The server that hosts gcc.gnu.org as well as sources.redhat.com had to be moved out of its colo facility at a very short notice. Its IP address was therefore changed and the RAM was also upgraded to 4GB. However the corresponding DNS entry's TTL was one whole day, so the IP address change did not quite propagate as soon as one would have liked it to. So we couldn't access the server for that period. However, worse was yet to follow.
The increased bandwidth and RAM somehow caused a RAID driver bug that results in hard lock-ups to show up much more frequently than ever before, with the result that the server is only intermittently up for useful work. (It responds to "ping", but CVS, SSH, etc. seem to be down.)
As of this writing, the server is down again - I really hope this issue gets resolved as soon as possible.
By the way, what I do not understand is why the "overseers" mailing list that is used to coordinate the activities of the maintainers of this important server for free software seems to be hosted on the server itself!
Package-Private Accesses in GCJ
My patches for PR 15073 and 9685 are finally in.
Gmail
Gmail is a real pleasure to use - thanks to Yumpee Saar, I've had a Gmail account for a while now. It still lacks a couple of things and is not as customisable as one would have liked it to be, but it is still so much better than any other web-based email service I have seen. Like so many great innovations, it has so many neat and simple features that make you think "Why hadn't anyone thought of this before?". Nice.
I have since had four opportunities to invite others and my wife, my sister, Kingshuk and Srikanth were promptly doled out these invitations.