Buildbot is offline

[Ryan Carsten Schmidt]

On Aug 12, 2026, at 02:45, Ryan Carsten Schmidt wrote:

> While booted to the main startup volume, Disk Utility's disk check found many problems on the startup disk and although it exited with a successful message, it didn't fix any of them. I didn't check the separate RAID volume yet.
> 
> Yesterday, when booting to a macOS Install image, Disk Utility was hanging on launch so I couldn't try to repair the disk there.
> 
> Trying again today, Disk Utility is opening properly from the macOS Install image and I'm checking the disks now.

Disk Utility couldn't repair the boot disk but DiskWarrior could. The RAID had no errors reported. I've hopefully cleared out the corrupted/empty files on the boot disk, and the buildmaster is back online and the Intel workers are working through the backlog of builds. Apple Silicon workers remain offline for the moment. You can keep an eye on buildbot progress here if you like:

https://build.macports.org/waterfall?num_events=10


On Aug 16, 2026, at 04:56, Oleksiy Akimov wrote:
> 
> 
> Not sure how buildbot is hosted currently - it may be an idea moving to something stateless like https://cirrus-runners.app/
> Much cheaper than GitHub actions and similar alternatives.
> And then making build artifacts available on something like AWS S3, so there is no reliance on a single server.

In 2016, hosting for the MacPorts project moved from Xserves owned by and hosted by Apple to our own infrastructure. Ar that time we switched from Subversion to GitHub for the code, moved our Trac, Guide and main web site to a virtual private server managed by Clemens and Rainer, and I provide most of the buildbot hardware at my home.

Buildbot hardware currently consists of three Intel Xserves with a combined 240GB RAM running VMs in VMware ESXi, one Intel Mac mini running VMs in UTM, and one Apple Silicon Mac mini provided by MacStadium running VMs in UTM, and also having macOS 11 on a separate bootable volume since macOS 11 cannot be virtualized. 

The master copy of our compiled archives and mirrored distfiles has been on the Xserves as well. My bandwidth is insufficient to serve them to the public, so they're mirrored via rsync to a server provided by Friedrich-Alexander University. There are many other mirrors of this content around the world; see https://trac.macports.org/wiki/Mirrors. Also, Fastly has donated the use of their CDN to us for even more global coverage. So the outage of the buildbot merely means no new content is being created, but it doesn't prevent anyone from accessing the existing content. 

We intend to make changes to this arrangement soon. For example, the buildmaster will move to be hosted on another virtual private server managed by Josh. This ought to have faster and more reliable Internet connectivity than my ISP has been able to provide. 



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