Qt Open-Source Downloads Temporarily Offline Due To Severe Hardware Failure

[elatllat]

Clouds instances are not fully fault proof, if you want no single point of failure your app needs to span data centers and providers, the cloud helps by offering fast automated instances.

I have had 2 cloud providers break my instances.

[polarathene]

Isn't the "cloud" pushed because of its ability to stay available? Looks like it rained instead, on Qt.

It's the ability to provision remotely resources to handle your workload on-demand. This can include scaling your resources based on load like traffic and doing such automatically, as well as routing and all that, some of this is managed services where you pay a bit for a service provider to make such more easily available, or you DIY at the cheaper end and just use APIs. You can also manually through a web UI just ask for one VM instance and do everything on that as you would a local machine.

Cloud is you don't worry about where the hardware is so much (other than perhaps regional locations if it matters for your needs) or anything else that you might if you were to provision them yourselves, you also don't have the delay/downtime of waiting for all that hardware to be provisioned locally and setup by someone you're paying hourly or whatever, or if taking a more traditional route of a dedicated server rental that's usually on an annual plan instead of hourly and may take a day or so for the provider to have ready (Hetzner I think is one of these if you're customizing the hardware setup).

In this case, Qt had two servers of some kind with a single provider, so probably no real redundancy/HA. Probably management or some other department said it'd be a waste of money and such a situation would never happen, so if it was brought up it wasn't approved but someone else will be getting the blame :P

[polarathene]

Not sure if anythings changed since the article here was published but here's one of the links that it's referencing AFAIK:

http://download.qt.io/official_releases/qt/6.0/6.0.0/single/qt-everywhere-src-6.0.0.tar.xz

That will fail and reveal it's running from an Ubuntu server running Apache 2.4.29 (Oct 2017 release), so probably Ubuntu 16.04. The main download.qt.io website also reveals a default setup page "It works!" and if you inspect the HTML, there's a comment that states it was last updated 2016-11-16, so if it is the 2016 LTS it's had some updates?

There's not HTTPS setup for whatever reason. I can't see how this would be a HW related issue, unless this is the present progress of recovering it (in which case why are they fumbling around with Apache?), or maybe download.qt.io always had that apache page and all the files that fail to load are from some other mounted storage which is related to the disk failure issue?

I looked up the servers IP and did an rDNS query with drill, but unlike the usual information of the cloud provider, it provided nothing useful (my skills aren't that great :P). I did note that the main qt.io website is hosted via Amazon's AWS.

EDIT: Using https://hostingchecker.com/ instead of drill gave the following information:

It is hosted by: Telia Inmics-Nebula Oy

WHOIS information: Click here

Organization name: Digia Finland Oy

IP addres: 77.86.229.90

AS(autonomous system) number and organization: AS29422 Telia Inmics-Nebula Oy

AS name: NBLNETWORKS-AS

Reverse DNS of the IP: download.qt.io.229.86.77.in-addr.arpa

City: Helsinki

Country: Finland

Finnish to English translated wikipedia article if it interests anyone on the hosting provider.

I guess that makes sense since Qt is also based in Finland, that they'd use a Finland hosting provider? There's this article about Qt as a customer and why Qt chose to go with them:

We use Amazon CDN to publish commercial product versions, and Cloud 9 serves as the publishing platform for open source versions.

Progress of the hardware failure issue can be tracked here.

[rmfx]

If Qt was not so overly bloated, the servers would be fine..

[oleid]

It is true. I'm hosting their download server in my basement and the machine broke. Too bad, I was planning on getting a second machine via ebay... when I find the time. Next server would have had a second disk for ultra redundancy. </sarcasm>

[creoflux]

It is true. I'm hosting their download server in my basement and the machine broke. Too bad, I was planning on getting a second machine via ebay... when I find the time. Next server would have had a second disk for ultra redundancy. </sarcasm>

I have a reliable source of SD cards if you want to host using a raspberry pi.

[ddriver]

I am just glad commercial users are not affected.

Poor open source server - no redundancy whatsoever, and when it heard about cutting LTS off the open source version, it probably let to a nervous breakdown.

I am sure the timing is just a coincidence.

If Qt was not so overly bloated, the servers would be fine..

Even that is not an excuse, they could have easily offered alternative / p2p downloads, for example via torrents, like many linux distors do.

They cling to options with which to inconvenience open source users, and suffer the consequences of their greed. They tremendously increased the strain on their servers by deciding to stop offering offline installers, forcing people to have to download everything over and over again.

And now it conveniently broke, just days after they removed the LTS option from the open source version... is this an improbable server failure, or are they testing just how much insolence they can afford to exert?

Even after they fix this, I am ditching their official "no you need to have account and identify to us" installer, I'd rather use MSYS2 packages, even if a little slower to ship new versions. At least I can only download it once, and use the cache package to install on a number of systems quickly.

[bug77]

I think it's pushed mostly because it's easier to deal with than your own in-house infrastructure - the same way it was easier to buy a PC to do your work than have another meeting with the gatekeepers of the mainframe to try to get your job scheduled the way you needed it...

The cloud is pushed because it's both illegal and unwieldy to mine data on people's computers. It becomes much easier when people voluntarily upload their stuff somewhere.
And because you can charge per usage when your offer your own software in the cloud.