Site updates/Archives

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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Orain Site Update #2
This is an update of all technical changes and issues during the month of August.


 * Technical Changes
 * prod1 was removed from active maintenance on August 6th and removed from the cluster a week later.
 * Orain migrated from RamNode to DigitalOcean. The work began on August 17th
 * We moved away from Memcached to Redis for session and general caching on all Orain servers.
 * We added prod7 to the cluster during the migration. It is responsible for Redis and static content hosting.


 * Technical Issues
 * The job queue did not run any job for 4 days as a result of permissions errors with Redis. We have rolled back to using the database for this for now.
 * All wikis experienced database issues shortly after the migration as a result of MariaDB cache taking up excessive disk space. To fix this in the long term, prod5 was recycled as a new database server.
 * For an hour on the 25th of August, users occasionally got caching errors and log in issues as a result of Redis taking up excessive disk space.

On behalf of Orain staff, John (talk) 22:02, 6 September 2014 (BST)

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