ProjectLocker Blog

Servers back online

C. G. Brown — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 20:47:00 -0500

At this time, all ProjectLocker services are back online and all users should have access. We apologize for any inconvenience caused.

Server Issue (*2.projectlocker.com, svn.projectlocker.com)

C. G. Brown — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 15:53:00 -0500

ProjectLocker is currently having a hardware issue with one of our servers. Users with a server number ending in 2 (e.g. venture2.projectlocker.com) or that user svn.projectlocker.com, trac.projectlocker.com, or documents.projectlocker.com will experience problems with access at this time. Our team is aware of the issue and we're running diagnostics to isolate and repair as soon as possible. We will update the blog as soon as we know more.

Customers on other servers should not be affected, and all customers, including Enterprise customers, can access user management functionality at https://portal.projectlocker.com.

Portal Upgrade Complete + Git Upgrade

C. G. Brown — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 11:34:00 -0600

We've completed the upgrade of Portal and the underlying applications to Rails 3.1. This should lead to improved performance and stability going forward, as well as enhance our ability to improve the user experience more frequently and quickly.

Some new customers may have experienced issues with setup of their first project. We're running programs now to fix those projects that were set up improperly, so you should be able to use them shortly. Subsequent projects should have set up without issue.

As part of the dependencies for the upgrade, we also upgraded Git to version 1.7.9.2, the most recent release. We're still working on Git over HTTP/S and will announce when we have released that.

Upgrade to ProjectLocker Portal

C. G. Brown — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 14:31:00 -0600

We're upgrading ProjectLocker Portal this weekend from the old version of Rails we were running on to version 3.1. This is the first step in several we will make to improve the user experience and functionality of our user portal. There should be no impact to our users; however if something unanticipated goes wrong and you are unable to file a ticket in the ProjectLocker system, you can reach us via support [-at-] or via Twitter at @ProjectLockerHQ. Thanks for your continued support, and we're excited about being able to expand ProjectLocker's capabilities to better serve you.

Subversion 1.7 upgrade complete

C. G. Brown — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 01:32:00 -0600

At this time, Subversion 1.7.2 is installed on all ProjectLocker production servers. You can upgrade your client to a 1.7 client to obtain the additional performance benefits, or continue using your 1.4 or higher clients if that's what you prefer.

There was an issue with case-sensitivity of email addresses that some customers experienced after the upgrade. The workaround was to use the same case for your email as you used when you entered it into Portal, but we investigated and determined why our customizations to Subversion did not pick up our addition of case-insensitive email address support. The installation was repaired and reinstalled, and your email should work in a case-insensitive way at this time. Trac is still case-sensitive as it has been, but we're working on a solution for that as well.

We hope everyone had a great holiday season and look forward to another year of serving you. Thank you as always for your patience and support as we continue to do our best to offer you the best value in hosted software quality solutions.

Subversion 1.7 Upgrade In Progress

C. G. Brown — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 09:21:00 -0600

We are in the process of upgrading our servers to Subversion 1.7.2. For those of you on Enterprise plans or with server numbers ending in 2 or 5, you have already been upgraded, and you can begin using the features immediately if you have a Subversion 1.7 client. If you do not, you should still be able to use the features that your client version supports.

If you are experiencing issues, please contact us by clicking the New Support Request link in ProjectLocker Portal and post in detail the exact error message you are getting. You can also try upgrading your client to a Subversion 1.7 client and see if you get better results. If this works for you, please notify us which client versions failed and which succeeded so we can do additional testing against those versions.

Holiday One For You, One For Me Promotion is Back

C. G. Brown — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 14:19:00 -0600

It's the holiday season again, and we're grateful for our subscribers around the world whom we are privileged to serve. During this time, we wanted to once again offer a special promotion as our holiday gift to you:

All subscribers who upgrade their Free plan to a Paid plan in the month of December will receive their first month free. In addition, we'll give their second month's subscription to one of the following charities:

charity: water - a non-profit organization bringing clean and safe drinking water to people in developing nations.
Kiva - microlending to entrepreneurs around the world
Room to Read - global child education and literacy programs
Wikimedia Foundation - home of Wikipedia, a free global crowdsourced encyclopedia

This year, the Paid subscribers are also able to join in on the giving. Just purchase a Downloadable Backup subscription in ProjectLocker Portal, and we'll give you your first month free and donate your second month to charity.

We will select based on your vote, so feel free to vote for your favorite below.

Last year, we were able to make a donation to Wikipedia on your behalf, and we're looking forward to donating again to the charity of your choice this year.

From all of us at ProjectLocker, we wish you the best this holiday season, and a prosperous and productive New Year.

Update to Server Certificate

C. G. Brown — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 12:26:00 -0600

On Thursday, December 1, ProjectLocker will be updating our SSL certificates on all servers. If you do not have your Subversion client configured with our intermediate certificate bundle, you may receive warning messages about the certificate not coming from a trusted authority. More detailed instructions on how to do this are provided at https://portal.projectlocker.com/support_faq/tag/subversion#46.

We are using the same certificate authority we have been using, Starfield Technologies, and the certificates are valid and work in all major browser. After inspecting the certificate in your browser, you should feel free to accept the certificate permanently into your client's cache.

As always, just open a support ticket in ProjectLocker Portal if you have any questions.

Recent Improvements to Server Performance

C. G. Brown — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 14:00:00 -0600

As you may have noticed and as we mentioned before, we have had more issues than we would have liked in the process of tuning our service to meet the growing demand. We're excited to announce a few improvements we've made that should already be noticeable to you in the form of faster page loads and a better experience overall.

New Database Server - We've relocated our applications and database to a separate server from the other ProjectLocker services. You have probably already noticed improvements in the speed of Portal and any operations overall that require database access. We've also upgraded to a more recent version of MySQL, which should give us performance benefits as well.
New Application Platform - Our Ruby on Rails applications, including Portal and our internal server communication APIs, are now running on nginx with Phusion Passenger. We made the decision to switch from Apache for those apps so that we could take advantage of nginx's relatively smaller configuration footprint and lean memory usage, which should free up resources for other applications.
Trac Media Caching - Each customer's Trac needs to run in its own environment, but there are some base static resources that are shared, such as JavaScript and CSS files for Trac layouts. We copied the relevant shared files to a single location and instructed Trac to look there for standard media. This means that you get a cache benefit from your browser across all Trac projects in your account, since the static media will be coming from the same place.
mod_expires - We added mod_expires configuration settings to our Trac configurations so that static assets will be cached and not served over and over again. Combined with the media caching, we've seen page load time improvements of up to 75% across all servers for Trac.
mod_wsgi Tuning - We reconfigured mod_wsgi to only run as a daemon process. This means that it's decoupled from our Apache server's memory requirements and threading, and our Apache processes use less memory as a result, again leading to more speed and performance.

At ProjectLocker, we're proud that over 100,000 users have chosen us to meet their software quality needs, and we're excited to make the changes that will once again provide the quality and stability you've come to expect from us. We're not stopping here: soon to come are upgrades to Trac, Subversion, and a new, more usable experience for ProjectLocker Portal, as well as other unique features that will provide industry-leading security and management capabilities.

If you have any questions, concerns, or feature requests, please just open a New Support Request in ProjectLocker Portal and our team will promptly respond.

ProjectLocker Scheduled Maintenance - September 17, 2011

C. G. Brown — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 09:49:00 -0500

On Saturday, September 17, from 7 AM EDT (11 AM GMT) to 1 PM EDT (5 PM GMT), we will be performing maintenance and upgrades on our database servers to improve performance. During this time, the web site, blog, and Portal may experience outages. Existing Subversion, Trac, and Git services will not be affected.

Please contact us by clicking the New Support Request link in Portal or emailing us at support [at] if you have any questions or concerns.