Toolserver-l December 2005

toolserver-l@lists.wikimedia.org

9 participants
17 discussions

lynx
by Tony Sidaway 02 Jan '06

02 Jan '06

Um, I asked earlier but don't know what became of it. Sometimes I want to quickly eyeball a html document for text content (to test CGI script output when run from the command line, for instance). I like to have lynx around to do that because it saves me having to wade through loads of html tags. Could we have that, please? Happy New Year to everybody.

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Account?
by Jeremy Dunck 30 Dec '05

30 Dec '05

I've resisted asking on this list since there seemed to be a system [1] for gaining accounts, but since it's been some time and I've not heard whether I would be accepted or not, I'm asking now. :) Are accounts still available, and if so, what qualifications should I present? I've been doing some work, but so far, it's not useful. ;-) [1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Toolserver#People_interested_to_join

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Subversion
by Edward Z. Yang 30 Dec '05

30 Dec '05

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 By any chance, are there any plans to give Subversion hosting to people with Toolserver accounts? That would assist in project development, releasing and collaboration. - -- Edward Z. Yang Personal: edwardzyang(a)thewritingpot.com SN:Ambush Commander Website: http://www.thewritingpot.com/ GPGKey:0x869C48DA http://www.thewritingpot.com/gpgpubkey.asc 3FA8 E9A9 7385 B691 A6FC B3CB A933 BE7D 869C 48DA -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.1 (MingW32) iD8DBQFDtGKmqTO+fYacSNoRAkVbAJ4nQs5VCH39wdu62HcTfxOSY5MKFQCdFBx+ rBnlLBib8xnsHRKpgQRPi6E= =iPd/ -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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improving slow query performance with transaction isolation level
by kate 30 Dec '05

30 Dec '05

hi. people already familiar with SQL's transaction isolation level and MVCC databases can ignore this post. anyone who doesn't may want to read it. the problem: a lot of the queries used on zedler are report queries which examine a lot of records (possibly every page, link or revision) to generate the result. not only do these take a long time to run, but they slow down the SQL server for other uses, since InnoDB queries are transactional, and the server must ensure that changes to the database don't affect the query. in most cases -- like on the production site -- this is what you want, and the performance penalty is acceptable. however, for other uses, you may be more interested in the query completing quickly than having entirely consistent results (especially when your result is going to be several hours out of date anyway). for this purpose, MySQL provides a command, SET TRANSACTION ISOLATION LEVEL. this allows you to control (for the current connection only) how consistent queries will be. this and other related InnoDB issues are explained in detail at: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/innodb-transaction-model.html (section 14.2.10.3 in particular) but i'll provide a brief summary here. the default isolation level is "repeatable read". this means that (mostly) everything you do will be consistent relative to the first query you run in each transaction. if the table changes, your transaction will not see the changes. the least consistent isolation level is "read uncommitted". this does not perform any locking or multi-versioning for the query. the downside of this is that you may see dirty data (slightly out of date or uncommitted) in the result. however, the advantage is that the query will run much faster. you can change the current isolation level with the command: SET SESSION TRANSACTION ISOLATION LEVEL READ UNCOMMITTED; if you're running slow queries on the database, you may like to test this and see how much difference it makes. you may also want to review the manual sections linked above for more details. k.

1 0

HEADS UP: zedler IP/login details are changing
by kate 29 Dec '05

29 Dec '05

users on zedler are being moved to a different zone than mysql. the user-visible effects of this are as follows: * you can no longer log in to zedler.knams.wikimedia.org. instead, log in to login-services.zedler.knams.wikimedia.org (you may find "tools.wikimedia.de" easier to type). * the IP for zedler will be changing to: 2001:610:672:1:145:97:39:142 (IPv6) 145.97.39.142 (IPv4) this will probably not affect you unless you have a separate domain hosted on zedler, in which case you will need to change the IP(s). * MySQL can no longer be accessed at "localhost". instead, use "sql" as the host. * home directories are now in /home. compatibility links in /u01/u exist. there may be some residual problems resulting from this change. please inform me of anything which does not work as expected. please note that DNS for the new hostname may take up to an hour to update. you can use the IP if you need to log in before then. k.

3 6

Question about the rules
by Edward Z. Yang 29 Dec '05

29 Dec '05

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 This particular rule piqued my interest: [[meta:Toolserver/Rules]] wrote: > The installation of large web applications (phpmyadmin, mediawiki, ...) is not allowed. In this context, what does "installation" and "large" mean? It probably would be okay to be storing the codebase of MediaWiki in order to piggyback off of parsing functions or use Revision::getRevisionText (as noted in [[meta:Toolserver/For users]])... so what's the catch? - -- Edward Z. Yang Personal: edwardzyang(a)thewritingpot.com SN:Ambush Commander Website: http://www.thewritingpot.com/ GPGKey:0x869C48DA http://www.thewritingpot.com/gpgpubkey.asc 3FA8 E9A9 7385 B691 A6FC B3CB A933 BE7D 869C 48DA -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.1 (MingW32) iD8DBQFDs050qTO+fYacSNoRAl9CAJ4g42oygq4KRVuHmPGFT9QoxnlsHwCggHDV Pr1/eu+Agi4S2/QwAKn+24k= =m7nh -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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A simple vandalism analysis tool
by Tony Sidaway 25 Dec '05

25 Dec '05

My vandalism analysis tool, which uses a simple but powerful methodology developed by Brian0918, analyses edit summaries on articles to spot probable vandalism reverts by recognising the summary patterns of standard rollbacks, and edits labelled "rvv", "rv v" or "rvc". It was developed for English Wikipedia but probably has applications beyond that, and the methods developed here have obvious utility beyond the recognition and reporting of vandalism. You can visit it here: http://tools.wikimedia.de/~tony_sidaway/ Please try to break it, and tell me what happened. There is a link to a discussion page for that purpose. The rationale is that, while vandalism is difficult to recognise electronically, a pretty easy and reasonably reliable way to track vandalism on a popular wiki article is to examine edit summaries and count the proportion of them that indicate that the editors apparently believed themselves to be reverting vandalism. A highly experimental adaptation of this script to recognise (only) rollbacks on the German Wikipedia is here: http://tools.wikimedia.de/~tony_sidaway/cgi-bin/vandalismus.cgi The text of the latter CGI script is currently in English, although it is analyzing German text. As I know nothing about internationalization I have no idea whether it will always perform correctly if UTF-8 multibyte characters (such as o-umlaut) are entered. This simple test seems to suggest that it does work: http://tools.wikimedia.de/~tony_sidaway/cgi-bin/vandalismus.cgi?article=Köln Wikipedia is an international project and I welcome any and all testing input on this. Presently I don't know of any edit summary patterns that non-administrators on the German Wikipedia use to indicate that they're reverting what we on English Wikipedia would recognise as simple vandalism--as I'm unfamiliar with their practises I'm not even certain that they draw the same distinctions that we do on English Wikipedia between intentional and overt disruptive edits (simple vandalism) and more subtle vandalism or trolling. Any help on this that German speakers can offer would be most welcome. Although I address the German Wikipedia prominently because its community is highly advanced and well organized, its content comparable to that of the English Wikipedia, and (not least) Deutsche Wikipedia hosts the tool server, I would also love to produce useful tools for as many languages as possible--the skills I learn can be put to use in tools of more general use than the current one. The scripts I write can easily be internationalized. I cannot write good German (whenever I try, native German speakers beg me to stop!) but I can write good French and reasonable Spanish. I am particularly interested in Chinese, Indian languages, and Russian.

1 0

upgrade
by kate 21 Dec '05

21 Dec '05

i am planning to upgrade Zedler to Solaris 10 Update 1 at some point, probably tonight/tomorrow morning (UTC). assuming everything goes as planned, there should be no disruption during the upgrade, but a reboot will be required when it's finished. apologies for any inconvenience. k.

2 2

Estimating the incidence of vandalism on a popular Wikipedia article
by Tony Sidaway 18 Dec '05

18 Dec '05

The program presented here is simple and should be easy to translate into Perl, C or any other reasonable computer language. A basic knowledge of lisp list processing operators (car, cdr, etc) is all that is required to understand this program, which is written in the Guile dialect of Scheme. The program analyzes the revision table and uses vandalism reverts as a proxy for vandalism. This relies on the assumption that vandalism is quickly detected and corrected by reverting to an earlier version, and also assumes that administrators do not abuse the rollback facility to perform non-vandalism reverts. It further assumes that editors do not incorrectly label edit warring as vandalism. These assumptions are broadly valid for the article chosen, [[en:George W. Bush]], but may not be true for all popular articles. The program is configured to work in English, but it may be possible to apply the same methods in other languages by changing the match patterns for vandalism reverts. Multibyte characters may break this program. Sorry, it isn't my area of expertise. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Tony_Sidaway/Dubya_vandalism

1 0

notes on security (important)
by Kate 15 Dec '05

15 Dec '05

hi. i've noticed some users seem to be unaware of either rules specific to Zedler, or general php security issues. please be aware that: * you must not install third-party web applications on Zedler. this includes putting mediawiki source code in your public_html, even if you don't configure it. this also includes phpmyadmin. this also includes applications protected by passwords or other access restrictions. there are no exceptions to this. (if you believe you have a very good reason to do this, ask me first.) if you must use it, put it elsewhere, and keep it up to date. DO NOT provide access to it via HTTP. the only valid reason for installing MediaWiki is to run maintenance scripts from the command line, or using MW libraries in your own applications. this is extremely important. i will start disabling applications which do not conform to this rule. * do not place sensitive information (such as passwords) in world-readable files. since CGI scripts, including PHP, run as your uid, there is no need to do this. * when you use data from $_GET, $_POST, etc. in SQL queries, you MUST escape it. please familiarise yourself with this function: http://uk.php.net/mysql_real_escape_string * when you print user-supplied data in HTML, you must also escape it: http://uk.php.net/manual/en/function.htmlspecialchars.php neither of the last two are specific to PHP, but for some reason PHP code seems to be a lot worse, on average. if you have not already done so, please ensure you are familiar with the rules for Zedler users: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Toolserver/Rules k.

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Toolserver-l December 2005