User talk:Samwilson

Recent Orain Updates
Greetings all,

A lot has happened quite recently (I mean a lot), for those not actively involved in our IRC channel (#orain on freenode), here is a brief update of what has happened recently.


 * Upgrades
 * Orain updated to the latest stable release of MediaWiki, 1.23.
 * All extensions which have updates for 1.23 have also been updated.
 * We've moved over to MediaWiki 1.23's json style for i18n.
 * Downtimes
 * We have experienced a few downtimes over the past month. These include service failures (10 minutes in total), upgrade issues (5 minutes total) and issues with our host (15 hours).
 * We have looked into all downtimes and put into place methods we can use to prevent these reoccurring again.
 * New Stuff
 * After a few downtimes, we introduced Nagios to our infrastructure. Nagios can be viewed by any user on prod1.
 * We also introduced an IRC RC bot. All RC feeds on public Orain wikis are now sent to #Orain-feed on JDNet (irc.jasperswebsite.com). Users can join the channel manually as well as introducing bots to the channel.
 * We now have a twitter account! Follow us

We know the past two months have been rough with a few matters which have been occurring internally with our staff but we are working to resolve all issues which we are aware of as soon as possible. I thank you for your patience and I hope we can continue to work together to build an awesome wiki farm! Also, Orain will be 1 year old on July 12th 2014.

Thanks, on behalf of all Orain staff, John (talk) 21:21, 12 June 2014 (BST)

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Orain Site Update #1
This can be called the official first monthly site update hence the #1 so; let's get on to what has happened during the month of July!

During July, Orain added two new servers to the cluster, there were two incidents and one long term fix.
 * Technical
 * prod5 was added as an additional webserver which we plan to use to help distribute the load of web requests and as a fail-over so if prod4 fails, we can continue to provide you all with your wikis.
 * prod6 was added and is still in the setting up stage. It is planned to take over the role of prod1, a server we are planning to decommission eventually.
 * We had a small security issue regarding ElasticSearch on our prod3 server. No unauthorized access to the data stored on the server was seen and the server has since been made more secure. As a security precaution, ElasticSearch was removed from the cluster and wikis were defaulted back to MediaWiki search.
 * From July 30th to August 1st; there were issues with out going MediaWiki mail. This has since been resolved however incoming mail to all @orain.org addresses are still not functioning as of August 3rd.
 * A long-term issue with images was resolved on July 15th.


 * New Features
 * A wikicreator group was added to metawiki so community users can handle new wiki requests which is one step into delegating new roles and responsibilities to the community. Wikicreators are chosen by system administrators using their discretion.
 * Cyberpower678's tool was given access to some database tables on public wikis. As a result the UserAnalysis tool works on all public Orain wikis.
 * UrlShortener was enabled on all Orain wikis to allow shorter URLs to be used. Currently URLs follow the form of 'https://$database.orain.org/o/$id'. If wikis want to use a shorten URL of their choice; please make a request to the system administrators.
 * Private wikis may now (on request) use image authorization for their wikis. This means images are made web-inaccessible as to preserve the security of images uploads while still being accessed by users with 'read' access to your wiki.
 * Orain now allows the use of OAuth. Please see the OAuth page on MediaWiki for more details. OAuth requests can be made on any wiki and will be approved by a system administrator on metawiki.

On behalf of the Orain staff, John 17:35, 3 August 2014 (BST)

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