ITTS Update

It appears that the wikis.ala.org suffered from a hacker attack of some sort.  The exact methodology is not yet clear, but the miscreants placed links to an attack in the .ru (Russia) domain into various files.  I believe i have removed all of the offending links, and have asked Google to review the domain.  Until then, you will get a browser security warning when attempting to reach any of the wikis hosted at wikis.ala.org.

This is a good time to remind everyone of how vital it is to monitor any wikis you have running.  Letting a wiki go unwatched for a long period of time is a formula for this sort of trouble.  We are fortunate that this is the first time a spam or hack attempt has triggered this sort of warning from Google.  Extra vigilance is called for.  Also, let me know if you have a wiki that needs to be retired, so I can erase it permanently and remove one more potential attack point.

Posted by Matt under Uncategorized | No Comments »

In an effort to ease the pain of the wiki migration, ITTS will be moving the entire wikis.ala.org domain to off site hosting this coming Wednesday, March 18th.  This means that rather than moving each wiki to an new individual hostname, as previously planned, all wikis currently hosted at wikis.ala.org will continue to function with the same addresses they currently have.  We will endeavor to make the transition as seamless as possible.  We simply request that you make no changes to your wikis on Wednesday, as changes made while the data is being migrated will be lost.

Please let me know if you have any questions about this migration.

Posted by Matt under Blogs & Wikis | No Comments »

This weekend, the server on which wikis.ala.org and blogs.ala.org are housed encountered a system failure that required in person attention.  It was corrected Sunday evening.  This downtime was not related to the blog migration efforts taking place this weekend, but does illustrate the need to move content off of both sites.  Please let me know (at mivaliotes@ala.org) if you have a blog at blogs.ala.org or a wiki and wikis.ala.org that can be deleted, so we can clean this machine off as soon as possible.

Posted by Matt under Blogs & Wikis | No Comments »

This morning, we experienced a brief period (an hour or two) during which messages destined for ALA mailing lists on our Sympa server were being bounced.  The problem had to do with the email aliases file on the mail server where Sympa resides.  That file has been restored to a previous version.  The root cause of the problem is being investigated, but full service has been restored.  The quick return to functionality was in no small measure due to fast error reporting on the part of ALA staff, for which we are grateful.

Posted by Matt under Mailing Lists | No Comments »

The server on our shared hosting account at Dreamhost is encountering an extremely heavy load. Blogs, wikis, and classes housed on the account may encounter slowness. I have reported the problem, and am monitoring the server’s performance, which appears to be gradually improving. Please contact me any time you run into major problems using the external hosting account, as this data is vital in terms of long range planning for our off site resources.

Matt Ivaliotes – ITTS

Posted by Matt under Blogs & Wikis | No Comments »

For some time now, we have had WordPress software available on our offsite hosting account at Dreamhost. We still have about forty weblogs internally hosted on blogs.ala.org using the b2evolution software package. For a host of system stability, security, and efficiency reasons, we’d like to have weblogs migrated off of blogs.ala.org and to Dreamhost-hosted WordPress installations as quickly as reasonably possible. If the address of your weblog begins with http://blogs.ala.org, then it will need to be migrated.

On the Tech support wiki, you will find an instruction document on how to make this migration (thanks to Stephanie Kuenn for putting this together after going through the migration process herself).  Please look the instructions over, and plan to move your weblog in the next several weeks. I of course will be happy to answer questions you may have about this process. Note that Stephanie references using an FTP site for uploading a blog theme. If your unit already has applications on Dreamhost, you should have a login and password for FTP-ing files. If not, when you request the new WordPress blog from me, I will send you the FTP information.

Posted by Matt under Blogs & Wikis | No Comments »

The wikis at wikis.ala.org are back in service.  There was an error that overwrite the password the wikis use to access their  databases.  The risk of this sort of single point of failure is one of the reasons why no more new wikis are going to be created on this server.  We are sorry about this downtime, and do not anticipate a repeat.

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The wikis hosted at wikis.ala.org are encountering another problem.  The issue does not appear to be causing any problems for web log analysis using urchin or the weblogs housed at blogs.ala.org using b2evolution.  Troubleshooting of a database connectivity issue between Mediawiki and mysql is in progress.

Posted by Matt under Blogs & Wikis | No Comments »

Late last week and this weekend we experienced downtime on our internal blog/wiki/urchin server. This affected all wikis house at wikis.ala.org, all weblogs currently using b2evolution on blogs.ala.org, and our web log stats analysis software, urchin. The problem was tracked down to an issue with php configuration on the server which was causing the system to not release available memory when a process terminated. The situation has been resolved. We are continuing to monitor the server, and will post notice of any further action required in this space.

Going forward, we will be posting information on how to migrate all blogs hosted on b2evolution at blogs.ala.org as well as all wikis hosted at wikis.ala.org to our outside hosting space. Expect both the blog and wiki instructions by early next week.

Posted by Matt under Blogs & Wikis | No Comments »