tl;dr; Firebot is moving servers, there may be downtime and you may see a second bot named “koalabot”, this is expected.
Two weeks ago, the server firebot was on underwent routine maintenance as its role had changed since firebot was migrated to it – this resulted in a lot of software being reinstalled, including firebot’s cygwin/perl environment . Since then, firebot’s performance has been less than stellar, frequently resulting in hung processes which cause him to experience ping timeouts if the process isn’t killed fast enough. These leftover processes have occurred since firebot was moved from Windows Server 2003 to 2008 R2 awhile ago, but never before did they actually affect his performance.
Since I originally started running firebot in 2004, technology has progressed that makes it much easier to move firebot back to a machine running Linux, which mozbot Is intended. (Thanks to the magic of VMs.) Originally, firebot ran on Windows because, for reasons outside of the scope of this post, the mail server his bugmail is processed on, is on Windows, and the bot needed to be able to get the mail piped to him. This is no longer a limitation and I’m now able to move the bot to be separate from the mail processor (in fact, firebot and the mail server are not running on the same machine and haven’t for some time now).
So, long story short, I’ve been testing running firebot on koala, a new Linux VM configured for him, and results have been good. Therefore, I plan on migrating firebot to be in production on this new VM and shutting down the old bot. There may be sporadic outages while I copy files around and so forth. Also, for a time, you might also see his twin running on the new VM “koalabot” if I need to run both instances at the same time.
Thanks for your patience – if you see any issues, please let me know.
Update: Firebot’s migration is now completed. If you see any problems, file a bug in bugzilla (webtools/mozbot) or contact me (Wolf) on IRC or by email.
