We’ve just done a major upgrade over the past few weeks to the whole of XP-Dev.com. It has been pretty eventful and interesting, a few things broke along the way (sorry about that!), and we’ve made a few things much simpler.

1. New Home Page Design
2. Infrastructure upgrades
   1. Repository URL cleanup
   2. New High Availability System
   3. New SSH fingerprint
3. Trac Hosting Changes
4. New Trac Plugins
5. Minor Bug Fixes and Enhancements

New Home Page Design

The main landing pages for XP-Dev.com has been updated to a new design. The rest of XP-Dev.com will follow suite in the next few weeks, and will give the whole platform a much needed UI improvement.

Infrastructure upgrades

A number of infrastructure related upgrades have been performed. During this migration (which took a bit more than a week), there were intermittent problems on the whole platform while we were making changes and migrating users to new servers. All of this is complete, and we’re now in stable zone, where we can focus on delivering new functionality.

Repository URL cleanup

No more silly subdomains for repositories! In the past, your repository would have existed on svn.xp-dev.com,svn2.xp-dev.com, git.xp-dev.com, git2.xp-dev.com etc. From now on all repositories are addressed from a single domain xp-dev.com, i.e. http(s)://xp-dev.com/.. and ssh://xp-dev.com/..

We’ve done this to simplify our URL structures and helps you out by requiring less typing (and avoid a ton of confusion along the way)!

New High Availability System

The new infrastructure deployed is based on a live-live load-balanced architecture. This ensures that only a minimal amount of users are affected when we do have outages. Additionally, it gives the whole platform additional resilience and allows us to start offering SLAs with some guarantees (stay tuned for more information about this).

On top of the added reliability, it does give us the freedom to scale and move repositories between servers without any action/downtime on users. Imagine if the server that your repository is hosted on goes down, we can switch over to a backup server and you won’t even notice it! At the moment, this failover is still a bit manual, but we’ll be making changes in the future to allow a complete automated hot-backup solution.

New SSH fingerprint

As a consequence of the upgrades, some users would have noticed that our SSH fingerprint has changed. This was an oversight (read: technical “debt”) on our end from our previous system where one server had a different key from others. These upgrades have resulted in all repositories being served from one (highly available) floating virtual IP and only a single SSH key can be served.

Our SSH fingerprint is ca:3f:90:8c:b0:93:c0:bd:00:ad:76:37:fb:8c:65:f4. This is what you will see regardless where your repository is located.

Trac Hosting Changes

In the past all users had a common list of Trac plugins that they could enable on their Trac projects. This has changed such that Free account users have access to a limited number of plugins. Paid account holders (Pro and Enterprise) remain unchanged and have access to ALL plugins.

This is being done because some Trac plugins do need a lot of support and attention: either they are broken and require some additional patches to get working, or their setup is overly complex.

New Trac Plugins

We have added support for 6 new Trac plugins:

• Discussion
• Teamcity
• MasterTickets
• GanttCharts
• Eclipse
• TracHours

At time of writing, we currently support 18 Trac plugins in total. If you’d like us to add other plugins, please do raise a support ticket.

Minor Bug Fixes and Enhancements

• Fix state field for Bugs where the state contains foreign Unicode characters.
• Users can supply a fallback billing address if one is not supplied by Paypal from their Settings page
• Users can add a descriptive name to their list of public keys