Author: ruaok

We just updated the main server with improved and updated documentation and improved news item handling. This release allows us to delegate the documentation tasks of MusicBrainz to a greater number of people, which should keep our documentation more up to date.

Wikidocs

A number of static web pages for documentation and other content that goes stale over time, has been replaced with a set of wiki pages. To accomplish this, we’ve created a separate new wiki that is accessible to a handful of brainerz who have volunteered as documentation experts. All of the pages in this wiki are camouflaged so that the end user doesn’t really see that it is a wiki. Visitors with an untrained eye should not notice that our documentation is now served via a wiki — the end user will just see that the wikidoc pages have a prefix of /wd.

Blog news and release notes

The Movable Type blog software is now used to publish release notes (such as this one) and general news entries. This centralizes the news into one convenient place where we can give measured access to various people in the community. It also removes some of the clutter that has built up in the main web page.

MetaBrainz and financial pages

The MetaBrainz web page has been launched and all financial pages have been moved there. More on this tomorrow during the official launch!

Changes of interest to developers

Dave Evans says:

Replication: changed DB_IS_REPLICATED to REPLICATION_TYPE – finer degree
of control. When importing data into a slave, refuse to import
non-replicated tables. Rewrote the replication slave code to be more
robust, and slightly faster.

Other minor fixes for when running as a slave.

committed a patch by Lukas Lalinsky to avoid a server trip when changing
artist type

Fixed very minor date-related error in RelationshipBox

Some will say that hell froze over today…

We just updated the main server with Advanced Relationships (AR)!

After nearly two years of brainstorming and several months of tinkering, the new feature is finally live! (see the release notes for details)

This new feature takes MusicBrainz into a new direction towards becoming a music encyclopedia — as opposed to a simple music metadatabase. While the server team does not believe in version numbers for the server (we prefer to use dates), this could be considered MusicBrainz Version 1.75 — its not quite MusicBrainz 2.0, but we’re getting really close. Now that we have Advanced Relationships in place we will be able to easily add on Concerts and Record Label support in future releases — that would bring us to MusicBrainz 2.0. 🙂

A few more notes about this release:

1. IMPORTANT if you have a replicating server (!!): Due to a small bork-up in the release process, you must do a full import on your database to kickstart the replication process again. Sorry for the hassle! 🙁
2. If the site hassles you about an unverified mail address, simply log out and back in.
3. If you’re adding AR links and think up new link types or new instruments/vocals, please add them to this wiki page
4. How does AR change the styleguidelines? Should you still do silly things like ‘feat.’? Yes, please continue to follow the style guidelines. I’ll work with Tarragon to update them with respect to AR.

Big thanks for helping with this goes to: Dave Evans and Don Redman. Thanks to everyone else who helped brainstorm and test the new feature!

After talking about it for nearly two years, and hacking on it for 4+ months, the Advanced Relationships feature is finally ready for the final test and if things go well, ready for release on April 10th.

To make this happen, we need your help one more time. Please take a moment to use your normal password to log in to the test server and take AR for a spin:

http://test.musicbrainz.org

The notes for this release are here

A few things to keep in mind:

• The AR links entered will *not* be kept, since its too much of a pain to migrate them to the main server. The AR link types and attribute types will be kept, since those are much easier to move. But this only affects link moderators.
• The AR documentation is a wiki stub page. Can I interest someone to write that page? The documentation needs to be a general introduction to AR and how to use it for average users. If you’ve been looking for a way to contribute and are handy with english, but suck at coding, here is your chance!
• Please don’t throw out suggestions for new AR features — at this point we’d like to hear only about bug reports. We’ll start collecting suggestions for how to improve AR after the initial release when people have had a chance to play with it thoroughly.

We just rotated (literally) some machines at the hosting facility and brought one of the new machines (catbus) into service as our new database server. Bender, which was previously the DB and TRM server, will now solely be used for TRM service, which should decouple the TRM generation from the rest of the MusicBrainz site.

Hopefully this will bring more capacity to handle users to MusicBrainz.

Big thanks to Dave Evans and Kevin Murphy for their help in making this happen.

On sunday I decided to drive up to Fremont (about 200 miles from my house) to place one of our new servers named catbus (from Totoro). I was missing a part (64 bit left angle PCI riser card) so a good chunk of my time in the bay area was spent trying to locate said part. I thought it was possible to get any part for your computer in the bay area at any time of day — but nooo. Not on a sunday!

So, MusicBrainz friend Kevin Murphy volunteered to acquire the part and install it later this week. So, I racked the server, connected it but didn’t power it up. Better than just going home.

Then Jeff wanted me to be present for a software upgrade on zim. To complete the upgrade we rebooted zim, but he didn’t come back up cleanly, so I had to wheel the terminal cart over to zim and nurse him back to health. No big problems, but more stress. As I have zim hooked up, there is this other computer beeping really loud nearby. I think: “Man, that is annoying. Why don’t people take better care of their machines? Damn, which machine is that?”

After some snooping around, it turns out to be our very own Bender, with one of its hard drives failed out of the RAID array. ARG! So once I got done with zim, I zip things back up, drive to Fry’s and buy a new drive for bender at highway robbery prices. Back to the colo and then install the new drive on bender. I boot bender back up, tell the RAID to rebuild and head for home.

We’ll have to go and install more system monitoring tools to watch the status of the RAID array. I would’ve expected some messages in the syslog, but after considering the nature of the RAID system, I see why that wasn’t the case.

Well, live and learn. Things seem to be in good shape right now, so lets hope they stay that way.