Author: Rachel Evans

Wiki Migration

Today’s the day – our wiki is being migrated to MediaWiki.  The old “moin” wiki is now read-only (and will remain so, at least for a few months), and is available on oldwiki.musicbrainz.org.  The new wiki, once all the data has been migrated across, will be at the usual address.

As soon as the migration is complete, I’ll switch wiki.musicbrainz.org over to point to MediaWiki.

Unfortunately it won’t be possible to also migrate the user accounts from moin to mediawiki, so regrettably this means that once mediawiki us up, you’ll have to re-create your accounts.  Sorry about that.

Update: the switch has been made – if you have any questions to ask or problems to report about this, please see the WikiMigration page.  Thanks!

Problem delivering mail to gmail / googlemail

This week MusicBrainz experienced problems while trying to deliver mail to gmail.com / googlemail.com. The problem is now fixed, but regrettably this means that some messages that MusicBrainz should have sent are now lost.

This week MusicBrainz experienced problems while trying to deliver mail to gmail.com / googlemail.com. The problems started on Tuesday morning (UK time).  On Friday morning the problem was identified as a broken DNS server, which was then fixed, thus resolving the problem.

Regrettably this means that some messages that MusicBrainz should have sent are now lost.  The number of lost messages is approximately:

  • 103 ‘subscriptions’ messages from Tuesday
  • 61 ‘subscriptions’ messages from Friday
  • 297 other messages (new user signup, edit notes, etc)

Please accept our apologies for this error.

Amazon opens "SoundUnwound" to public beta, and becomes a MetaBrainz customer!

Robert Kaye writes:

I’m pleased to announce that Amazon became a customer of the MetaBrainz Foundation last year! They’ve been quietly working on a site to promote and let users discover new music: SoundUnwound.

Amazon is now ready to let the world play with their new toy — but please be aware that the site is only in beta and may still contain some snags. I had the pleasure of previewing their work when I visited them in May and I was quite impressed with their methods of presenting information about music. I think MusicBrainz can learn a few things from their work.

However, I would like to stress that Amazon is currently only using the MusicBrainz data for SoundUnwound. I know there are a few people in our community (myself included) who would like to see Amazon use MusicBrainz data in their main store. That is currently not a point of discussion — the cooperation between Amazon and MusicBrainz is limited to SoundUnwound.

I’ll continue to work to convince Amazon that they should use our data in more of their operations, but for now, let’s take one step at a time!

Welcome on board, Amazon!

Unplanned Downtime

It looks like the main web site has dropped off the ‘net – most likely the server has crashed. I’ve asked the good people at Digital West to reboot the server. Please bear with us… hopefully we’ll be back up soon!

Update: the server is back (so it was down for just over an hour).

Update 2: We have two new servers on order to bring much needed redundancy to the site. So, the next time our flaky web server crashes the site should keep running. We hope to have those machines in rotation early in September. (read: after Burning Man. 🙂 )

New search servers

I’m happy to say that we’ve now got extra search servers – a failover pair, in fact, so we’re no longer reliant on a single search server. In fact shortly we hope to bring a third server into the pool too. Not bad considering that, so far, we’ve only ever had one (or zero) search servers.

What this means for you is that searches should be faster. It also means that the future performance of the web site is now more assured than it was before – we’re in a substantially better position to handle extra traffic.

Most of the work was done by Robert Kaye; I only helped to polish off the edges 🙂

Performance problems on the Wiki

I’ve had to disable the “FullSearch” moin macro, at least for now – far too many pages were using it, sometimes multiple times on the same page, and each invocation of FullSearch is rather expensive. The result was that the wiki server – which also runs the mailing lists and various other important things – … Continue reading “Performance problems on the Wiki”

I’ve had to disable the “FullSearch” moin macro, at least for now – far too many pages were using it, sometimes multiple times on the same page, and each invocation of FullSearch is rather expensive. The result was that the wiki server – which also runs the mailing lists and various other important things – was dying a death.

I don’t know why this has only just started being a problem, because it looks like most of those uses of FullSearch have been in place for a while. But, for whatever reason, it’s a problem now, and the quick fix to stop the server crashing is to disable the macro. Sorry 😦

Unplanned downtime

The primary web server has just gone offline unexpectedly – we’re looking into it. Meanwhile you can still the other parts of MusicBrainz (read on for details). Sorry for the inconvenience – please bear with us, and check back here for updates. Thanks!

The primary web server has just gone offline unexpectedly – we’re looking into it. Meanwhile you can still the other parts of MusicBrainz (read on for details).

Sorry for the inconvenience – please bear with us, and check back here for updates. Thanks!

Continue reading “Unplanned downtime”

Search server down

The search server is terminally overloaded (load average over 100, last I looked), and it was taking down the main web site with it. Therefore for now I’ve had to change mb_server to show a simple error message instead of running the search. You may be better off using the old search page for now. … Continue reading “Search server down”

The search server is terminally overloaded (load average over 100, last I looked), and it was taking down the main web site with it. Therefore for now I’ve had to change mb_server to show a simple error message instead of running the search.

You may be better off using the old search page
for now.

Hopefully more news later.