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hi,

after some internal discussion we have decided that it does not make sense to continue supporting the stable server. after 2 years, stable has seen very little uptake from users, and it creates significant administrative overhead. rather than spending time and money on a little-used service, we will work to improve the reliability of the normal Toolserver.

as a result, we will no longer accept new projects on the stable server, and encourage existing projects to migrate to the normal Toolserver. for stable projects with multiple maintainers, you can use a multi-maintainer project:

https://wiki.toolserver.org/view/Multi-maintainer_projects

there is no difference for subversion hosting. web hosting will require a URL change from http://stable.toolserver.org/projectname/ to http://toolserver.org/~projectname/. if you would like a redirect added from the old URL after you move your project, file a request in JIRA.

there is very little difference in software between stable and the Solaris servers (wolfsbane/willow); if you find software you need which is not installed on the normal Toolserver, file a request in JIRA. (in particular, the web server software is the same, so there is no need to convert rewrite scripts.)

any users on stable who do not have accounts on the normal Toolserver will need to request an account. do not use the normal account request process for this; instead file a request in the TS project in JIRA, giving your stable username and project name.

there is currently no replacement for cache.stable.toolserver.org. however, i will probably set up a general cache.toolserver.org in the future.

projects using the MySQL database on stable itself should request SQL access for their project on the normal Toolserver, then move the database over (e.g. using mysqldump).

for projects concerned about reliability compared to stable: in the past, stable was more reliable because it was only a single machine, while the normal Toolserver had multiple machines, and failure of any one would cause downtime. we will shortly remove the worst single points of failure from the normal Toolserver (LDAP, NFS, and MySQL) by adding redundant servers for these services. we are also planning to provide a backup for the web server, and we already have redundant login servers. we therefore expect the normal Toolserver to be more reliable than stable, where failure of the single machine hosting it will cause downtime.

currently there is no fixed end-of-life date set for stable. however, i would encourage projects to move sooner rather than later.

- river.