There are no shipping status updates on the dev site. For some reason the Great Firewall is blocking our access to the server in Germany when we scan boards and try to download PDF shipping labels. It works fine for our developers outside china, but inside we are always blocked. Part of the issue is that our server at Hetzner has 50 percent packet loss and routes through america, the long way around.
Next week we will move the dev site to digital ocean in San Francisco or aws in Washington. That will bring back the problem that Hotmail spams all our emails, but we can deal with that later. We are also moving our email to rack space as our own server has become nearly unusable from china.
Working from china has afforded many opportunities for great difficulty. It os extremely stressful and frustrating, and many times I've thrown up my hands and given up, but I think this reshuffle will help at least a bit.
In addition, I've been trying mirrors in china. Our Chinese comoany opened an AWS china beta account. Bandwidth to dirty PCBs in San Francisco is 8kbps. Bandwidth the aws own mirror of Ubuntu repositories is 64kbps. It is unbelievably pathetic. I'm trying another, aliyun, now.
[quote author="ian"]. That will bring back the problem that Hotmail spams all our emails, but we can deal with that later. We are also moving our email to rack space as our own server has become nearly unusable from china. [/quote]
I use Mailgun from my AWS Ec2 machines for sending transactional mails, works great. Mailgun is owned by Rackspace, so, yeah go that going for it. Very easy to setup just add the appropriate DNS records, can connect to it over SMTP (use port 587 to avoid the AWS limit there) or HTTP API (which is what I use). Have not noticed any particular problem with delivery to hotmail, shared IP pool does get the occasional dirty IP but support will swap you to a clean one if you ask no problem - or of course you can pay them for a dedicated IP, but best to have significant volumes before you do that.
There is also Amazon's own SES, but I've been a bit iffy about using that personally.
PS: If you are going to AWS, here's an idea for solving your image generation problem - setup an simple EC2 instance which could sit there polling a folder (ftp, ssh, nfs, whatever) for .zip'd gerbers, pick one off, run through gerbv using the script I put on the gerbv mailing list or whatever, and fire the resulting images back. Once it's all working, take it as an ABI (EC2 instance image), then you would be easily able to spin up multiple copies of that instance to parallelize processing of large back-logs of gerber-to-image processing as the need arose.
There's a good write-up here of latency and networks speeds across AWS regions and specifically their interactions with China: https://www.opswat.com/blog/best-amazon ... ving-china (https://www.opswat.com/blog/best-amazon-web-services-region-serving-china)
The takeaway seems to be that the AWS Singapore region is quite good for Chinese network traffic and very consistent too. On top of that, it has the same good interoperability and speed with all other AWS regions and so presumably also with other networks like Digital Ocean's and Rackspace. Perhaps setting up a small mirror with the cheapest t2.micro in Singapore could help?
But the article is from last year, not sure what the situation is now since it seems to change quickly. Good luck with all this, it does indeed sound very frustrating.
Will we still get emails with tracking numbers for 1-2 day deliveries etc?
Best of luck getting it fixed. *hug*
They're doing their best to get the tracking numbers out, but the volume of boards is ridiculous at the moment. Four crates arrived for the old site and one for the new site in three deliveries today. Fortunately the old site is still running smoothly for the time being.
Thanks for the advise. I will work through these.
Once it's all working, take it as an ABI (EC2 instance image), then you would be easily able to spin up multiple copies of that instance to parallelize processing of large back-logs of gerber-to-image processing as the need arose.
For the rendering what we are actually doing is a RabbitMQ message queue with a rendering cluster backend. Currently that cluster backend is just a client on the same box :) The eventual plan is to create an image at Digital Ocean (cause the connection there from China is a consistently awesome 24mbit+ from all our computers, probably because the Chinese spammer industry depends on these boxen...) that we can spin up via the API as needed. Each backend node just pulls from the queue and returns results, RabbitMQ is pretty slick and has been rock solid to work with.
[quote author="solexious"]Will we still get emails with tracking numbers for 1-2 day deliveries etc?
Best of luck getting it fixed. *hug*[/quote]
If you enter a valid gsm number you'll receive the updates from the courier (DHL at least for me)
[quote author="ian"]They're doing their best to get the tracking numbers out, but the volume of boards is ridiculous at the moment. Four crates arrived for the old site and one for the new site in three deliveries today. Fortunately the old site is still running smoothly for the time being.
[/quote]
Hi I have problems to get any feedback for my order made on the NEW SITE before the problems started.
I made Order No. 201168 (with DHL delivery) on March 24 and it went to production on March 25.
Since then, nothing have happend!
So April 8 I created a Ticket Id: #236 on the NEW site.
There has been no reply for a week now and the order still has not changed status and no message from DHL or anything, this does not feel normal.
I have order several times from DirtyPCBs and it has worked perfectly.
Is my order lost?
Reagards,
Janne
[quote author="janne68"][quote author="ian"]They're doing their best to get the tracking numbers out, but the volume of boards is ridiculous at the moment. Four crates arrived for the old site and one for the new site in three deliveries today. Fortunately the old site is still running smoothly for the time being.
[/quote]
Hi I have problems to get any feedback for my order made on the NEW SITE before the problems started.
I made Order No. 201168 (with DHL delivery) on March 24 and it went to production on March 25.
Since then, nothing have happend!
So April 8 I created a Ticket Id: #236 on the NEW site.
There has been no reply for a week now and the order still has not changed status and no message from DHL or anything, this does not feel normal.
I have order several times from DirtyPCBs and it has worked perfectly.
Is my order lost?
Reagards,
Janne[/quote]
Hey Janne, I will reply your ticket now. Sorry for the delay!
Got the reply now. Thank you!