As mentioned in our previous blog post, we’ve had to plan a maintenance window. Here are the details:
Announcement
When?
The window will be the entire of the weekend of the 5th/6th of October, however it could well be done early. Keep an eye out on our Facebook and Twitter, as well as this post which we’ll be updating throughout the weekend.
Why?
We’ve had excessive loads on the server, causing pages to not be returned to users. This has caused much upset, and we’ve had to disable various features to try and improve this in the short term. We’re now going to implementing our long term fixes.
What?
The maintenance window will mean sites go into read-only mode while we transfer the necessary data across servers, and configure the new server. We’re hoping that all sites will still be readable during this period, as we’ll be serving read-only data from the old server until the new one is configured and ready. When this is done, we’ll switch be switching the IP address assignments and you’ll then get data from the new server.
The server we are replacing is the server that stores our production MediaWiki code base, and stores the images. All wiki edits and pages are stored on a separate server which is unaffected and will run as usual, so you will not lose any of your hard work. Images will be backed up and transferred across.
If you have any questions, please leave a comment! Again, we thank you for your continued patience.
Updates
09:25 UTC Sat 5th – Maintenance has started. Image uploads and deletions have been turned off temporarily while the maintenance is completed. Wiki creation has also been suspended temporarily.
17:15 UTC Sun 13th – New server in production usage. Maintenance restrictions still in place while the new server is load tested. Thumbnails must be regenerated.
17:00 UTC Mon 14th – Issue with images with UTF-8 characters in their names resolved. These will now thumbnail correctly.
22:18 UTC Mon 14th – Subdomains now redirect to the the correct Main Page (fixes for non-English wikis or wikis with custom main page names.)
20:37 UTC Tue 15th – Wiki creation, image uploads and image deletion re-enabled, marking the end of the maintenance period.
On behalf of the ShoutWiki team,
— Lewis Cawte
Chief Technical Officer, ShoutWiki.
13 replies on “Scheduled Maintenance Window”
It’s October 8 already and I still see a message about the site “undergoing maintenance”. Is the maintenance ongoing still?
Any word on when thing will be back up and running? While I appreciated being able to edit my wiki while the maintenance was occurring, that now seems to no longer be the case as constant 503 errors are now constant.
Judging from past experience… don’t hold your breath. I’ll start to worry in a few ”weeks”. And I’ll use the time meanwhile to put my own site up to date.
The latex feature is the very reason that my friend and I use shoutwiki, please do not abandon it and make it come back asap. Thx!
Another day without info… any word on when thing will be back up and running?
I wish you successful work, unfortunately loading images from October 6 does not work, but we are willing to wait. The main thing is to stop DDoS-attacks, or that there was no longer give an error 503.
It would be VERY nice to know if and what progress you have made, what unforeseen complications have necessitated this longer-than-planned maintenance break (did the server explode? did alternate reality monsters eat the tech team?), and when would you expect to be ready.
Technical problems, of course, may take time and effort, but this silence should be easy enough to fix – and in a way, is much more frustrating.
What might be the story behind this most unnerving message: “Sorry! This site is experiencing technical difficulties.”? Has the server/host gone down completely? Please, talk to us.
please let us know something.
I really hope I don’t have to try to move my stuff to another service (Because I like shoutwiki and its staff). I’m hoping this is only a temporary setback and my RP community will be able to get back to using the wiki we’ve been having fun creating.
Please refer to Facebook for any updates. It has the latest information on the situation. There is a post, and various comments which we have replied to which contain what you may wish to know.
This post is reserved for the technical timeline.
The wiki I had created weeks ago is no longer there.
I had invested some hours to get categories and stuff right. Why is it gone? It was a private wiki.
Hi Kevin,
Can you please drop us an email, support@shoutwiki.com (or use [[Special:Contact]]) with the URL to your wiki and we’ll look into it,
Thanks!