Welcome to the new servers

The HTTP/Apache servers for the fol­low­ing domains have been upgraded, and pro­duc­tion traf­fic has begun flow­ing through them at approx­i­mately 12:15pm today: depts.washington.edu courses.washington.edu staff.washington.edu faculty.washington.edu www.washington.edu More infor­ma­tion about the project can be found here: http://wiki.cac.washington.edu/display/webpub/Server+Upgrade+and+Documentation Web­site admin­is­tra­tors are prob­a­bly most inter­ested in this page, which fea­tures the updated soft­ware ver­sions: http://wiki.cac.washington.edu/display/webpub/Software+Versions


UA/WWW Server Upgrade Planned

The long-awaited web pub­lish­ing server upgrade for the uni­form access sys­tems is upon us! Fea­tur­ing PHP 5.3.10, Ruby 1.9.3, Python 2.6.6, MySQL 5.5, and more updated soft­ware good­ness, we hope there’s plenty of new fea­tures for every­one. Our tar­geted switchover to pro­duc­tion is May 3rd, 2012. Web­sites will be auto­mat­i­cally switched over, but MySQL own­ers… Read More


ovid21 rebooted 2012-03-24

Ovid, the sys­tem that sup­ports many MySQL servers, was rebooted Sat­ur­day. I’m includ­ing a mes­sage sent to the mysql-users-ovid mail­ing list, which includes addi­tional infor­ma­tion. You can sign up for the list here to receive noti­fi­ca­tions in the future; http://mailman2.u.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/mysql-users-ovid [This mes­sage is being sent to mem­bers of the mysql-users-ovid mail­ing list because you asked… Read More


Briefly Exploring Ruby

Today, the most illus­tri­ous of all days, UW-IT staff explored new tech­nolo­gies, con­cepts, and ideas that they’ve been mean­ing to do but were always delayed due to more press­ing mat­ters, oper­a­tional con­cerns, or pri­or­i­ties. I decided to explore Ruby and how it inter­acted with our Uni­form Access sys­tems. Com­ing from a Perl and PHP back­ground,… Read More


SQLite

Dru­pal 7 and Medi­aWiki 1.17 both con­tain out of the box sup­port for SQLite, which is an open-source RMDBS intended for easy setup and light­weight use with­out sig­nif­i­cant over­head. Although I don’t men­tion it in our web pub­lish­ing doc­u­men­ta­tion,  SQLite is sup­ported on our uni­form access sys­tems. If you’re look­ing to test out Medi­aWiki or Dru­pal,… Read More


Ovid Rebooted 09/14/2011

The fol­low­ing mes­sage was sent to the mysql-users-ovid mail­ing list. Now would be an excel­lent time to sign up for it if you haven’t already.   [This mes­sage is being sent to mem­bers of the mysql-users-ovid mail­ing list because you asked to be noti­fied about ser­vice impacts regard­ing your MySQL server.] If you are receiv­ing… Read More


Revenge of the Load Charts

If you haven’t guessed by now, I love load graphs. They’re inter­est­ing and can often reveal oth­er­wise hid­den aspects of a server. We’ve had a lot of inter­est­ing events hap­pen recently on our uni­form access sys­tems, and there’s noth­ing to wrap all of those up with a recap involv­ing load graphs! Aesop01 Reboot One our… Read More


Cronjob and Full Paths

tl;dr: Run­ning cron­jobs with scp fails. Use “/usr/local/bin/scp” instead. Longer Ver­sion: A par­tic­u­larly vex­ing and not all-together intu­itive issue is that a com­mand that works per­fectly fine in your ter­mi­nal, such as ‘scp file.txt nikky@otherhost.cac.washington.edu:~,‘ fails when put into your crontab on a Uni­form Access sys­tem with the mes­sage of “Scp: com­mand not found.” This is… Read More


UW Blogs Network Presentation

I’m cur­rently work­ing on the UW Blogs Net­work project. There will be a lot more about this project in the com­ing months, but I recently gave a brief overview pre­sen­ta­tion about it to the UW Web Coun­cil. If you missed the coun­cil meet­ing, you can view the pre­sen­ta­tion via PDF for­mat. UW Word­Press Net­work: A… Read More


Ovid, MySQL, and Web Publishing Outages

As you may have noticed recently, there had been some slow­downs and ser­vice out­ages involv­ing web pub­lish­ing and MySQL data­bas­ing on uni­form access and www sys­tems. We have dis­cov­ered the cause of these out­ages, and have a workaround in place while replace­ment parts are ordered and installed. This may have impacted your MySQL server. To… Read More