The Environmental Data Initiative (EDI) technical team is excited to announce that we have completed the migration of PASTA+ and related services to the latest version (18.04 LTS) of the Ubuntu operating system. A total 18 servers were affected, including those in our production, staging, and development environments. This event also brought to bear new versions of the Tomcat and Jetty servlet containers to our Java infrastructure and the use of NGINX as our primary front-end web server. In addition, we are now using LetsEncrypt SSL certificates throughout our public-facing infrastructure.
As part of our change to the use of LetsEncrypt, we are now redirecting all HTTP requests to HTTPS to enhance and enforce network-level security – especially when connections contain user login credentials in the payload. It has been brought to our attention that some users may be using scripts that rely on the HTTP connection. If this is the case, your software should be modified to either directly use the HTTPS protocol in your request or ensure that your software will follow a 301 “redirect” to HTTPS. The “cURL” command, for instance, will follow redirects if provided the “-L” or “–location” command line flag. For example:
curl -i -L -X GET http://pasta.lternet.edu/package/eml
will redirect to “https://pasta.lternet.edu/package/eml“.
Finally, our migration touched a great deal of system-level configuration, which still may not be perfectly tuned. If you experience any oddity or issues in the use of PASTA+ services, please let us know, along with as much detail as you can provide, at your earliest convenience.
