This article is more than 1 year old

OpenWrt forums lost as hardware failure again crocks open Wi-Fi router

Sole admin on holiday as devs cross fingers and hope there's a backup

Open source Wi-Fi firmware project OpenWrt says a hardware fault has taken down its forums, which appear not to be recoverable.

The forums disappeared with a simple, and distressing, message:

The OpenWrt forum is currently offline due to a hardware problem on the hosting machine. Unfortunately we neither have access to the machine itself, nor any backups of the forum to restore service.

At this point in time we do not know if and when the server will get back online.

Developers have therefore started using the forums of the LEDE project, which was a fork of OpenWrt that lasted for about two years before an outbreak of peace saw the two efforts join forces.

Work to merge the two projects is well-advanced, but in a small irony developers from both are now using LEDE's forums.

As noted at the LEDE Forum, it's now nine days since the forums disappeared. The OpenWrt development mail reflector and the forum's name server are also gone.

One post at LEDE said “Sounds like there is uncertainty if the forum will get restored as the admins in Hungary are rather uncommunicative.”

OpenWrt's personnel don't seem to have learned the lessons of history. In 2016, shortly before LEDE forked from OpenWrt, downtime was attributed to it running a single server with no redundancy.

John Crispin, one of the LEDE Project leads, last week became frustrated and suggested using the outage as a way to farewell OpenWrt infrastructure entirely.

“We dont know if backups exists and if they do, if we can get hold of them. ML [mailing lists – El Reg] and forum are the last 2 pieces of the OWRT infrastructure that were not moved during the LEDE reboot. I would propose that we ask David Woodhouse to setup a openwrt-devel ML on the old DNS/names. Reap our inboxes for a list of anyone that has ever sent an email to the old ML and send them an automated invite for the new list. If we do manage to get a backup of the old subscription list we can merge the missing ones later and possibly import the archive.”

One reply to Crispin's post said the reason for the long outage is that Imre (presumably Imre Kaloz of OpenWrt) is on vacation. Otherwise, the project received overwhelming support from on-list responses.

There's also a mirror of the former OpenWrt developer list. ®

More about

More about

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like