RationalWiki gets an upgrade! Per the details here, Linode has doubled everyone's RAM for free. Trent will be putting the various machines into upgrade queues today. He
will stagger the upgrades starting with the Squids to limit downtime. However,
when the backend is upgraded the site will not be available.
(We are very happy customers of Linode and can heartily recommend their service. This is a referer link that gives RWF a few pennies.)
Tuesday, April 9, 2013
Saturday, February 16, 2013
Search index updated, will update weekly.
Search on RationalWiki uses Lucene. The Lucene index hadn't actually updated since July 2012 - because incremental updating didn't work, because Trent had to disable the OAIRepository extension because it was breaking other stuff.
A complete reindex (we're currently around 86,000 pages total) takes 20-30 minutes, so David's set it to run one of those weekly. This is not ideal, but is a vast improvement.
Fixing it properly will require fixing OAIRepository, and possibly even writing documentation that doesn't have a big red warning saying it's completely wrong. Anyone feeling inspired?
A complete reindex (we're currently around 86,000 pages total) takes 20-30 minutes, so David's set it to run one of those weekly. This is not ideal, but is a vast improvement.
Fixing it properly will require fixing OAIRepository, and possibly even writing documentation that doesn't have a big red warning saying it's completely wrong. Anyone feeling inspired?
Friday, February 8, 2013
Editing through open proxies has been blocked.
We've been suffering an attack from a vandalbot written specially for us which appears to hop from open proxy to open proxy. So I've had to disable editing through an open proxy, using the following lines in LocalSettings.php:
$wgEnableDnsBlacklist = true;
$wgDnsBlacklistUrls = array( 'xbl.spamhaus.org', 'opm.tornevall.org' );
Ordinary not-logged-in IP-number editors should be able to edit and remonstrate with us over our ignorance in the usual manner, per the invitation to do so on the front page (and have been doing so).
Note that I think the open proxy block also affects logged-in users. If you are a regular RW editor and this is a serious problem for you, please email David.
This only affects English RationalWiki, not Russian RationalWiki .
Editing through an ordinary non-anonymous proxy (your work or ISP) is fine.
$wgEnableDnsBlacklist = true;
$wgDnsBlacklistUrls = array( 'xbl.spamhaus.org', 'opm.tornevall.org' );
Ordinary not-logged-in IP-number editors should be able to edit and remonstrate with us over our ignorance in the usual manner, per the invitation to do so on the front page (and have been doing so).
Note that I think the open proxy block also affects logged-in users. If you are a regular RW editor and this is a serious problem for you, please email David.
This only affects English RationalWiki, not Russian RationalWiki .
Editing through an ordinary non-anonymous proxy (your work or ISP) is fine.
Sunday, January 27, 2013
The thrashing of the squids.
RW now has a more elaborate setup than the previous single server:
This is holding up really nicely of late - we didn't even notice the effects of our last Reddit onslaught!
Lately it's been flaky - Squid has been exhausting memory on its servers badly enough to invoke Linux's Out Of Memory killer. Apparently this is pretty much always due to misconfiguration, so we're trying to work out the magical numbers. Please bear with us.
In the meantime, if you get a 503 error or a blank page or other really weird flakiness from the site, please email David at dgerard@gmail.com with the time and date of the error. This can be useful occasionally!
Edit: Kludge in place on squid1/2 to check the Squid process once a minute and restart if necessary. This should make things more reliable while we work out how to do it right.
- apache1, which has the MySQL server, the Lucene search server and, of course, the Apache (with libphp5) - a 4GB Ubuntu 12.04 box
- squid1, a 1GB Ubuntu 12.04 box running Squid (a reverse proxy server) and that's it
- squid2, ditto
- a load balancer, the thing at the IP for rationalwiki.org, which just sends requests to the squids as fast as it can.
This is holding up really nicely of late - we didn't even notice the effects of our last Reddit onslaught!
Lately it's been flaky - Squid has been exhausting memory on its servers badly enough to invoke Linux's Out Of Memory killer. Apparently this is pretty much always due to misconfiguration, so we're trying to work out the magical numbers. Please bear with us.
In the meantime, if you get a 503 error or a blank page or other really weird flakiness from the site, please email David at dgerard@gmail.com with the time and date of the error. This can be useful occasionally!
Edit: Kludge in place on squid1/2 to check the Squid process once a minute and restart if necessary. This should make things more reliable while we work out how to do it right.
Tuesday, October 9, 2012
10/09/2012 Traffic Spike
With in the first hour of the day we had 10,000 unique visitors, by this time we are closing in on 100,000. Which at one point used to be our yearly traffic. Expect site trouble. The influx is started from reddit but I don't see which article.
Sunday, July 22, 2012
Upgrades
The vast majority of the work is completed on the upgrades for RW.
The most notable difference for our users is we have jumped 3 major releases to the latest version of MW. We are now running 1.19.1. If you want to know about the major changes review these pages:
Most of the extensions have been upgraded to newer releases as well but should continue to function normally. There were also major upgrades behind the scenes with our software and database but these should be mostly "silent" for normal users.
Continue to report in strange goings on at the RW technical support page.
The most notable difference for our users is we have jumped 3 major releases to the latest version of MW. We are now running 1.19.1. If you want to know about the major changes review these pages:
Most of the extensions have been upgraded to newer releases as well but should continue to function normally. There were also major upgrades behind the scenes with our software and database but these should be mostly "silent" for normal users.
Continue to report in strange goings on at the RW technical support page.
Saturday, July 21, 2012
7/22/2012 Downtime
UPDATE: Everything is moving along as planned, a series of database updates will have to run for many hours yet. I will be heading to bed and hoping to finalize things in the morning. Depending on issues hopefully we will be done Sunday afternoon.
There will be substantial downtime all day Sunday as I am implementing a whole lot of upgrades at all levels. The downtime will likely begin early Sunday with a site lockdown, while readable the site will not be able to be edited. As the day progresses the site will likely be totally down at several points or return strange errors or nothing at all. I will try and keep updates posted on progress as well as a more substantial explanation about what pertinent changes to the site users/readers will need to know about.
There will be substantial downtime all day Sunday as I am implementing a whole lot of upgrades at all levels. The downtime will likely begin early Sunday with a site lockdown, while readable the site will not be able to be edited. As the day progresses the site will likely be totally down at several points or return strange errors or nothing at all. I will try and keep updates posted on progress as well as a more substantial explanation about what pertinent changes to the site users/readers will need to know about.
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