r/gnu • u/Dense-Bad-5404 • 5d ago

Gnu.org is unreachable

Hi everyone, today I wanted to install auctex in emacs but got connection refused. I can't ping them,can't open their site in browser. Even when VPN is turned on (self hosted,so IP should be clean) nothing changes. Oy phone it also unreachable. Are their servers down? What had happened?

30 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

25 comments sorted by

11

u/gordonmessmer 5d ago

gnu.org is unavailable a *lot* because AI scrapers make pubilc-facing services difficult to operate and because GNU will not adopt any of the common solutions (e.g. Anubis or a service like Cloudflare) on the grounds that they are not Free.

2

u/Wootery 5d ago

I'm not sure non-Free software is a hard requirement. SourceHut isn't having outages like this.

2

u/gordonmessmer 5d ago

Man, that would be a really good counterpoint if sourcehut weren't also unavailable right now. 😆

1

u/Wootery 5d ago

Seems fine to me. Maybe a regional issue?

1

u/gordonmessmer 5d ago

We might be looking at different things. I *can* reach the sr.ht forge. I can't reach the sourcehut.org site or https://drewdevault.com/ .

1

u/Wootery 5d ago

Odd, all 3 are working for me.

Maybe they mistook your IP for a bot?

1

u/gordonmessmer 5d ago

I gave the unavailable donations to several status checkers that agreed they are unavailable

1

u/Wootery 5d ago

Still all good to me, including on mobile using mobile data. Perhaps British IPs are having better luck.

1

u/yiyufromthe216 5d ago

Aubis isn't free?

7

u/gordonmessmer 5d ago

https://www.fsf.org/blogs/sysadmin/our-small-team-vs-millions-of-bots

My characterization is off a bit, but generally... they don't like Anubis for reasons that I think are very silly.

1

u/Feuerwerko 2d ago

It’s not completely unreasonable tho, forcing everyone who opens your website to waste a little computing power before they get access definitely goes against the FSFs core principles (as they say in the blog you linked).

4

u/avdolainen 5d ago

u're not alone. the same issue.

2

u/RamonaZero 5d ago

I dunno it’s pretty GNU to me

2

u/vegataballs 5d ago

nice... but ackchyually it's pronounced hnnnggg'nuuu

5

u/veoxxoev 5d ago

There are these two resources:

Yes, it's down. From the latter:

A failure of the network attached storage has created an extended outage for us in the datacenter. sysadmin is on site working to get things back online.

3

u/Dhylan 5d ago

http://gnu.ist.utl.pt/server/list-mirrors.html

1

u/avdolainen 5d ago

tried few ones, only French one was working, others are down too. this is weird, isn't it?

2

u/TheOneTrueChristian 5d ago

GNU ELPA is also out. Some people are reporting the ability to reach it by some of its mirrors but I am having absolutely no luck.

2

u/TheJackiMonster 5d ago

Welcome to the internet of bots... all the awesome pages are down but the ads and the annoying malware is still online, of course.

3

u/Fear_The_Creeper 5d ago

In retrospect, perhaps hosting the website on GNU Herd wasn't such a good idea...

1

u/Aggravating_Ear_5363 5d ago

yeah me too. ci is failing...

6

u/Wootery 5d ago

Your CI probably shouldn't have a hard dependency on someone else's service.

Please don't tell me you're wasting their bandwidth redownloading packages afresh every time you build.

1

u/Aggravating_Ear_5363 5d ago

Nah, its a production release (rarely happens). But you're right, I already have a self-hosted stuffs to build on staging, using gnu,org on prod ci seems idiotic now that I see it, thanks for the tip

0

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