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Update on the System Recovery

Hello,

I realize that for many of you this has been a long and troublesome process, and I can thankfully say that ShoutWiki will soon be back up and fully functional.  Currently, I’m working on recovering all the databases; it’s a slow process, but so far all the databases that have been recovered (there are around 700 in all) are completely intact which means that you did not lose any pages, etc. from this crash.

After all the databases are recovered, we will need to basically reinstall the server, and once that is completed ShoutWiki will back in action.

Thank you all for your patience during this time, and I hope that you continue to choose ShoutWiki!

Regards,

Skizzerz
ShoutWiki Technical Team

UPDATE 1 (31 March 2011, 3:14am UTC): Current status is 125 done, 521 to go. Will continue to update as this progresses.

UPDATE 2 (31 March 2011, 3:52am UTC): Current status is 274 done, 372 to go.

UPDATE 3 (2 April 2011, 6:55pm UTC): There were about 10 wikis that didn’t recover properly, so I’m working on a way to recover them. Once this is done, everything else should go relatively quickly.

UPDATE 4 (4 April 2011, 11:56pm UTC): Clarification on the above: When I said they did not recover properly, this does NOT mean that they can’t be recovered. The issue lies with some stuff wrong with the backend behind the dbs, so certain large wikis with lots of revisions and log entries took too long to dump in one go before MySQL crashed. What I’ll be doing for these 6 wikis (got 4 of them to work normally since the last update) is dumping them table-by-table, so your stuff will not be lost. As for an update on how other stuff is going, we are now waiting for the Head Tech to reinstall the Operating System on the server so that we may begin restoring our backups. Due to the nature of the backup restoring process, wikis will become available as the backups get restored, so check back in a day or three to see if your wiki is up.

UPDATE 5 (9 April 2011): OS is going to be reinstalled sometime later today, and provided all goes well, so will the wiki restorations. Wikis will be restored in alphabetical order and will become available as they get restored (meaning some will be up before others). I’ll post another update when the restorations actually start.

UPDATE 6 (16 April 2011): The tech team has taken backups of databases and important configuration files. The CTO estimates that we might get started on the recovery as soon as this weekend, but it might take a major part of the next week. We’ll keep you posted on this. –Jack Phoenix

UPDATE 7 (19 April 2011): The operating system has now been reinstalled and the backup files are being copied to the server currently. Recovery will begin later today. –Jack Phoenix

UPDATE 8 (19 April 2011): Data recovery proper has begun. During this process the site may display various error messages. –Misza

UPDATE 9 (19 April 2011): The wiki restoration process has begun. Wikis should become available as they get restored. They are going in random order, so we cannot give any ETAs on specific wikis. Please note that just because your wiki is back, it does NOT mean that all the restores are done. As such, if issues arise, please alert a staff member on IRC so that we can look into it. We are also considering rolling out the 1.16 upgrade after the wikis get restored, so you may see some downtime there as well. –Skizzerz

UPDATE 10 (21 April 2011): We have restored the vast majority of the wikis, as people were quick to find out, we ran into a LOT of issues trying to restore Autopedia and Simpsons Fanon. We’re going to continue working on ways to restore these two wikis, but in the meantime, we will be pushing out the 1.16 upgrade to the rest of the wikis. After the upgrade finishes, editing will be re-enabled. –Skizzerz

UPDATE 11 (27 April 2011): We’re working on both issues, the MediaWiki upgrade and restoration of Autopedia and Simpsons Fanon databases, but it turns out that MediaWiki’s default upgrade script is not suitable for our purposes as-is, which means that we have to write our own upgrade script. This is something that we want to do right, without rushing, in order not to mess up anything, which is why it might take a bit longer then expected. Once the techs have finished writing the upgrade script, the actual upgrade process should be relatively quick, after which the database will be unlocked and you can resume editing. We’ll keep you posted on this. –Jack Phoenix

UPDATE 12 (1 May 2011): The update process has begun. In the meantime, a “ShoutWiki is currently undergoing maintenance” page will show until updates are complete. Once complete, editing will be re-enabled. ETA is about two hours from now, provided no issues are found. –Skizzerz

UPDATE 13 (1 May 2011): Updates are complete and editing has been re-enabled. If you run into issues, please let someone know on IRC and open a bug in our bugzilla: http://bugzilla.shoutwiki.com — At some point in time we’ll be re-updating to the newest 1.16 version, but this will not cause any downtime and should be for the most part invisible to you guys.

By Skizzerz

ShoutWiki staff member

387 replies on “Update on the System Recovery”

UPDATE 12 (1 May 2011): The update process has begun. In the meantime, a “ShoutWiki is currently undergoing maintenance” page will show until updates are complete. Once complete, editing will be re-enabled. ETA is about two hours from now, provided no issues are found. –Skizzerz

@Nick:
There is a difference between restoring one wiki and a wiki farm, though do take into account it’s not the only factor leading to this period of time.

An actual company with employees would have been restored a month ago, part of the slowness is attributable to the fact that ShoutWiki is really a group of people doing this in their spare time.
Additionally the necessity of working with data on the server and dumping it before reformatting the server is also attributable to a slow down in the time taken for restoration. A restoration plan where you start up a new server and prepare it while you’re fixing the data on the crashed server takes less time than waiting till you can reformat. It is a possibility, but I believe in this case choice of what type of server hosting to use is attributable to why it was not an option while ShoutWiki was restoring.

To be honest though, extending downtime with a system upgrade is not good PR management.
There are also methods of doing wiki farm scale system upgrades without taking down the actual visible content on wiki. Frankly, if you do it right you can actually do it with minimum read-only time. And with the aforementioned server transition method and a bit of dns, it’s possible to have all of ShoutWiki Online besides the two broken wiki while trying to recover the two broken wiki.

@Escyos

That would depend on how the tyre became flat. Lack of maintenance or due to someone laying nails on the road?

But seeing Update 12, is there any point in discussing this anymore?

@Silver Knight

They must have found another issue, then. Just keep an eye out for update no. 13…

Editing seems to be re-enabled now. Whats the ETA on Autopedia and Simpsons Fanon? Are you going to be able to recover them?

Thank you everyone for all your hard work! Everything seems to be working on my end though the site was loading slowly at the start. The only issue I have that is that the tabs are floating away from the page but it’s something I can overlook since they still work. Thanks again!

The site responses are EXTREMELY slow… It takes what? Over ten minutes to load almost anything. Not fun. Hope you can get it to speed up soon.

Site is so slow that all my attempts to log in time out. And I can’t get any editing pages open either.

Well, let’s see:

1) Pages are loading dog-slow.

2) Tabs not displaying properly.

3) Infoboxes are not displaying at all.

Reports that the wikis are back in business are both premature and greatly exaggerated. So far you can consider me extremely unimpressed with the MediaWiki upgrade and the decision to leave editing disabled for days in order to apply it, if this is the end result. Hope it gets better in a day or so, guys … 🙁

You better recover Autopedia because I’ve waited for over 5 weeks otherwise I will raise hell on you.

At the moment, staff have no idea why it is so slow.

From IRC:
[08:41] at first, I thought it was squid, etc. refreshing the caches
[08:41] now I’m not entirely sure. still might be a cache thing, could be an apache config thing

Once they find out what is causing the slow speeds, they can fix it. Please just bear with staff until then.

Also, I’m sure they’ll be able to fix Simpsons Fanon and Autopedia.

For some reason, I loaded “The Real Housewives of Fat Tony” page on Wikisimpsons, and a few secs before I loaded “Two Clams in Love” page on Fish Hooks Wiki, and the Wikisimpsons page stopped loading before the Fish Hooks Wiki page, even though the Fish Hooks Wiki page started loading first. On my second attempt, it was the other way around. Wierd……..

Things have gotten worse because of this update. The sites are very slow, things are messed up, and it looks like we can only edit once per hour.

I was writing an episode summary for “The Real Housewives of Fat Tony” on Wikisimpsons, and an error page kept showing up. By the time the preview page had finally loaded, the text I’d spent half-an-hour on had disappeared. Why is the sites so slow? Probably because of that MediaWiki upgrade. I think they should have done the update to the wikis BEFORE they re-enabled editing.

The only thing I want is another update within the next three days. Nobody wants to edit at a slow wiki, y’know.

Looks like the issue was fixed. Anomalies with the layout are gone and its moving fast again 😀

@Solar Dragon

You aren’t angry because your wiki isn’t down. How about you get into my shoes? You don’t know how angry I am. Two wikis out of the 700 that don’t work is Autopedia. We’ve missed goddamn over 100 car updates!!

@ShoutWiki

I will give you a few days to recover Autopedia or I will raise hell even if you threaten to ban me. I’ll find a new goddamn host that won’t break down for 50 days.

Well, that’s it. I’m moving to Referata. A discussion will be held at Wikia Autopedia.

@Silver Knight – You give them a few days and decide to move 8 minutes later. Give them a chance – what they need to do probably takes a lot of manual work.

@Silver Knight

How many times do we have to tell you? If your car updates are so important, USE A SANDBOX WIKI OR A TEXT FILE TO WRITE THE ARTICLES. Really, you’re just becoming more of a nuisance than anything else.If you want to leave… go right ahead, you might actually do us a favour, too.

Also, nice try in telling them you’ll give them a few days and then decide to snap out a few minutes later. How about doing what you say or vice-versa for once? And raising hell isn’t going to speed the process up. Go do some research, you clearly have no idea of how a wiki is recovered.

Writing in a text file is not good enough. Wiki editing is a cake, delicious, while writing it out on notepad is like having your testicles bitten, painful and at all costs avoidable.

Might i suggest using one of the free wiki hosts elsewhere or even better install mediawiki on your computer and have a handy place to store all your stuff.

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