EN: Signer is running again

DE: Signer ist wieder in Betrieb

FR: Signataire fonctionne à nouveau

ES: Firmante vuelve a funcionar

IT: Firmatario è di nuovo in funzione

The signer has been running again since yesterday, Friday, around 13:00 CEST. We then (while we were doing other work) watched the processing for about another hour… Around 0:30 CEST all outstanding certificate requests (~3000) were processed.

Things didn’t quite go as planned in June. As soon as something cannot be done remotely – there is no remote access to critical systems for security reasons – someone who is authorised to do so has to go the data centre in the Netherlands. Despite Corona, quarantine, floods, overtime at the company and whatever else comes up. That’s maybe two hours. Then two hours home again and in between the actual work. During the opening hours of the data centre, in your free time and paying for your own train ticket or petrol. It’s not always easy to reconcile all that. On Friday afternoon, however, the time had come and the Signer has now been running smoothly again for over a day.

As can be seen from the Critical Team’s plan published yesterday, preliminary work is already underway to make the system redundant throughout and even more robust, so that failures should no longer be noticed by users, because no one is interested in such failures! We are very sorry that you had to wait so long. At the same time, we thank the small core team who have sacrificed nights and weekends over the last five weeks to get the technology back up and running for the CAcert community!