ari breaks everything
Moderator: Staff
Re: ari breaks everything
Reasons! Okay, firstly, the actual reason: I was fed up with everything on the server being out of date, parts of it really badly. So I took everything down and upgraded everything. Technically this is even a new server with a new IP address and all.
The fuller story is: Some Chinese web spider decided to be a jerk and crawl the site way too fast (i.e. fast enough that it would have made things slow for everyone else), while also not being obviously blockable in any way except for geoblocking all of China. So I decided to do that. The first thing you need to do in order to geoblock countries is to install a geoblocking library. Which failed because the operating system on the server was too old. So I tried to upgrade it, and it promptly wedged itself by being confused about which package owned one file in the documentation of TeX (which, in case you hadn't heard of it, is not exactly a thing we actively use on this server; nor does an ownership conflict over a documentation file seem like a reason to completely fail a system upgrade, but I guess Debian's standards for purity are higher than mine).
I could probably have unwedged the above situation, but I'm too old, so I decided that it would make more sense to just start over and bring along nothing but the actual site content. So I took down the old server which was technically working fine except for the package management problem, and rebuilt everything on a new one.
Anyway, the status right now is:
What works, at least probably:
The fuller story is: Some Chinese web spider decided to be a jerk and crawl the site way too fast (i.e. fast enough that it would have made things slow for everyone else), while also not being obviously blockable in any way except for geoblocking all of China. So I decided to do that. The first thing you need to do in order to geoblock countries is to install a geoblocking library. Which failed because the operating system on the server was too old. So I tried to upgrade it, and it promptly wedged itself by being confused about which package owned one file in the documentation of TeX (which, in case you hadn't heard of it, is not exactly a thing we actively use on this server; nor does an ownership conflict over a documentation file seem like a reason to completely fail a system upgrade, but I guess Debian's standards for purity are higher than mine).
I could probably have unwedged the above situation, but I'm too old, so I decided that it would make more sense to just start over and bring along nothing but the actual site content. So I took down the old server which was technically working fine except for the package management problem, and rebuilt everything on a new one.
Anyway, the status right now is:
What works, at least probably:
- Logging on to the wiki, for users who have already done so at least once
- Most editing and display functionality on the wiki, including the stuff that always breaks in server moves like image uploads and thumbnails
- Pages and images on the wiki with non-ASCII characters in the name, hopefully. These caused so much pain in the last server move. If some are broken, please report.
- This forum and Bastion's
- Static content, such as the map archive
- The geoblock of China. It kinda feels nice to watch all these HTTP 403s roll by in the access log.
- Logging on to the wiki, for new user accounts
- Remote avatars, either here or on Bastion. The upgrade disabled them by default, and I'm not going to enable them anymore. Remote avatars are a completely pointless feature that should never have existed in the first place.
- Shireroth's old forum and ShireWiki
- FTP accounts on Bastion
- The thing Craitman uses to upload map updates. I don't even remember where it is, much less how to test it.
- Missing extensions on the wiki. Random things seem to get moved into extensions over time in MediaWiki. If you're missing some functionality, tell me what it is, and I'll try to figure out what extension might provide it and enable it.
Jesa habe Ljo kju Ljo toka par tokajj Ljo kju De habe!
Re: ari breaks everything
- The thing Craitman used for uploading maps was indeed broken, now fixed
- As was micras.org's front page
- Spangle's weird ancient experiments on https://micras.org/Archive/ used an ancient database API that's no longer supported; rather than bothering to fix it and all of its SQL injection vulnerabilities, I just replaced the whole thing with a redirect to viewtopic.php?f=2&t=7298
Jesa habe Ljo kju Ljo toka par tokajj Ljo kju De habe!