Supporting the UW Web

So the student Web servers are upgraded as of April 29th. The new machines seem to be running well, and I have not so far received any complaints of Web applications not running properly on the new software.

Student Web Server Upgrade
http://www.washington.edu/computing/web/publishing/server-upgrade.html

I’ve been getting a fair number of questions about migrating MySQL servers from the old vergil to the new one, but it has not been too bad.

The number of MySQL servers on vergil is approaching 100.

New vergil (vergil01.u.washington.edu)
load: 0.03 mysqlds: 92

This has been a model upgrade.

The student Web servers are being upgraded this month:

Student Web Server Upgrade
http://www.washington.edu/computing/web/publishing/server-upgrade.html

It looks like there are still 271 MySQL servers that need to move. They have 13 days to do that. On April 22nd, the DNS name vergil.washington.edu will go to vergil01 instead of vergil21, and Web applications won’t connect to those MySQL servers running on vergil21 anymore, assuming they are connecting to vergil.washington.edu.

Here are current numbers of MySQL servers on vergil and vergil01:

Current vergil (vergil21.u.washington.edu)
load: 6.37 mysqlds: 271

New vergil (vergil01.u.washington.edu)
load: 0.03 mysqlds: 3

Many more details of what is being upgraded are on the page linked at the top of this post.

I had a question about using OpenOffice on a UA account, and knowing that it wasn’t likely to get installed system-wide, I thought about what other options were available.  OpenOffice is distributed as an RPM package, so I decided to look into whether it would be possible to install an RPM package in a home directory.

The UA servers use RedHat, so they have RPM installed already. By default RPM edits the system-wide RPM database when RPM is used to install anything.  Most of us do not have access to edit this database, so you need to make a copy of the RPM database in your own home directory.  I found some pretty good instructions for this:

Creating a Private RPM Database
http://www.nordugrid.org/documents/rpm_for_everybody.html#4

I used this method to initialize an RPM database directory in my homedir, and then copy the system dir to my homedir, so that all of the packages installed on the system would be available to fulfill dependencies for any packages that this database is used to install.

After doing this, I was able to install the OpenOffice RPM packages, making sure to use these arguments:

• –dbpath DIRECTORY
  Use the database in DIRECTORY rather than the default path /var/lib/rpm
• –prefix NEWPATH
  For relocatable binary packages, translate all file paths that start with the installation prefix in the package relocation hint(s) to NEWPATH.

This happened a long time ago, but I thought I should call out that this thing is working again.  Anyone with a UA account can access this by going to the root of their Web server, but here are links directly to the error log viewer for each account.

students – https://students.washington.edu/adm/errorlog/
staff – https://staff.washington.edu/adm/errorlog/
faculty – https://faculty.washington.edu/adm/errorlog/
courses – https://courses.washington.edu/adm/errorlog/
depts – https://depts.washington.edu/adm/errorlog/

The University of Melbourne has a nice-looking installation of WordPress MU:

University of Melbourne Blogs

They’re running it as a service @ a cost-recovery rate of $200/year.  It doesn’t look like they have too many blogs running there yet, and the process of starting a new blog seems to be a bit manual for my tastes, but it is good to see WordPress MU being used in this capacity by a university.  I’d support that.

Harvard Law School also runs WordPress MU, with a more automatic blog-creation process, but theirs is free.

Weblogs at Harvard Law School

I get a significant number of requests for information on how to do this.  It’s a pretty bad kludge, but it does seem to work.

Basically, you make three directories:

• one containing the content and an .htaccess file denying all access
• one containing an .htaccess file allowing access via basic auth
• one containing an .htaccess file allowing access via pubcookie

The directories with access via the different authentication methods will also contain symbolic links to either files in the content directory(if the files are not going to change much) or to another directory in the content directory so that you can change the files around without redoing the symbolic links.

You can take a look at an example implementation of this scheme in the multi-auth directory on my staff Web site.

• Export the DB to sql statements.
• Search-and-replace “InnoDB” with “MYISAM”.
• Re-import the tables.  Might want to do this into a different DB than the old one, just in case.
• Configure MediaWiki to use the new MyISAM DB.
• Make sure the user MediaWiki is using to connect to MySQL will be able to access the new DB.

Bonus:

• Put the “skip-innodb” line into the .my.cnf file.
• Stop the DB.
• Start the DB.

InnoDB is gone.  Yaaay.

detail:

bin/mysqldump -u root -p --lock-tables --add-drop-database DATABASE_NAME > DATABASE_NAME.sql

/rc22/d77/agraf/bin/rpl  'ENGINE=InnoDB' 'ENGINE=MyISAM' DATABASE_NAME.sql

bin/mysql -u root -p DATABASE_NAME < DATABASE_NAME.sql

WordPress 2.5.1 was released today, which means that I will now edit the WordPress installation documentation to use the latest WordPress release again, since version 2.5.1 works with the new http-authentication 2.0 plugin.

It is a relief to have the WordPress documentation using the latest, more secure version of WordPress again.  Of course this blog is using WordPress 2.5.1 and the new http-authentication plugin now.

Today I updated the documentation for installing some wikis.

• MediaWiki instructions went from version 1.11.0 to 1.12.0
• MoinMoin instructions went from version 1.5.3 to 1.5.8

The new version of MediaWiki has an option for selecting InnoDB or MyISAM, so the previous changes to that documentation don’t seem quite as necessary, but they still make sense, so I’ve left them intact.

Today a couple of things were added to the UA Web servers.  This includes staff.washington.edu, faculty.washington.edu, courses.washington.edu, depts.washington.edu, students.washington.edu, ovid.u.washington.edu, and vergil.u.washington.edu.

• Python was upgraded from 2.5 to 2.5.2
• The sqlite3 (3.5.4) command-line tool was added.
• Python’s sqlite3 module now functions properly
• The MS SQL Server PHP module was added, which allows connections to MS SQL servers using PHP.