The last few days have been unpleasant and full of rancor. New owners trying and failing to load OS2008 and applications from the repositories, asking why and getting abuse from the old stalwarts for not searching first. Everybody is unhappy.

It would be nice if Nokia and Maemo maintained a status notice on their front pages whenever the sites are experiencing problems - but they don't so would it be possible to add a very prominent status area to the front-page of ITT and keep that up to date with the state of the download sites?

When things are bad then the notice could contain a link to a single thread that should be used to discuss the current status. It would be nice if most of the time this status message basically said that all engines were running normally. But when things go pear-shaped then folks would know where to look for assurance that it is not just their tablet that is behaving badly. New owners would see this notice the first time they visit ITT. It also might motivate Nokia to get their house in order.

I think that there is going to be a whole lot of new owners show up on on Christmas day this year, so even a once-off message right now would save some grief.

that's a good idea, because right now I still have problems with extras and chinook and I don't know for sure if they are online or it's me.

Garfi

Thanks to the keen eye of AdmJo a simple typo in the repository url appears to be the cause of all headaches over the past couple of days.

If you go & change Maemo Extras to: http://repostory.maemo.org/extras/ (basically remove the letter "I" in repository)

All will work as it should

And it does!!!! Unbelievable!!! For want of an 'i' the war was lost... (Restrained cursing about Finnish holidays).

Quick, Reggie (I suppose?) post this up right on the front page somewhere where it will be seen by every visitor. Please...

And I guess we will need to know when to put the 'i' back in repository when this problem is corrected.

I have messaged Reggie and asked him to make the following well-titled thread by PinCushionQueen into a sticky thread:

ATTENTION: How to fix Maemo Extras Repository

As for repository status, the (should-be) hall-of-fame site at www.gronmayer.com/it/ gives interesting info about repositories, such as whether they are up and whether they are empty.

Speaking of hall of fame -- is there a N-series hall of fame or Oscar (or maybe the Gates trophy ). I suggest that this site sponsor a people's choice award ceremony, with all registered users eligible to vote for the top programs, etc. (If there was one this year, I must not have been paying attention!)

OH PLEASE!!!! ...keep the name "Gates" out of these hallowed forums!

Regards...

Omega

Unfortunately, the gronmayer site has been saying that Maemo Extras was online with packages for the past couple of days - so it didn't help in this particular instance.

Otherwise, I agree that the gronmayer site is a fabulous resource for repo information.

Thank you so much for sharing this fix! Hours of frustration solved!

I can not BELIEVE Nokia allowed such a rookie error to affect thousands of users worldwide. A simple validation check on an actual unit before release would have flagged the issue.

Am I being too harsh?

I believe the "repostory" server we are using now was intended for staging (it is an alias for "stage.maemo.org") for internal testing prior to copying to the public server. We're just lucky it is publicly accessible and that someone found it.

The real "repository" server is just FUBAR right now for some reason. And that's not something that pre-release testing would have found, because it just happened.