I contacted Tow (our admin, in case you don’t know :P). He can’t fix FTP server issue which prevents us from updating mods and releases.

He said that the whole board is messy and outdated, needs migration.

However, Tow can’t do it himself, but he is ready to support any brave volunteers willing to do so.

I own my own homepage… (Sucks atm) I could try doing it… However… I’m a total newbie when it comes to FTP stuff

I think SXX wanted to work on it

Yeah I wanted to do that a while ago, but then wasn’t available. Now I’ll need to finish some other vcmi-related work and then we’ll decide where to move our infrastructure.

Could Tow maybe explain what needs to be done?

I assume the task is to migrate this board to the latest phpBB version. Is there also work needed on Mantis and MediaWiki?

And to whoever takes up the task: please make sure to enable https on all connections. Sending passwords in clear-text is not cool in 2017.

First thing is we need new hosting, currently forum is on Tow’s VPS which he prefers to keep private

Assuming the project does not have money to pay for the host I looked for possibilities and found TuxFamily . They offer free Webspace with php and a DB to open source projects.

Red Hat offers free resources for “non-profit projects” too. Installing phpBB on container based infrastructure may be harder though.

Or is there a plan to collect some money to pay for a server? I assume we don’t need much resources and would get away with ~ 3,50 € a month. (Scaleway, Vultr, OVH,…)

With all respect to people who help FOSS projects this just isn’t something I would prefer. At least it’s not any better than someone else server which I would try to avoid. First of all they also might get into financial trouble, their hardware could fail and there no automatic backup of any sort, no SLA, etc.

Another problem of hosting on someone server is issues with permission sharing: should we all have all the passwords? Who actually going to have access to control panels and going to represent project officially? So there are problems with it once you have more than just one-man-project.

I submit request back in autumn 2016, but got no reply. ALso tried to get in touch with RH employees I know but again no luck. Sadly RH likely just too large to be able giveaway resources to random projects on internet that isn’t officially registered non-profits.

Few days ago I finally got reply from DigitalOcean and they agree to help us with hosting sponsorship. This is really good since DO efficiently the best we can get:[ul]]There is Team support in control panel so we can all have own passwords./:m]
]No problem with control transfer if I unable to maintain it./:m]
]Servers have snapshots / backups./:m]
]For $20 we could have 2 or 3 ($10+$10 or $10+$5+$5 droplets) completely different servers which is good for both security and reliability./:m][/ul]We’ll need to agree on details so I’ll ask them today for two $10 droplets and might be a bit of extra storage, but even if they can’t give that much we’ll at least have rock solid hosting for forum / bug tracker / wiki.

PS: Their offer for open source projects is on that page: developers.digitalocean.com/opensource/

A number of people in the past offered money for VCMI, so some resonable funding could be possible… as long as the project moves forward, of course.

I think we could start with one which just works… will take some time to get it running, probably months. Either way, there’s no that much valuable data we need to keep in case of catastrophic failure. For now all we need to reliable service.

Sounds good

We just need someone to pay us work on it full-time.

If seriously we can always setup something like Patreon, but even in that case it’s better to not waste money on hosting since there are more useful things like assets replacement under free license.

Might be I’m far from skilled C++ developer, but server management is what I do for last 12 years. All server setup with proper permissions and security measures, automatic backup and snapshots will take a day or few. Then I’ll share it all on GitHub as Ansible configuration or just scripts.

So here we go. Everything now runs on new server(s) and I’ll slowly try to improve what can be improved.
Our Wiki (with default skin) and Mantis (1.2.x) updated to latest versions already.

It’s all harder with forum: transition from PHP 5.2 to 5.6 is hard enough and 7.0 wouldn’t worth effort. We have to implement (or improve what exist for non-modified phpBB2) export and switch forum software to something modern. Though before we going to do that we need modern website to replace portal features.

I suspect there might be still issues with “502 Bad Gateway” or encoding-related errors on forums. So if you have problems please report them and I’ll slowly fix them over time.

Wow, that’s awesome! Good job!

Now the main point of all this: FTP server access for Launcher and release packages.

Added slack invite page: slack.vcmi.eu/

I would rather not use FTP. It’s will be preferable if you could check WinSCP / Filezilla, find out how to generate SSH key and PM me public part of it.

Obviously you have access to servers already (on DO level) and I’ll share all important passwords once I stop mess with accounts so all core developers can keep them, but I would still prefer to not use password authentication when possible.

With the console? Which login / password do I use, teh one from DO website doesn’t seem to work.

Filezilla, the free FTP solution? What do you want to do?

DO password is just for server management, not related to file uploads at all.

You need to generate SSH key:
winscp.net/eng/docs/public_key
Then you need to upload public part to me so I can add it on server.
It’s just way more secure than using passwords or FTP.

Or you can join on slack for few minutes and I’ll explain how to do that. Though not sure that I’ll be online for long today.

I think FTP was meant to be used as a way to distribute packages from Launcher.

Currently we don’t use FTP in launcher and I don’t see reason why we should.

In future we’ll likely switch to some version-aware distribution model since mods will never be forward compatible and having just one version of repository at once don’t help. But that will be sometimes in future since proper setup will require some work on launcher.

PS: Just in case Warmonger already got access he needed.

Fixed file upload limits everywhere, set Mantis to always show screenshots up to 1M.
Also when downloading file on Mantis there now will be bug ID in filename as prefix.

Also fixed problem with weird gamma of attachment previews.