Dynamo Team

Hi Dynamoans,

We are planning to update the Package Manager infrastructure on Thursday, March 21st at 6pm Eastern Daylight Time, anticipating as much as 2 hours of downtime, but the interruption will likely be much shorter. During this time users will not be able to upload, download, or search packages in Dynamo, or access the web site.

Visible changes

The primary reason for the update is to move to more reliable, secure, and maintainable infrastructure for the Package Manager. Although we have had very few interruptions of service over the years, we anticipate that the number of packages and downloads will only continue to rise and we need to have a more scalable backend to support this. For this reason, we expect very few visible changes to Package Manager interactions, and expect that the main impact will simply be uninterrupted usage as the system continues to grow.

  • After the update there will be some changes in the metrics for “Installs, Packages, and Authors” reported on the DynamoPackages.com homepage. The current version reports all packages, and the new version will only count packages that aren’t deprecated.
  • Currently, when a user requests a package deletion (https://github.com/DynamoDS/Dynamo/wiki/Dynamo-FAQ#package-manager), the name of package will become available again for use. After the update, deleted package names will not be available to anyone but the original author. This is a common practice for similar systems and prevents malicious or confusing re-use of names with earlier associations.
  • Currently the package manager can be accessed via both “http://” and “https://”.  The new version of the website will only use the encrypted protocol indicated by “https://” and the “http://” address will redirect to the “https://” version.
  • For users with multiple accounts due to Autodesk Account username changes, those accounts will all be consolidated into a single account and the download and vote counts will be recomputed.  We expect that all accounts will have the most recent username, but if not, the username should update on the next login.
  • Changing usernames in Autodesk Accounts will no longer result in losing access to packages.  The accounts are now keyed to an internal identifier instead of the username.  Every time someone logs in, we will update their username if it changed.

Future Infrastructure Work

On June 1st we will be upgrading additional Package Manager components to increase privacy and data security. This change will necessitate an upgrade to Dynamo Core 1.3.4, Dynamo Core 2.0.2, or later versions. Older versions of Dynamo will not be able to access the Package Manager.  More information on this update will be available in a later post.

Looking forward to smooth sailing into a more secure and reliable Package Manager experience.

Thanks,

The Dynamo Team