We updated to a new version of “CheckUser” extension that required editing of the database tables. Not realizing it, I forgot to do it for the other wikis as well. All wikis should now be editable. Sorry for the long long delay!

In talking to a few people who have not been able to access the website since our move, it appears that Plusnet internet service provider—serving the United Kingdom—has an issue with The Planet’s DNS entries. The Planet, as you may be aware, is home to our two web servers. Since Plusnet users can’t access the website due to malformed or incorrect DNS entries, people have not been able to access the website from that ISP.

Plusnet and The Planet are working on a solution right now, but I have no ETA on when Plusnet people can access the website without using web anonymizers or web proxies that do not suffer this problem.

This will also be posted on the Case Orange blog here, since that blog is hosted on a server in the UK, and thus not affected by the DNS woes of Plusnet. So tell your UK friends.

Updates as we get them, thank you.

We have completed the move to our new, roomier servers. Everything is working, and most everyone should be able to access the wiki and our other websites. However, it may take as much as 48 hours (on the outside) for the new DNS entires to fully propagate.

If there are any issues, feel free to post them as a response to this blog.

It took two days, but I have transfered all files from the current apollo to the new server. I have asked Joe to start the DNS change. Hopefully everything should be good when changing over. I expect a few problems based on permissions, but that’s about it. Nothing we can’t handle.

Just to keep everyone appraised of the situation, we’ve determined that there’s some error that is preventing the fwrite() functions of Apache from working on our “Apollo” server, despite recompiles of Apache, PHP and its various libraries and services.

Therefore, poised with the fact that this cannot be corrected without a clean reload of the operating system (as well as an OS upgrade from RedHat 4 to RedHat 5), we’ve decided to take the opportunity to procure a new server to replace the old one. (We will still have the old server until everything is transferred to the new server, so as to make things easier for both our visitors and the maintenance staff behind-the-scenes.

This will be an in-house process, and as such there should be very little downtime. Right now, The Planet (our data host) is working on configuring the new server to our specifications. Once this is done, we’ll begin work on putting the finishing touches on it and transferring data files form the old server.

By the way, nothing on our database server will be affected in this process, as that server (”Athena”) will not be touched.

In the meantime, there is talk about retiring the “Apollo” name and renaming it on the Battlestar Forum here. If you want to help us determine whether or not we should keep the “Apollo” name, contribute to that thread.

In any event, we expect that everything will be finalized by Thursday or Friday. The only major problem that may occur is repopulating the DNS to direct the domain names (battlestarwiki.org, battlestarforum.com, et al.) to the new server instead of the old one.

If, for some reason, the servers go down, please check out our “Case Orange” blog at http://bswiki.woo-yay.net

A few updates on what’s happening here on our end:

• On Friday, June 13, we’ll be hosting an IRC chat at 8 P.M. ET. Check out the Battlestar Forum’s IRC information page for more details.

By the way, we didn’t get to be one of the top five finalists for “Best Website” from SyFy Portal’s Genre Awards. However, no loss there, since we’re not in it for the awards.

Good hunting!

Guys, Gals, and Robots,

We had a brief issue with the log-in system. The fault was MediaWiki’s—apparently a PHP function was removed in their SVN for some undocumented reason, and for a reason neither Shane nor I can fathom. However, we have fixed MediaWiki’s FUBAR and the single user login should now be working, aside from the minor issue of the cookies. To work around that, please remember to check off the “Remember using this computer” before logging in!

Please shoot us any questions, comments, or concerns either via this blog or at our e-mail address.

Good hunting!

A mistap on the MediaWiki developers removed and important function that works for Centeral Auth. I re-added the function, but I will make sure that this doesn’t happen to anyone else.

As the title says, we’ve got a few updates.

Anyway, the reason why access may be lagging is because we’re testing out a new method of doing database backups, as well as some redesign of the database behind the scenes. (There are a few reasons for this, and now that we have an expert on our staff who knows MySQL like the back of his hand—Michael Casadevall—things will definitely be more optimized. However, before we can get to that plateau, there’ll probably be some growing pains.

So, if you ran into any problems for a two hour stretch from 1-3 A.M., now you know why.

More at… whenever.

I call this the great crash since it was during the Hub. In any case here is the time line of events:

1. The Hub Aired
2. The Hub Ended
3. You (That’s you reading this post connect to site) times 10000000 people.
4. Me and Joe = We try to save some sanity.
5. I do something. The database indexes and data get corrupted.
6. With you all still visiting the website, have trouble testing fixes after doing some imports. So I rebooted the servers.

Anyway. Everything should be back up in running. All sites should be working and back as new (Media wiki type of course) from June 2. So we lost 5 days worth of data. I tried to recover it, but that was no good. So that’s the deal. This effected every wiki, however, no hard data files were lost on the media wiki.

Forums are up 100%.

Right not if you do not select the “Remember my login on this computer” when logging on, the cookies disappear and you “logoff” as soon as you hit the refresh button or goto a new page. I have sent the error to the development team. This is a temporary fix for now until the normal process of “Login” and the cookies expires after the default time are back to working again!

After some fiddling around in the early hours of Friday (it’s 1 AM as I write this), Shane and I managed to get Single User Login (SUL) working.

The idea of SUL is that you can log into all Battlestar Wikis (i.e. all languages and the Media wiki) by only logging in once. To enable SUL for you, do the following:

1. Log out
2. Log back in while keeping “Remember me on this computer”. (Check this post, as this is a temp fix.)
3. Go to Special:MergeAccount. You should see a big header saying “Login unification complete”. If you don’t, you’ll have to enter your password in the form and click “Confirm login information”, then click “Unify accounts”. After that, you should see “Login unification complete” as well.
4. Go to a wiki where you’ve never even *been* before ( the Chinese wiki is a good candidate for most people).
5. You’re logged in already! You don’t even have to create an account there: it’s been automatically created behind the scenes.

Note that steps 1, 2 and 3 only have to be taken once. If you have any problems using SUL, please report them at the Chiefs’ Noticeboard and I’ll look at them. If you are having trouble, lease send us an email at webmaster [at] battlestarwiki [dot] org as you can not post as a guest.