Wikimedia Commons images are working again

RationalWiki uses images from Wikimedia Commons where available, via the InstantCommons mechanism. This broke last week because Commons' API went HTTPS-only. This is fixed on RW now, though you will see HTTP pages with HTTPS images.

(yes, we still need to get around to HTTPS on the wiki itself)

Downtime Fri 03 Jul 2015, ~12:30-13:30 UTC

After much puzzling around MySQL, it seems apache2 was hammering the living my-goodness out of the MySQL instance on apache1. There is no obvious reason for this to have occurred ... but I disabled Apache on apache2 on the assumption that flying on one engine beats crashing on two. Investigation proceeds, further hiccups may occur.

Update: The answer: MySQL on apache1 saw apache2 as coming from its internal IP, so connections from it hung when it tried a reverse DNS lookup on this IP. Simple fix: skip-name-resolve in my.cnf.

Downtime weekend of 4/19/2014

UPDATE 04/20/14-11:40AM EDT

We have started the update for the database server so will be offline for at least several hours. I will be monitoring the situation and get everything back up as soon as possible. 

UPDATE 04/20/14-2:00AM EDT

First round of updates went smoothly with no downtime or issues. Tomorrow's update will cause downtime though. Probably 3-4 hours.

ORIGINAL POST:

Linode, our hosting service, has upgraded their services and in order to take advantage of the upgrades we need to power down our machines. This first phase of this upgrade will occur on Saturday 4/19/2014, and will involve upgrading our frontend and apache clone. This should not require taking the site offline but could potential cause strange behavior or decreased performance.

The second phase will occur at 12:00pm EDT Sunday, 4/20/2014 and will require shutting down our database server. This will cause the site to go offline. We estimate that this should take 3-4 hours. 

For more information on the upgrades see Linodes blog post.

Connectivity issues at our hosting facility

The Newark hosting facility where our servers are located is experiencing connectivity issues. This does affect the RationalWiki websites, status updates are available here.

Incoming! Rapid server reconfiguration underway ...

RationalWiki just got sued by Kent Hovind. The lawsuit is a comedy classic and will brighten your Friday afternoon. (Saloon Bar discussion.)

We're not worried about the suit — the worry is that we're about to get a zillion well-wishers hammering the server. Trent is frantically rejigging our setup as we write this, pressing a spare box into service. More news as it comes, and if the site entirely vanishes please try again five minutes later ...

Update, next day: We quickly spun up a 4GB Linode to just put Apache on (MediaWiki scales horizontally really well). It appears that Apache was taking lots of CPU, not MySQL! So we've split Apache for the main site between the two boxes (the old 8GB and the new 4GB) and the setup is ticking along nicely. Trent may have some nice graphs later.

The wiki is getting hammered.

Haven't checked the Squid logs as to what it is —I suspect fallout from the Nye/Ham debate. But we're getting a buttload of requests, a lot of Apache processes, load around 50-55, MySQL using 70% of CPU after a restart ... we're not actually running out of memory, the wiki's just legitimately doing a lot of work. So page loads are often working, but taking up to a minute, and there's lots of timeouts. David's keeping an eye on stuff.

Edit: It doesn't look like any particular article. Our creationism stuff in general is getting lots of hits. While youre waiting, here's today's Google cache of "How come there are still monkeys?"

Edit 2: Still very highly loaded, but is serving up pages now, if very slowly.

Apache zombie process problems.

The Apache server is being a dick. It keeps dying with unkillable zombie processes; these don't serve data, but they do keep their hold on port 80. The only workaround is to reboot the server. This is, of course, ridiculous. I've put a ticket in with Linode. Anyone got ideas? It's just the standard Ubuntu apache2 package.

Update: Apache was causing kernel oopses. (Things that make you go "wtf.") Linode suggest using kernel 3.9-linode instead of 2.6-linode (the default for Ubuntu 10.04, which our box runs on). We'll see how that goes next reboot. Might even fix the white-screening blog too.