Wikispooks:Site Status

Maintenance is ongoing. Site unstable.
Save your work offline regularly - i.e. a copy/paste into 'Notepad' or other text editor before saving it here since there is a possibility that changes may be lost. See below for further information.
If you hit a problem that you think is to do with the site software, report it here.

5 January 2015

Core software upgrade to Mediawiki 1.26.2. --Peter P (talk) 07:21, 6 January 2016 (GMT)

8 November 2015

Server upgrade + re-jigging caches and database configs involving Localsetting.php edits. May have to stop and restart both web server and/or MySQL + plus re-boot the main server. While warning banner shows, make sure you copy any work before committing it - just in case. --Peter P (talk) 13:52, 8 November 2015 (GMT)

Update

Server upgrade to 4 core cpu and 8Gb RAM complete. Main cache changed to 'Memcached' + messages and parser caches set up for Memcached. --Peter P (talk) 11:55, 14 November 2015 (GMT)

17 May 2015

Rebuilding database following software upgrade --Peter P (talk) 08:28, 17 May 2015 (IST)

1-4 May 2015

Jobs

Commissioning a new server with latest Centos OS + new MariaDB database software (GNU public licence) to replace MySQL which is now owned by Oracle. Upgrades to MW-1.24.xx and SMW 2.1.xx.

Progress

Substantially complete with just relatively minor glitches to sort out. Risk of having to revert to 2 May backups is now minimal. Op-code cache and jobs queue still disabled so site may still seems slow. --Peter P (talk) 12:14, 3 May 2015 (IST)

27-28 April 2015

Site moved to new server running Linux Centos 7 OS, php 5.4.xx and MariaDB (replacement for MySQL). Please report any issues. --Peter P (talk) 10:05, 1 May 2015 (IST)

18 December 2014

Upgrade to MW-1.24.1.
Rebuild all semantic data.

Note: It may be necessary to disable the saving of edits for a while during this work. --Peter P (talk) 11:34, 18 December 2014 (GMT)

Postponed - issues. --Peter P (talk) 15:17, 18 December 2014 (GMT)

27 September 2014

Upgraded to MW-1.23.3. Patch to 1.23.4 failed the dry run so not implemented. It is a minor maintence release so will wait for next one to judge if a full system u-grade needed.
Upgraded to Semantic Forms 2.8. Lots of new features to explore.

Please advise if any issues arise --Peter P (talk) 17:23, 27 September 2014 (IST)

6 August 2014

Minor patch upgrades MW 1.23.0 -> 1.23.2. Then major upgrade to Semantic MediaWiki, 1.9 -> 2.0. The SMW U/grade requires a semantic data refresh and a database rebuild. Editing will be turned off for couple of hours max (hopefully) from @ 12:15pm BST today. --Peter P (talk) 12:12, 6 August 2014 (IST)

SMW u/grade

First attempt failed - awaiting reply to support queries --Peter P (talk) 12:40, 6 August 2014 (IST)

SMW upgrade complete. Please let me know of any glitches --Peter P (talk) 20:48, 6 August 2014 (IST)

10 June 2014

Upgrading to MW v1.23 and SMW 1.9.2
This is a major upgrade requiring database schema changes. Whilst the main page banner warning is displayed there will be periods when editing is disabled. There may also be short periods when the site is unavailable. --Peter P (talk) 09:51, 10 June 2014 (IST)

Upgrade aborted - problem running update.php. will have another go when solution found - maybe a couple of days --Peter P (talk) 13:43, 10 June 2014 (IST)

Having another go at the upgrade --Peter P (talk) 18:01, 10 June 2014 (IST)

All MW 1.23 database schema changes done + U/g to SMW 1.9.2, but MW 1.23 scripts produce blank main page so reverted to 1.22. There is just an outside possibility that I may need to revert to the pre-u/g schema backup (10 June 2014 12:25) so edits since then and before the all clear are at risk. I'll have another crack at it tomorrow when help requests are hopefully replied to. --Peter P (talk) 18:32, 10 June 2014 (IST)

Important

Upgrade problem turned out to be nothing more than a file permissions issue Duh!!!. However, in my attempts to resolve it, lots of other things were tried, including multiple database and properties rebuilds, disabling various extensions etc. All APPEARS to be OK now but.... please have a good look around and experiment with a couple of edits before relying on things being fully back to normal. I will do likewise. It is possible I may also have failed to re-enable an obscure extension. Also, there may be extensions that will need upgrading. Worst case is we MAY have to revert to the 10:45 am 10 June backup per my email. I will remove the main page warning notice when I have carried out a few further checks --Peter P (talk) 07:47, 12 June 2014 (IST)

24 April 2014

The site was affected by the Heartbleed vulnerability until 1045GMT today. The fix has caused an access issue with the server security module which in being worked on. Expect the odd server re-boot until further notice. --Peter P (talk) 11:02, 24 April 2014 (IST)

Site outage for at least 8 hours on Saturday morning 22 Feb 14

This is reported to me by the hosting company as having been a 'domain registrar status issue' - which makes me uneasy. I've asked for further info. --Peter P (talk) 12:21, 22 February 2014 (GMT)

Further info: from Host support "... essentially it's a glitch in the control panel that crops up form time to time where a security feature in the control panel kicks in in error and disables a domain. There's nothing you could have done about it on your end. Apologies for the inconvenience".

Upgrading SMW and Semantic Forms

Upgrading semantic software withe the php cache and Scribunto disabled. This will also require a data rebuid. Site will remain operational but usual cautions apply - should be back to normal by 12:00 today. --Peter P (talk) 08:27, 12 February 2014 (GMT)

Scribunto/SMW issue

Recent refresh of SMW data threw up lots of errors (@150 out of 9,000 items refreshed). The error was generated by a Scribunto Lua-Engine script called by the SMW refresh script in the course of its looping execution. I intend to switch off Scribunto and run the SMW refresh again to help understand what is happening here. Site notice should be up for maybe 2 hours or so from this message --Peter P (talk) 07:26, 9 February 2014 (GMT)

Refresh done - issues with 14 records (lots less than before) but still don't know what's causing them. --Peter P (talk) 08:14, 9 February 2014 (GMT)

Note:Scribunto disabled whilst investigating issues which may be connected with it. This will primarily affect the cite template. Hopefully will enable again shortly (days rather than hours) --Peter P (talk) 07:57, 12 February 2014 (GMT)

See talk page on the Scribunto issue --Peter P (talk) 10:20, 12 February 2014 (GMT)

Scribunto enabled again - but only to continue investigations. Don't rely on it for any new edits, template functionality - yet --Peter P (talk) 20:13, 12 February 2014 (GMT)

Move to new server

Status of the move and any issues arising.

To-Do list of issues arising from the upgrade' - please add to it if you spot anything.

Saturday 18 January 2014

Move complete and most issues resolved You should notice major server response improvements. There's still some server tweeking to do, notably to Apache mod_security and php cache tuning. These will require occasional Apache restarts so best to keep copying edit box contents to clipboards before saving. But I'm taking a bit of a break from intense techie-tweeking for a few days --Peter P (talk) 08:34, 18 January 2014 (GMT)

Friday 17 January 2014

The site will be put offline from 0700 GMT for about 1 hour while a number of maintenance routines are run. --Peter P (talk) 19:31, 16 January 2014 (GMT)

All data refreshed. There is minor issue arising from my having left the $wgServer directive set to the new server IP address (rather then the hostname for DNS reasons while testing) for an hour or so after going live with it. It has caused 9 'record ID's' out of about 11,000 to have 'invalid server index entries'. I don't know for sure which actual pages that involves right now but it will be those edited very soon after going live - and could be the cause of the Image problems on the pages Patrick edited. Also this page since I was quick to post a progress report on it. It's not serious and will be resolved over the next few days. Meantime please report any other issues. --Peter P (talk) 09:12, 17 January 2014 (GMT)

Panic over pages disappearing from the Main Page boxes resolved. After running SMW_refreshDate twice to confirm the index ID's of problem pages, I ran it once more on just the SMW Type and Property pages (Completes very quickly). It seems that breaks their links to containing pages so as the jobs queue progress the pages disappeared from the Main Page boxes. It is necessary to run SMW_refreshData on both Types/properties AND regular pages even though doing types and properties first negates the need for two complete passes. BIG learning curve this :-)) --Peter P (talk) 13:12, 17 January 2014 (GMT)

Thursday 16 January 2014

The site is now running on the new Cloud-based VM server

There are likely to be teething issues. Please advise here and I'll see to them asap. We have access to the old server for another month or so. It is not open to the world but all software and files remain in place until the contract expires - Insurance :-)).

Note: I will be restarting the Web server several times through today to apply and test configuration changes as they are made, so please continue to exercise caution per the red notice above for as long as it and the main page banner warning are in place --Peter P (talk) 08:10, 16 January 2014 (GMT)

Major issues resolved so site banner warning removed. MAY need to apply minor changes to web server config but your browser cache should cope if you get a 'server reset' message. Piwik, Cron-job backups setup, and the anon-ul glitch should be done today too. --Peter P (talk) 12:45, 16 January 2014 (GMT)