MetaBrainz Foundation Community Blog
Hi folks, just a quick announcement – our main web server frontend had some minor problems earlier, but we’ve since sorted it out. It seems to have only effected the web frontend, and not other services such as the web service.
We’re back up now though!
The VMWare image has been updated for the 2009-05-24 server release. The previous image was getting old and updating steps have been reported not easy.
The new image has been upgraded to Debian 5.0, includes a more recent Linux kernel and uses PosgreSQL 8.3 (the required version to work on NGS).
To download and play with the new image, read our VirtualMusicBrainzServer wiki page!
I just pushed a set of fixes to the main servers. To see what has changed, check out the recently closed bug list. More bug fixes will come later this week.
We’ve just finished rolling out our latest release to support Release Groups, ISRCs and CD Stub searching!
For all the details on this release, check out the release notes.
I would like to thank Luks, Dave Evans, Navap, Outsidecontext, Voiceinsideyou, Murdos, Pronik, Prodoc and everyone else who has helped put this release together! Thank you for all your hard work!
P.S. Happy Birthday to Matt Wood!
Welcome all Lifehacker users!
Unfortunately you picked a bad day to come inundate MusicBrainz, because today is our next server update. This will start very soon, within about half an hour of me posting this entry. We expect to be down for at least 30 minutes today.
Sorry for the inconvenience!
I just rolled out a few bug fixes and enhancements to the main server:
Many thanks to Luks, Nikki, Brianfreud and Navap for helping with these fixes/improvements.
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:
Please accept our apologies for this error.
I come bringing good news! With the latest version of the server now out in the wild, we’re ready to move on to the next stage of MusicBrainz development. But first a quick refresher…
You may recall, many moons ago I (Oliver Charles aka aCiD2) began work on moving the mb_server codebase from our own in-house framework, to the tried and tested Catalyst framework – along with separating out the HTML into separate Template Toolkit templates. Well, after what seems like an age, it’s finally got to the time where I can start getting some critical feedback from the most important people – you!
As from now, test.musicbrainz.org is now running the development branch of this work. It’s important to realise that this new codebase currently has no javascript support. This decision was made because it’s very important we get the website fully functional, and then add bells and whistles on later. We’re starting from a mostly clean slate, so there’s a lot of chance of things breaking, and JavaScript was likely to be just one more headache.
Oh, and I’ve never deployed a server like this before, so please bare with me while I work out any problems running the server. I’m going to London tomorrow and coming back Saturday evening (slightly bad timing, I’m aware) – but I’ll do my best to check any messages that come my way!
However, before you jump straight in and overload us with work – I’d like to lay down some guidelines for providing us with feedback. This will (hopefully) ensure that we can see to these bugs as fast as possible.
Where to report:
Standard practice- report at our bugtracker – bugs.musicbrainz.org
What should you report?
The most important things to report are actions that cause errors to occur, invalid behaviour or features that are simply not available, but are from the main server. You should also report typos and other visual problems – but I will be encouraging people to help fix these themselves (more on this later!).
What information should you provide?
The most critical information is that you can provide us with as much context as possible. Please let us know:
The last point relates somewhat to Catalyst. Catalyst features improved error handling and can provide us with a stack trace. You should try and include this stack trace, and the errors at the top. Chances are, we’ll be able to reproduce this from the information you provide – but if not, the stack trace gives us one more pointer to where the problem is 🙂
How should you organise the report?
Generally speaking, just try to fill in as many of the fields as possible. I’ll be reading every single report that comes in, and re-filing it myself where necessary. Ideally, set the component to ‘MusicBrainz’, the milestone to ‘Server: TemplateToolkit’ and assign the bug to me 🙂
So…
We just completed pushing the latest changes out to the main servers! We had a bit of a bumpy ride to roll out the upgrade — we’re noticing quite a few problems with collections right now and the Last Update feature brought our database server to its knees. As a result, we’ve disabled the Dashboard — we’ll re-enable it once we figure out what the problem is.
If you encounter a problem with the server, please file a bug report and select the 2008-11-23 version. Also, please check the open bug list to see if your problem has been reported before.
For a complete list of things that changed for this release, please see the release page on the wiki.
This massive release was brought to you by the tireless efforts of: Luks, Murdos, Djce, Jugdish, Acid2, Niklas and myself. Loads and loads of good testing came from Voiceinsideyou and Nikki. Thanks to everyone who helped with this release!
Also, if you’ve used Jugdish’s enhanced voting GreaseMonkey script, please disable it as it may cause problems since that functionality was included in this server release.
Murdos has been busy merging the various development branches into trunk — thanks for your work. I’ve updated the test server with the latest codebase. Come check out the latest new features:
(to log in use your normal log in name and password ‘mb‘)
We’ve got more bug fixes coming in the next couple of weeks. Also, the next server release has been scheduled for 2008-11-23. As usual, please report bugs to our bug tracker.
UPDATE: I had to clear everyone’s collections because of a bug. That’s fixed now — please start over again.
UPDATE2: Due to complaints by stodgy brits, Music Newz is now called Music News. 🙂