WikiIndex:Admin Notes

December

We have moved to the cloud - please identify any issues that come from that. Also, please add your support to the WikiIndex:NewLogoDecision. Best, MarkDilley

October 2010 Upgrade Thoughts

moved to WikiIndex:Spring 2011 Upgrade Path

Dreamhost Disaster

Our former hoster, Dreamhost, had a server failure about noon on Saturday, May 5th that caused 23 of our wikis and blogs to go down including WikiIndex.org and RecentChanges.info. They brought up a replacement server on Sunday the 6th but were unable to restore our sites from either the failed server or the server backups and that condition remains today. Luckily the databases for the sites were not affected because they were on a separate server and we were able to pull the very latest data out of the database.

We had already made the decision to move from Dreamhost to 1and1 before this failure occurred because of the many outages and very bad performance of Dreamhost, so we decided to rebuild all of the sites on 1and1. Some of our sites are quite large and uploading just the images can take over a day, so restoring the sites is really a pain. Dreamhost and 1and1 are on different versions of the MySQL database and restoration without corrupting the data proved a bit daunting for a while until we found the magic bullet. Most of our wikis are now operational including WikiIndex but several sites are still awaiting name transfers and some wikis have yet to be restored.

There are almost always losses when this kind of thing happens and for WikiIndex we lost images that were entered between 15 Dec 2006 and 5 May 2007. Most of these are logos and they can be recovered as we get the chance. The image loss was the result of poor judgment on my part because I had elected to backup the image directories on the server that failed because of their size.

If you run across a missing image just re-upload it under the same name and all should be ok. If you notice any configuration or extension issues just let me know and I'll track them down.

Sorry for any inconvenience this outage may have caused.

John 22:09, 15 May 2007 (EDT)

You will be ok wit 1and1, i used em for eight years, never had downtime. Just other things to watch for now, Good Luck wit 1and1.... Written by a 1and1 eight year ignored client

Dreamhost

We are going to have to find a more reliable hoster than Dreamhost. The outages over the last two weeks are just unacceptable! Let us know if you have a recommendations for a MediaWiki friendly hoster. We are going to change within the next two weeks. John 12:06, 26 February 2007 (PST)

System Outage 2/22/2007 - 2/23/2007

Sorry about the system outage over the last two days, Dreamhost upgraded PHP 5 to a new version and it took down all of our wikis that were not on MW version 1.9.X. I was force to upgrade all of our wikis to 1.9.2 and still have some to go. Not a happy camper!

Beware of PHP 5.2.1 upgrades and MW versions below 1.9.x!

John 19:29, 23 February 2007 (PST)

Spam Control Policy

I've put up a proposed Spam Control Policy page to try and get our spam fighting coordinated and everyone on the same page. Please check it out and revise, extend and discuss as you wish. The local spam blacklist is a bit out of control and may be defeating it's own purpose. I propose deleting the content of that page and starting over using the new policy.
John 14:44, 18 February 2007 (PST)

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Page Location Problems

Since the Move we have been experiencing some problems with specific pages generating errors. The problem was traced to the code that allows the use of so called "pretty URLs" (URLs without the /index.php part). The offending code has been removed and all is well. The downside is that you may have to re-bookmark specific pages. The issues with this code are complex and we will continue to use the ugly URLs until we are sure we have code that addresses all the issues.
John 16:28, 8 February 2007 (PST)
(Partial workaround implemented 15feb07.)

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Vector and 1 million hits

Sorry for joining this page late, for some reason this time I did not receive an email alert that a message had been posted on my talk page. Anyway, and I think someone else has mentioned this on this page, I think it would be good to change the default page "skin" to vector (to do this put:

$wgDefaultSkin = 'vector';

in LocalSettings.php). This gives a modern look, familiar to users of wikipedia.

As an aside, I notice that the MainPage is approaching the 1 million hits mark. Maybe someone could design a nice banner to mark the occasion? All the best, -- Carl McBride (talk) 03:23, 17 November 2010 (PST)

This wiki uses MediaWiki 1.10.1, this version was released long ago and doesn't include Vector. To use it, this wiki should upgrade to 1.16. See the thread above. --Bachinchi 08:55, 17 November 2010 (PST)

Thanks Bachinchi. Given that any presumable upgrade would be to the latest version, I implicitly assumed that it would be to 1.16.0. However, in general, on upgrading one usually maintains ones original LocalSettings.php file from before. For this reason I made an explicit mention of the $wgDefaultSkin variable. Otherwise WikiIndex would continue with MonoBook as the default skin (which is starting to look dated) regardless of the version installed. All the best, -- Carl McBride (talk) 09:09, 17 November 2010 (PST)