Wikitech-l April 2006

wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org

123 participants
143 discussions

Wikipedia live mirror
by Marc Schütz 11 Apr '06

11 Apr '06

This mirror, which Brion Vibber blocked on April 8th, seems to be up again: http://www.stadtspiegel-netzwerk.de/cgi-bin/enz.pl?SDT=1&ROOT=3&Query=Speci…

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how to use Group class
by ting wang 11 Apr '06

11 Apr '06

Hi all, I am working something about the access right control with mediawiki : - MediaWiki <http://www.mediawiki.org/>: 1.5.7 - PHP <http://www.php.net/>: 5.0.4 (apache2handler) - MySQL <http://www.mysql.com/>: 4.1.13-nt During the work I found a useful class "Group" in Group.php. It seems that this class is never used. In order to use this class I have to make a corresponding database, but I don't know what is the schema of the database. According to the class Group the following columns are necessary: name id description dataLoaded rights Are these columns complete? Which data types are used for the corresponding columns? Any answers are appreciated. Thanks a lot Ting Wang

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MediaWiki automated test run failure 2006-04-11
by brion＠pobox.com 11 Apr '06

11 Apr '06

An automated run of parserTests.php showed the following failures: Running test Table security: embedded pipes (http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2006-April/034637.html)... FAILED! Running test Magic Word: {{NUMBEROFFILES}}... FAILED! Running test BUG 1887, part 2: A <math> with a thumbnail- math enabled... FAILED! Passed 300 of 303 tests (99.01%) FAILED!

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Navigational maps - is this all there is?
by Rich Morin 11 Apr '06

11 Apr '06

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Images_and_other_uploaded_files#Navigat… describes a couple of ways to get the effect of image maps in MediaWiki. However, neither of these is going to be easy to use with images created by Graphviz, etc. Are there any tricks that this page doesn't mention? Is there anything else in the pipeline? Inquiring minds need to know... -r -- http://www.cfcl.com/rdm Rich Morin http://www.cfcl.com/rdm/resume rdm(a)cfcl.com http://www.cfcl.com/rdm/weblog +1 650-873-7841 Technical editing and writing, programming, and web development

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MediaWiki 1.6.3 released
by Brion Vibber 11 Apr '06

11 Apr '06

MediaWiki 1.6.3 makes some additional fixes to the spring 2006 release branch: * Fix disappearing red-linked items in the watchlist editing view * (bug 5512) Spacing in "page has a history" deletion warning * (bug 5508) Switch ENGINE in table statements back to TYPE; fixes regression where some versions of MySQL 4.0.x wouldn't work * Added note about $wgUrlProtocols format change Full release notes: http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/tags/REL1_6_3/phase3/RELEASE-NOTES http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/tags/REL1_6_3/phase3/HISTORY Download: http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/wikipedia/mediawiki-1.6.3.tar.gz MD5 checksum: mediawiki-1.6.3.tar.gz 89d0d6a588dce6453fb00a70598c632e Before asking for help, try the FAQ: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_FAQ Low-traffic release announcements mailing list: (Please subscribe to receive announcements of security updates.) http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-announce Wiki admin help mailing list: http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l Bug report system: http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/ Play "stump the developers" live on IRC: #mediawiki on irc.freenode.net -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales speaking in SF this FRIDAY, Apr. 14
by Rich Morin 11 Apr '06

11 Apr '06

Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales will be speaking in SF this FRIDAY, Apr. 14 -r ----- Forwarded message from Stewart Brand <sb(a)gbn.org> ----- Date: Mon, 10 Apr 2006 12:12:58 -0700 To: salt(a)list.longnow.org From: Stewart Brand <sb(a)gbn.org> Subject: [SALT] Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales this FRIDAY, Apr. 14 (for forwarding) Vision is one of the strongest forms of long-term thinking. Like any project, the online encyclopedia Wikipedia deploys month-to-month tactics in the service of year-to-year strategy. Both must serve an unusually ambitious decade-to-decade vision, stated by founder JIMMY WALES: "Wikipedia is first and foremost an effort to create and distribute a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language." The English language edition of Wikipedia, which started in January 2001, reached its millionth article last month. A year ago it was half that. There are 123 other language editions active, with German (350,000 articles), French, Polish, and Japanese leading the way. The editing process is radically "open source"--- anyone can edit any article. Article authors and amenders get no pay and no public credit. Against reason, the process works spectacularly. Wikipedia has become the primary online research source. It currently costs $320,000 a quarter to produce. For the talk on Friday, Wales is expanding on his usual Wikipedia-only presentation to address the larger and longer picture that Wikipedia's success hints at: "Vision: Wikipedia and the Future of Free Culture," Jimmy Wales, Cowell Theater, Fort Mason, San Francisco, 7pm, Friday, April 14. The lecture starts promptly at 7:30pm. Admission is free ($10 donation welcome as always, not required). NOTE ON SECURING A SEAT: This talk may be very popular, with the possibility of an overflow audience. You can ensure yourself a seat by making a reservation, which costs $5 a person. Reserve through Long Now's home page (http://www.longnow.org) or phone 415-561-6582. Reservations will stop being taken at 4:30 pm April 14. Apart from reserved seats, which must be occupied by 7:20 pm at the event or be released, seating is first-come-first-served, and admission is free. (This reservation service is offered in an attempt to avoid previous problems with exceptionally popular talks. Jared Diamond and Brian Eno, for example, had far more people at the door than could fit inside, and many went away frustrated. Anticipating that problem at a joint talk by Freeman, Esther, and George Dyson, Long Now offered the ability to make reservations by phone. People then filled the house with what turned out to be illusory reservations. My email about that discouraged other people from showing up, and we wound up with half a house. So this time there's a financial incentive to make only sincere reservations. The Cowell Theater seats 400, with room for another 40 in the lobby watching on live TV. My email to this list on Friday will reflect your prospects of getting in by just showing up. Reserved seats not filled will by released at 7:20pm, ten minutes before showtime.) This is one of a monthly series of Seminars About Long-term Thinking organized by The Long Now Foundation, usually on second Fridays, usually at Fort Mason. If you would like to be notified by email of forthcoming talks, please contact Simone Davalos--- simone(a)longnow.org, 415-561-6582. You are welcome to forward this note to anyone you think might be interested. --Stewart Brand PS. Much of Kevin Kelly's March talk, "The Next 100 Years of Science: Long-term Trends in the Scientific Method," is now available in text form, with his great slides, at Edge.org: http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge179.html . -- Stewart Brand -- sb(a)gbn.org The Long Now Foundation - http://www.longnow.org Seminars: http://www.longnow.org/projects/seminars/calendar.php Seminar downloads: http://www.longnow.org/shop/free-downloads/seminars/ ----- End forwarded message ----- -- http://www.cfcl.com/rdm Rich Morin http://www.cfcl.com/rdm/resume rdm(a)cfcl.com http://www.cfcl.com/rdm/weblog +1 650-873-7841 Technical editing and writing, programming, and web development

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Initial post-mortem notes for April 9, 2006 outage
by Brion Vibber 10 Apr '06

10 Apr '06

Recovery consisted of four phases: 1) "What the hell is going on?" Outage mentioned immediately by users in IRC. On investigation, the whole of PowerMedium appeared to be offline. Mark indicated that they had a major network problem. I phoned their support line; they confirmed a big network problem and said they were bringing in Charles to work on it. (This was about 3:30pm Sunday afternoon Florida time). At this point there was nothing further we could do, we had to wait for them to fix things on their end. I also called Kyle so we'd have a pair of hands in the office when things started to come back online. 2) "Why does nothing work?" After an hour or so they apparently had their general issues under control. PowerMedium's own web site came back up, we could get at our own switch over the network, and Charles (bw) was available online. Between us remote folks, and bw & Kyle on-site we did some banging on rocks. We found that in addition to the network outage, there had been a power problem (presumably this killed their routers too), which had rebooted everything. In this stage we were confronted with the fragility of the internal DNS and LDAP we had set up to make everything work. While we've expended some effort to minimize the dependencies on NFS, we hadn't yet put similar effort into these services. Until these services were restored, booting was a vveeerrryyyy slow proposition (with lots of timeout steps), and it took another hour or so to get key infrastructure back in place to where we could seriously get working. 3) "Where's my data?" MediaWiki is highly reliant on its database backend. With machines on, we were able to start the MySQL databases loading up and running InnoDB transaction recovery. This took much longer than expected, apparently because we have a *huge* log size set on the master: about 1 gb. (James Day recommends reducing this significantly.) While this step was running, mail was brought back online and the additional MySQL servers for text storage were brought online. Two of the slaves were found to be slightly behind, and the master log file appears to be smaller than their recorded master log offsets. This might indicate corruption of the master log file, or it might simply indicate that the position was corrupted on the slaves. In either case, this is very much non-fatal for text storage as it's very redundant and automatically falls back to the master on missing loads. (But it should be looked into. We may have write-back caching or other problems on those boxen.) 4) "Where's my site?" Once the primary database was done, it was time to flip the switch and watch the site! Except that the Squid+LVS+Apache infrastructure is a little fragile, and in particular LVS was not set up to start automatically. At this point it was late in Europe and our volunteer admins who do much of the squid and LVS work were asleep. I was able to find the information I needed on our internal admin documentation wiki, and got these back online after a short while. Additionally I had to restart the IRC feeds for recent changes data, which involved recovering a tool which had gotten moved around between home directories. Things appear to be pretty much working at this point. In the short term, we need to examine the broken MySQL slave servers, and make sure we're at full capacity. In the medium term, we need to make sure that all services either will start automatically or can be very easily and plainly started manually. We also *must* examine our DNS & LDAP infrastructure: if we can't make it boot fast and reliably we need to consider replacing this with something more primitive but reliable. (ewww, scp'ing hosts files...) We also need to make sure that: * Squid error messages are easily configurable and can be updated with necessary information. * DNS can be easily updated when the Florida cluster is offline, eg so that we could redirect hits from Florida to another cluster for an error page or read-only mirror. -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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Virus attack to SMTP Server (DOS Denial of service)
by Eugenia Tenneriello 10 Apr '06

10 Apr '06

Hello, I want warn the MediaWiki community against a possible virus attack to a Mediawiki website. I published a website based on MediaWiki platform few weeks ago. Today I have noticed Google indexes it, but this morning I have received a virus attack to my SMTP Server from a website that uses Mediawiki too. The attack caused a DOS Denial of Service on the SMTP port number. Every help is welcome. Thanks in advance. Eugenia Tenneriello "L'unica organizzazione capace di crescita illimitata e di apprendimento spontaneo e' la rete. Qualsiasi altra topologia pone dei limiti allo sviluppo futuro" - Kewin Kelly

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new features for exention developers
by Tels 10 Apr '06

10 Apr '06

Moin, as an extension developer I'd like to have two new features. I looked at the doc, the code the FAQ etc but I couldn't find out if it is not already possible to achive that: * addCSS(); You can call from your extension things like addMeta(), addHeader() etc, including addStyleSheet(), which adds a link to a stylesheet to the page. However, forvarious reaons and extensions adding CSS code into the head ala: addCSS('YourCodeHere') would result in: <style type="text/css"> </style> Is this already possible and did I just overlook it? If not, could it be implemented? (Adding a link to a stylesheet requires external files, which is messy and leaks files,see my other post "File leakage in extensions") Likewise, I would like something along the lines of: __NOCATEGORIES__ (or __NOCAT__ __NOMENU__ __NOTOOLBOX__ __NOSEARCH__ __NOFOOTER__ that supress the various elements of the interface. (This is for a slide extension, that allows one to give presentations from a wiki diectly). Now, with the addCSS() from above that could be hacked (if you know which skin to use, and add an extenion to each slide article, but the special variables would be much cleaner and they would also allow these things to be used on other pages w/o an extension. For wikipedia, they should be probably disabled, but this can be achieved via a technical solution (config var, or spamblicking etc). What do I need to get these things into the current code? Best wishes, Tels -- Signed on Fri Apr 7 10:47:09 2006 with key 0x93B84C15. Visit my photo gallery at http://bloodgate.com/photos/ PGP key on http://bloodgate.com/tels.asc or per email. "...pornographic images stay in the brain forever." -- Mary Anne Layden; "That's a feature, not a bug." -- God

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Next step in the spam arms race.
by Gregory Maxwell 10 Apr '06

10 Apr '06

Seems like the spammers have found the web equivalent of an smtp open relay. For example: [http://wiki.cs.uiuc.edu/VisualWorks/DOWNLOAD/sb/index.htm sitz bath] [http://www.buddy4u.com/view/?u=monophonic+ringtone monophonic ringtone] [http://www.buddyprofile.com/viewprofile.php?username=nextelringtone nextel ringtone] These are links to legitimate sites that perform poor input validation... The spammers have managed to convert the pages into http redirects. Because of how the various search engines work a link to a redirect page is just as good as a link to the redirect target. Since the spammers can make an infinite number of unique URLs at these sites, blocking the exact URL is pointless. So right now our only choices are to block legitimate sites because their poor hygiene allows them to be used as a spam-bouncer, or allow ourselves to be spammed with these sites and contribute to the declining usefulness of the internet. Things like this make nofollow more attractive all the time. Has there ever been any discussion on perhaps allowing a white-list for non-spam sites that we won't no-follow? This would be useful for wikis who don't want to kill all their externals with no-follow.

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Wikitech-l April 2006