on a virtual machine with 384MB RAM, a single Pentium 4, and 20GB of disk. So, the system requirements were pretty modest. I was running it on a relatively ancient colo server.
Personally, I’m trying to get rid of the colo server- it’s kind of overpriced, and I don’t need it for much else now that I moved this blog to Dreamhost. But there are other places that have offered to host CIA. The problem has never really been hardware and bandwidth, it’s been development and maintenance time. It doesn’t take much time (a few hours a month on average) to just keep it running on life-support, but it’s a much bigger job to really make the broad changes that CIA needs at this point in its life cycle.
Even if a single motivated individual stepped up to take control of CIA.vc exactly in the state I left it, though, I’d be inclined to let it continue to rest in peace. I’d really want to see some form of community in which not all of the load is placed on a single part-time volunteer.
Thanks for everything you’ve done for the numerous FOSS communities. I will miss that cute little CIA bot parked in our IRC channel, waiting to pounce the second a new commit is made. We totally understand that you have a life and have higher priorities. I don’t think anyone is going to fault you for your decision, especially after offering such a great service for us for all these years.
Best wishes and good luck!
As you know, I run the infobot project these days. apt, ibot, infobot, and purl are all popular bots on FreeNode. I’ve been considering adding CIA like services to the bot with a similar web administration front end. I’ve used CIA for quite a few of the projects I work on. I’d be interested in getting a dump of the database if you are willing. I don’t know yet how much time I’ll have to work on this, but my employer is interested, so it might be a good time to dig in.
Thanks a lot for providing this service all this time!
This service has been quite valuable to me over the years. Thanks for all the work you put into it.
Thanks for prodiving this! Ruled!
Now we need a new CIA :/
The atheme.org team refuses to allow bots on the efnet and undernet networks…so if you’re waiting for your bots on those networks to come back up, you’re wasting your time. Some other person/group will have to pick up the torch.
p.s. – Thanks a lot scanlime, never knew you created cia.vc
Perhaps all this news should also be published on http://cia.vc/blog/ ?
I’m sure the Atheme folks will get around to updating it soon… their first priority was just to restore the server to normal operation.
Here is a quick python script that sends commit reports from googlecode to an irc bot:
http://ideone.com/ijCZg
/me heads back to efnet
Beth, this is the team you mentioned in practice;
(22:44:35) Aerdan: e & cherokee are the affected projects
(22:45:04) Aerdan: I think there may be others too, but so far only a guy from e and a couple guys from cherokee have popped up.
(22:45:09) nenolod: too bad
(22:45:13) nenolod: tell them to use cia.vc correctly
(22:45:24) Skinkie: nenolod: in what way we don’t?
(22:45:44) Skinkie: neither the poll method nor mail notification are working
(22:45:58) nenolod: and those two things are not documented
(22:46:02) nenolod: so use ciabot.py
(22:48:22) Skinkie: i don’t really understand where this attitute is coming from, we merely report that the webinterface is not working as expected
(22:48:55) Lcawte is now known as Guest45056
(22:50:39) Richlv: hrm. i reported cia not working a few days ago…
(22:50:50) Richlv: looks like it’s a pretty global problem then
(22:50:55) nenolod: fine, i’ll just take it offline you stupid fucks
(22:50:57) TAsn: Aerdan, I don’t have admin access for e.
(22:51:06) Guest45056 left the room (quit: Quit: KVIrc 4.1.1 Equilibrium http://www.kvirc.net/).
(22:51:35) Aerdan: TAsn: then you need to talk to someone who does.
(22:51:50) TAsn: nenolod, either you are joking, or you are mad.
(22:52:10) TAsn: Aerdan, weirdly enough, after a couple of days of not working, it just came back.
(22:52:20) Skinkie: TAsn: i guess he is part of the ‘team’ http://atheme.org/ mentioned: http://scanlime.org/2011/05/cia-vc-service-is-down-indefinitely/
(22:52:44) nenolod left the room (“fuck this shit”).
(22:52:46) Aerdan: you should be using the VCS hooks /anyway/, since they’re push notifications and thus don’t require us to poll constantly like the polling service does.
(22:53:09) Skinkie: Aerdan: smtp isn’t polling right?
(22:53:25) Aerdan: welp. you’ve gone and pissed him off to the point of him taking it down. great job, guys.
(22:53:34) Richlv: Aerdan, yeah, but not always it’s hat easy…
(22:53:41) Richlv: that
(22:53:53) Skinkie: Aerdan: anyway who was that guy? Is that your bofh?
(22:54:12) Aerdan: he’s the head of Atheme.org and the guy who took cia.vc down.
(22:54:15) TAsn: * nenolod (~nenolod@atheme/member/pdpc.active.nenolod) has joined #cia
(22:54:17) TAsn: too bad
(22:54:17) TAsn: tell them to use cia.vc correctly
(22:54:28) Skinkie: Aerdan: if you call this a ‘team’
(22:54:43) Skinkie: Aerdan: i call this a dictator
(22:54:44) TAsn: that’s just being mental.
(22:55:09) Aerdan: I mean, I am an Atheme.org developer too but my involvement with CIA is pretty much limited to ‘invoking the nenolod’. which apparently doesn’t work if you don’t listen to what he tells you.
(22:55:12) TAsn: dictatorship is great as long as the dictator is not an asshole.
(22:55:22) ***Richlv blinks
(22:55:33) Aerdan: I believe he told you to use the push notifications.
(22:55:38) ***jed eats popcorn
(22:55:39) TAsn: Aerdan, me?
(22:55:41) Aerdan: I just told you the same thing he did, even.
(22:55:48) TAsn: first time here
(22:55:52) Aerdan: ‘you’ as in you, Skinkie, and anyone else still using the svn poller.
(22:56:13) Richlv: this sounds like a show of socially incapable persons getting famous. jed seems to know where that usually ends up
(22:56:26) Skinkie: Aerdan: are you really ignorant too?
(22:56:28) jed: actually, nenolod is twice the person you are, but okay
(22:56:37) Skinkie: Aerdan: we are using for ages the smtp solution
(22:56:46) Skinkie: Aerdan: which stopped working friday
(22:56:49) Aerdan: Well, apparently that’s also not the right solution.
(22:56:50) Amanda: Jesus Christ.
(22:57:07) ***jed claps
(22:57:12) Skinkie: so either mention this on the project page, that nobody comes in this channel asking for help
(22:57:17) nenolod [~nenolod@atheme/member/pdpc.active.nenolod] entered the room.
(22:57:17) Richlv: Aerdan, just to put things in perspective… people report cia being down, and end up with being called “stupid fucks”…
(22:57:20) jed: nenolod: wb!
(22:57:29) Aerdan: look.
(22:57:33) Aerdan: he said to use push notifications.
(22:57:38) Aerdan: use. the. fucking. push. notifications.
(22:57:39) mode (+o nenolod) by ChanServ
(22:57:47) mode (+b *!*rich@85.15.227.*) by nenolod
(22:57:47) Richlv left the room (Kicked by nenolod (Richlv)).
(22:57:50) mode (-o nenolod) by nenolod
(22:58:00) nenolod: any questions?
Sorry you had this experience…
As the ones running the server, though, they’re free to remove or modify features. You’re always free to start your own service using the same or a different codebase.
I don’t have a whole lot of sympathy left for user complaints, unfortunately, when over the years that’s mostly all I heard. Few people are willing to step up and maintain a large service like this, so that motivation and effort should count as some kind of currency at least. It’s a free service, give the guys a break.