FreeCinc closing

[djmitche]

It's time to shut down freecinc.

• The taskd server is not built for production deployments -- it's really only suitable for one person running it on a server under their desk. It crashes, hangs, leaks memory, is horrendously insecure, and has no diagnostic output.
• The service is expensive to operate (~US$40/mo).
• My Kubernetes skills are not sufficient to keep it running (witness the https portion of the website being down).

I'll be turning off the service in January 2023.

[hickey]

Perfectly understandable.

I have seen over the past couple of days issues with connecting to freecinc.com and just found your message. I would like to take the opportunity to thank you for providing the service out there early on when I started using Taskwarrior. It was quite useful to have a taskd server out there to keep all my machines in sync.

[djmitche]

Thanks! I do wish I could continue supporting this, but it's just not practical..

[djmitche]

There are still a number of users of this service, and I'm concerned the news may not have reached them. There aren't a lot of avenues for TW news, but we did miss one: taskwarrior.org.

I'm adding an announcement to taskwarrior.org about this, and pushing the date back by one month.

[djmitche]

announcement

[traycerb]

Yes, thank you also 🙏. I was (still am 😰) using it. Where is the best resource for setting up your own taskserver? The official docs show an empty page. I seem to recall freecinc had good instructions, at least for configuring things on the user side. Perhaps you can post how you set it up here for posterity's sake, seeing how freecinc is down.

EDIT: Well, I'm answering my own questions but taskd setup has moved to this page https://gothenburgbitfactory.github.io/taskserver-setup/ (regrettably as a slide show).

[djmitche]

It's definitely not easy to set up! That slideshow is the only documentation I know of, and is what I followed when I set up my own server.

[hickey]

I have been working on getting the taskd and web repackaged in Docker containers. That work is happening over in https://gitlab.com/wt0f/freecinc-taskd and https://gitlab.com/wt0f/freecinc-web. The original Dockerfiles were not building for me and the base images were quite old. I suspect that there were updates to the base images that conflicted with what was being done in the Dockerfiles.

The plan is to get good solid Docker images and produce a good process for initializing the certs and required data structures. It will have to get done one way or another :-)

Things have been slowed down quite a bit by my move across country, but I am staring to have some free time again and will continue working on getting the containers built and operational.

[djmitche]

It looks like those are baed on https://github.com/freecinc/freecinc-web and https://github.com/freecinc/freecinc-taskd? You're also welcome to https://github.com/freecinc/freecinc-helm! In fact, I'd be happy to collaborate on getting things back up and running, if you've got the know-how.

If you're just looking to get a docker container that will run taskd, suitable for individual use (so, without freecinc-web), that might be an easier task.

[hickey]

Yes, they are direct copies of your repos for the baseline. Initially i was hoping it would be just a docker build to get images, but there were issues with the build and it seemed that every little change I would do to try to get the build going cause another problem. So that is when I decided that I would fork the repos and do a major update to pretty recent images and modules.

It is mostly a time issue right now. Getting everything running will not really be a problem. I actually started working on taskd yesterday while the girlfriend was at the doctor for her foot. Sure enough by the time I really got working on the project she came out.

The first version will be enough to where I can get it running for my uses. Then I will work on getting the image to where anybody with a bit of knowledge (i.e. can execute the proper commands) can properly setup the certs and server config. At that point I can focus on the web component for anyone who wants to run the web interface. Just have not fully decided if I am going to keep them as 2 separate images or try to combine them into one image.

Certainly I would welcome help. I don't see this as terribly complex task. Certainly not compared to a lot of other things I work on.

[djmitche]

It's probably not worth someone setting up their own freecinc-web, so perhaps the best course is to continue with the freecinc-taskd image (maybe just renaming it to taskwarrior-taskd?) and set that up so that it can generate creds via a command-line setup.

[clach04]

Yes, thank you also 🙏. I was (still am 😰) using it. Where is the best resource for setting up your own taskserver? The official docs show an empty page. I seem to recall freecinc had good instructions, at least for configuring things on the user side. Perhaps you can post how you set it up here for posterity's sake, seeing how freecinc is down.

EDIT: Well, I'm answering my own questions but taskd setup has moved to this page https://gothenburgbitfactory.github.io/taskserver-setup/ (regrettably as a slide show).

https://github.com/GothenburgBitFactory/guides/tree/master/taskserver-setup has a tex version

and https://github.com/GothenburgBitFactory/taskserver-setup appears to be the source version

[hickey]

I have just released the 1.1.0 version of the taskd docker container that I had announced a while back. This release simplifies a bunch of the nitty gritty of getting taskd up and running. There was also a bit of work added to create users and their certificates.

I have changed the project name also so not to infringe as much on the Freecinc name/reputation. While the link above should work for quite a while, the new taskd project is https://gitlab.com/wt0f/taskd/. The README has (I think) everything one needs to know to get the server up and running. If there are any problems encountered please drop an issue into the project to let me know.

As for freecinc-web, I have done no work on anything there. Right now I am not planning on it and won't be planning anything unless I receive a bunch of requests or when I finally get some time to dig through the code that is there. If the code is really just the Freecinc website that assisted a user with setting up Taskwarrior to sync with Freecinc, then I agree with @djmitche that there probably is not much value there. My initial thought with freecinc-web was it would be wonderful to have a self-service portal for people to create a user and manage their certs. I suspect that this functionality would be all new code and most of what is there would go away.

[djmitche]

Thanks! This looks fantastic, and will be a great help to folks in migrating away from freecinc!

[djmitche]

Oh, and to be clear -- I don't mind "infringement" on the name or anything like that (and to my knowledge it's not a trademark). I only suggested renaming the image to avoid confusion with freecinc.com, which as a globally unique domain name can only run one taskd. :)

[hickey]

I spent the last day or so considering changing the name away from Freecinc to avoid confusion and there was really nothing in the container that was (for lack of a better term) "Freecinc". It is really just a taskd install and I did not want to upset anyone (mostly you) by using the Freecinc name. When I saw your posting from 2 weeks ago suggesting a name change I decided to go ahead and pull the trigger now before people start looking at the previous name. 😄

BTW, I just looked at www.freecinc.com and the page is still allowing people to generate keys. You may consider updating the page to let anyone coming across the page know that the service will be shutting down and the date of expected shutdown. You are more than welcome to point people to my repo to setup their own taskd server.

[djmitche]

Huh, I can't load it.

I wonder if that has to do with HSTS -- it automatically defaults to https for me. What browser are you using? I wonder if it's in the HSTS preload list for some browsers and not others.

[djmitche]

Oh, interesting! It seems to be cached in my browser session, but bleeding even into private tabs. Opening it in a new Firefox profile works OK (well, images don't load, but what can you do). I'll update it.

[hickey]

I have tried in Firefox and Chrome. Both of them show the same page.

[djmitche]

Yeah, I think if you had accessed freecinc.com when it had its http -> https redirect in place, your browser would "remember" that redirect and you'd see the same behavior I do.

[djmitche]

Website is updated:

(images and CSS still don't load since they use https URLs, but at least the information is there)