Category: Server

Server updated

We just updated the main server with the latest and greatest features:

New Features

  • Lucene Search – New search functions that uses a Lucene text search engine. See the text
    search documentation     for details on how to use this new search. However, indexes are currently only updated once a day, so the old search
    feature is still available for when you need to find something that may have changed in the last day.
  • XMLWebservice – This new XML based web service drastically improves on the old RDF based web service by being more standards compliant and
    having a much more granular control over what data is returned for each query. Read the documentation
    how to use this new service. Please note that this is in BETA and the service is still subject to change!
  • New option to “approve” edits for auto moderators (719)
  • New links “Create relationship with this artist/album/track” and “Relate to URL” to speed up the process of
    adding AdvancedRelationships (21)
  • Adding more complete release dates is now auto moderation. (759)
  • New option to automatically subscribe to artists created by you (995)
  • Numerous improvements and bugfixes to the guess case and related Javascript tools.
    (12)
  • Subscribing to an artist redirects to the artist page, rather than the (sometimes) large list of subscribed artists
    (605)
  • More “intelligent” defaults guessing of new track artists for album moves (1015)
  • For move, artist changes and some other edits: link every participating entity in the moderation pages, and add as much information as necessary
    for checking its correctness. (610, 623 and
    920)
  • Improved Disc Id move, target album is searchable and moves are allowed for VA albums (155)
  • Reports: 2 small reports added (albums with language but no script and the other way around (621),
    simplification of the MultipleTRMsPerAlbum report for faster creation.
  • ASIN ARs now update the relevant albummeta table data as well. (1039)

Fixed bugs

  • Fixed merging of albums/artists with AdvancedRelationships (916)
  • Album Moving in batch mode will now change track artists as well (972)
  • Fixed some issues in “best match” calculation for searches (985)
  • Fixed failed moderations counter in user profile (1018)
  • Fixed bugs in ASIN AR cover image URL extraction. (1061)
  • and many more we already forgot about — please see this
    report     for all the bugs that were closed for this releases.

Thanks to everyone who helped in this release!

Planned TRM Server outage

The TRM server will be going for a multi-hour road trip to SLO tomorrow, which means that the server gets to take a break and enjoy picturesque views of the California countryside. Thus, there will be no TRM service tomorrow from between 1100 and 1200 PST (1900 GMT – 2000GMT) until about 1800 – 2000 … Continue reading “Planned TRM Server outage”

The TRM server will be going for a multi-hour road trip to SLO tomorrow, which means that the server gets to take a break and enjoy picturesque views of the California countryside. Thus, there will be no TRM service tomorrow from between 1100 and 1200 PST (1900 GMT – 2000GMT) until about 1800 – 2000 PST (0200 GMT – 0400 GMT). It should be less, but something always happens, right?

Technorati Tags: ,

Site move (kinda) complete

We’ve moved into the new digs! While the main services are working, we still need to clean up many loose ends. Please bear with us as we configure various bits and pieces. Thanks! Technorati Tags: colo, service

We’ve moved into the new digs! While the main services are working, we still need to clean up many loose ends. Please bear with us as we configure various bits and pieces.

Thanks!

Technorati Tags: ,

Service status update and upcoming release

Update: The move was postponed by approx. 24 hours, and has now been started. Its been a rough week for MusicBrainz, that’s for sure. First off, about a week ago a post about MuiscBrainz bubbled to the top of digg.com and that sent masive waves of traffic to us. That died down later in the … Continue reading “Service status update and upcoming release”

Update: The move was postponed by approx. 24 hours, and has now been started.

Its been a rough week for MusicBrainz, that’s for sure. First off, about a week ago a post about MuiscBrainz bubbled to the top of digg.com and that sent masive waves of traffic to us. That died down later in the week until all those people came back on the weekend and overwhelmed the servers. Our puny, but trusted, web server zim is just stretched too thin to handle all the load thrown at it. I apologize for the down-time and random errors you’ve been seeing in the last week.

And all that is about to get worse, but then it should get much better. Today is the day that we’ll attempt to move into the new data center (colocation facility) here in SLO (San Luis Obispo, CA). Starting very shortly after this post we’ll take a stab at moving the site onto new servers that should at least double, if not triple our current capacity to handle traffic.

We expect this move to take nearly three hours, during which you should use our mirror servers (or the staging server) if you need your MusicBrainz fix:

  • http://test.musicbrainz.org
  • http://de.musicbrainz.org
  • http://nl.musicbrainz.org

Last, but not least, we have finally updated the test server with the next release scheduled to be released next sunday on 2006-03-05. This release includes:

  • Many bug reports (see trac for a list of recently closed bugs)
  • WikiDocs: The improved replacement to the first generation wiki documentation system
  • Lucene search: A much improved search facility that is faster and vastly more accurate. This first version will not search for stop words or punctuation — we’ll improve this later.
  • XML Web Service: The newly designed and much more efficient based on XML (not RDF!) goes into beta with this release. This new service is vastly improved over the last one and uses common tools and common best practices for web services. This service alone should improve the performance of our systems. For details see the web service documentation. (We’ll also have new native python bindings to go with these!)

We’ll get a much more detailed ChangeLog out as the week progresses. So, happy playing with the new features while we move the site!

Technorati Tags: ,

Two Dell Poweredge servers donated!

Halsey Minor with Minor Ventures and David Ulevitch of Freedom Networks just donated two Dell Poweredge 1750 servers to the MetaBrainz Foundation! Each of these two 1U servers clocks in with: Dual 2.8 Ghz Xeon processors 2 Gb RAM 2 Ultra 320 36Gb SCSI drives with RAID controller These two machines help us quite a … Continue reading “Two Dell Poweredge servers donated!”

Halsey Minor with Minor Ventures and David Ulevitch of Freedom Networks just donated two Dell Poweredge 1750 servers to the MetaBrainz Foundation! Each of these two 1U servers clocks in with:

  • Dual 2.8 Ghz Xeon processors
  • 2 Gb RAM
  • 2 Ultra 320 36Gb SCSI drives with RAID controller

These two machines help us quite a way toward our current hardware fundraising goal — now we only need to find a beefy database server and we’re ready to migrate into the colocation facility here in SLO.

Thank you so much Halsey and David — the entire MusicBrainz community will love you for your generous donation!

Technorati Tags: , ,

Hardware wishlist & colo migration

MusicBrainz has been growing by leaps and bounds — pretty much every month is our busiest yet and our overall service is getting noticeably slower. Many moderation searches are timing out because too many tagger users are putting a heavy load on our database server. After the recent fundraiser, I started thinking about how to … Continue reading “Hardware wishlist & colo migration”

MusicBrainz has been growing by leaps and bounds — pretty much every month is our busiest yet and our overall service is getting noticeably slower. Many moderation searches are timing out because too many tagger users are putting a heavy load on our database server. After the recent fundraiser, I started thinking about how to expand the capacity that MusicBrainz has, and there is no quick fix.

This is complicated by the fact that CCCP is full and cannot accept new servers. We’re outgrowing this service and its time for us to move to a new hosting company. I am considering different options for this, but I am very much favoring a data center here in SLO. This will give Jeff Simmons (our sysadmin helper) and myself immediate access to all of our machines. Right now our machines are 200 miles away from here, which does not lend itself to quick fixes.

So, I would like to expand our capacity and move our servers closer to home at the same time. For that we need to purchase or preferably beg for more hardware. Our hardware wishlist looks like this:

  • One database class server — 2U, dual 32 Bit processors, 12GB RAM, RAID-10 SCSI with loads of fast SCSI drives (donated!)
  • Two webserver class servers — 1U, dual 32/64 bit processors (AMD preferred), 4GB RAM, SATA or SATA RAID, with SATA drives (donated!)
  • One server mobo, 2GB RAM, SATA or SATA Raid, with SATA drives (donated/purchased!)

I know, those are stiff requirements that clock in near $10k new. And I also know that I may as well be smoking crack — but hey this is a wishlist, right?

So, if someone has this killer hardware laying around or they are looking for a serious tax write-off please start by leaving a comment.

UPDATE: So much for smoking crack — this wishlist is now checked off and complete!!

Technorati Tags: ,

MusicBrainz now uses Trac as its official bug tracker

We just completed the transition to Trac as our official bug tracking system! While the bug database is stored on the staging server right now, we will be moving it before too long. You can always find the current location by using these shortcut URLs: http://musicbrainz.org/bugs — go to the list of bugs http://musicbrainz.org/bug — … Continue reading “MusicBrainz now uses Trac as its official bug tracker”

We just completed the transition to Trac as our official bug tracking system! While the bug database is stored on the staging server right now, we will be moving it before too long. You can always find the current location by using these shortcut URLs:

http://musicbrainz.org/bugs — go to the list of bugs

http://musicbrainz.org/bug — enter a new bug

Please do no use the SourceForge Bug Tracker anymore!! (we will disable these trackers soon)

If you spot a bug that has an encoding problem (non-ascii characters getting garbled), please post a comment with the fixed up characters. Some of the data that SourceForge spit out for our old bugs had inconsistent encodings, which caused some bug reports to have some garbled characters. Alas.

Thanks to Lukáš Lalinský for writing the scripts that allowed us to import the data!

Technorati Tags: ,

Amazon coverart: Please stop pestering me about AR support

Just to get some peace from incessant nagging about Amazon Coverart AR support, I implemented it and made it live on the main server. Now please stop pestering me. Technorati Tags: musicbrainz

Just to get some peace from incessant nagging about Amazon Coverart AR support, I implemented it and made it live on the main server. Now please stop pestering me.

Technorati Tags:

Server updated

A few minutes ago we completed the update to the latest version of the MusicBrainz server. New features: Implemented the changes to alleviate some of the problems related to Style Guideline #5 Added new show artists link in the album edit links. This shows all of the tracks and change track artist links for a … Continue reading “Server updated”

A few minutes ago we completed the update to the latest version of the MusicBrainz server.

New features:

  • Implemented the changes to alleviate some of the problems related to Style Guideline #5
  • Added new show artists link in the album edit links. This shows all of the tracks and change track artist links for a given album, which is a nice short-cut for changing one track artist and not a whole album at the same time.
  • Wiki formatting in annotations

Closed bugs:

  • Users cannot remove their email address if they have moderations open. (bug #1222947)
  • cannot create duplicate artist during change track/move album (bug #1332702)
  • changed the ‘Mailing List’ links to be consistent (bug #1333094)
  • CSS: minor margin problem in 20051023 release (bug #1344427)
  • Indicate on subject line if mod note is for your mod (bug #1348545)
  • Add rel=”nofollow” to outgoing AR web links (bug #1260342)
  • deselect AR link leads to unknown artist/album (bug #1358789)
  • AR display: still showing ‘…’ when View All Relationships (bug #1232367)
  • FreeDB’s imports of AC/DC and such bad (bug #1014240)
  • group link types for URLs selectable (bug #1363133)
  • ModBot should not delete artist if it is target for any mods (bug #1349243)
  • [patch] Homepage HTML no longer validates (bug #1337604)
  • Multiple Duplicate artists created during import of VA album (bug #1339958)
  • New “Release” page when adding album ignores preferences (bug #1335764)
  • Empty artists script causes DB server to crash (bug #1375624)

Please file a bug report if you find something amiss.

Technorati Tags: ,