MetaBrainz Foundation Community Blog
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. … Continue reading “New database server live”
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 … Continue reading “Hardware issues”
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.
It’s TRM pruning time again.
At about 1100hrs UTC on January 25th the TRM database
was “pruned” again. Here are the pertinent facts and figures:
For pretty pictures illustrating this, check out our
MRTG pages.
See server news for details of previous pruning.
Server updates: quite a collection of medium to small changes, including making artist subscriptions public.
(This change log includes all changes made to the server since the date
of the last release. Some of these changes are new as of the
above date; some were introduced between the previous release and this one).
Artist Subscriptions Made Public
So far your list of subscribed artists has always been completely
private – no-one could see which artists you’re subscribed to, and
no-one could see who is subscribed to any given artist.
This is now changing.
A new preference has been added, called
“Allow other users to see my subscribed artists“.
The default setting of this new preference is ON, the opposite of
the previous behaviour, meaning that your artist subscription list
will become public. If you don’t want your subscription list to
become public, you have 30 days from the date of this release
to log in and change this preference to “off”. (You can change the
setting at any time, but if you want to be sure that no-one ever sees
your subscription list, you’ll have to change it to “off” within the first
30 days).
From the date of this release, you can
see how many users are subscribed to any given artist, including
users who have are “privately” subscribed. However you won’t
immediately be able to see a list of users subscribed to an artist, or
vice versa.
From 30 days after this release,
you’ll be able to see other users’ subscription lists (if their preferences
let you), and you can see what users are subscribed to any given
artist (but only those users whose lists are “public”).
During the first 30 days those pages will simply show an error message.
Please read these notes about this
feature if you are concerned about the privacy implications.
New Preference: “When I Vote, Mail Me Notes”
A new preference has been added: “When I vote on a moderation,
mail me all future notes for that moderation”. Hopefully
the meaning of this is quite clear. The setting is checked
as each note is added, so you can globally turn this
behaviour on or off for all moderations (i.e. you can’t have this
option “on” for some moderations and “off” for others).
If you are an “Automatic Moderator”
The search page will
now notify you whenever there are any elections in which you may
participate (but have not yet done so).
There is a new preference, “Enable auto-moderator privileges”.
If you turn this setting off, you can temporarily revoke your automod
privilege from yourself, allowing you to put some moderation to the vote
where it would otherwise have been automatically applied. To
regain your automod privilege, simply
return to your preferences page and re-enable
the option. This setting is not saved to the database; if you log
out and in again, the option will always be reset to “on”.
When nominating another user for auto-moderator status, there is now a
“confirm” page, so it’s harder to accidentally nominate someone.
Miscellaneous
When editing a track, the allowed track number range is
shown and checked against.
The Albums with superfluous data tracks
report now only shows tracks if they are the last track on the album
in question.
The sidebar “Quick Search” now includes search for Editor
(aka user, aka moderator).
On the preferences page, most options now have HTML labels (so you can click
on the text next to the tick box, as well as the tick box itself). The
voting buttons on the main voting pages have been re-arranged to be easier
to read. (Changes by Eli Miller – thanks!)
The “login” page is now never shown to logged-in users. This happened
from time to time, and was always very confusing when it did. The HTML
for the login box has also been tidied up. One side-effect of this is
that the odd “jumping” behaviour seen by some Mozilla / Firefox users seems
to have been fixed.
If you use the “Picard” Tagger, then the
artist “album list” page now includes “tagger” links on all the
albums. Also, the problem whereby sometimes you would see the “Nothing
to see here, move along” page has been fixed.
If you use the “Use Javascript to move the input focus when the page loads”
preference (which is on by default), then the tagger “lookup” page now
doesn’t move the focus, but the “submit a new CD” page
does.
Each album now includes an “Edit releases” link at the bottom, next to where
the releases are shown.
Kim
Plowright has contributed search
plugins for Firefox.
The “Reveal my e-mail address” option has been removed from the moderation
note window.
The album “release editor” now checks for valid dates.
The main artist page no longer shows the “more…” link for related artists
when there are, in fact, no more related artists to show. (patch by
Matthew Exon)
You can now search for moderations by date / time:
example one,
example two.
Searching for moderations (when your search includes both open and closed
moderations) is faster now, after
this
work by Yary Hluchan. Thanks Yary!
From a moderator’s “profile” page, you can now search for their
Deleted Moderations.
When editing your own profile, you can
re-send yourself a “confirm my e-mail address” message at any time,
without having to change your e-mail address to something else and
back again.
P.S.: all user accounts which have a
stored e-mail address have now had that address validated at least once.
Various things in moderation notes are now automatically turned into
hyperlinks to moderations: e.g. “moderation #123”,
auto hyperlinks in mod notes to other mods: e.g. “moderation #123”,
“mod 245725” or “edit #36483” would all become links to their respective
pages.
The page about disc IDs contained a link to what
is now some rubbishy “link farm” web site; that link has therefore been
removed.
ruaok’s bio has been updated.
The home page contained some invalid HTML, which has now
been fixed.
The INSTALL file has been updated; PostgreSQL 7.4 or later is required,
and the list of dependencies from CPAN has been updated.
Also a link to the DebianServerSetup
wiki page has been added.
admin/RemoveOldSessions now also removes orphaned lock files.
admin/SetSequences.pl now correctly sets the next sequence values
on the three “*_open” tables. (This bug would manifest itself as
duplicate key errors whenever the moderation was closed).
The URL rewriting (e.g. of /artist/GUID etc) is now implemented
via MusicBrainz::Server::Handlers, not mod_rewrite. In doing so
it’s now possible to use the “/artist/…” URL space for other things, e.g.
HTML pages (note: this page currently gives an error).
The SQL scripts have been tidied up (sorted, layout standardised etc).
DropViews.sql now drops the views, not creates them 🙂
Artists, users and countries are now cached using memcached.
The country list is no longer stored in each user’s %session.
The MusicBrainz::Server::DateTime module has been added.
The MusicBrainz::Server::DeferredUpdate module has been rewritten
somewhat, including the ability to handle deadlocks.
You can now customise the cookie name used (the default is
AF_SID).
We now check for, trap, and work around HTML::Mason‘s unhelpful
behaviour of turning repeated arguments into an array reference.
Extra logging has been added TRM requests and to the
TrackInfoFromTRMId query. In the latter query,
results are limited to 100 tracks, and looking up the “silence” TRM is now
disallowed.
Here is a shot of the new server: It’s titled: Full frontal, topless with freshly shaved pussy. 🙂
Here is a shot of the new server:
It’s titled: Full frontal, topless with freshly shaved pussy. 🙂
whicken sent MusicBrainz a Thanksgiving Day present that consisted of nearly 3000 AR relationships, and I finally had the chance to import the data and play with it. A few of URLs to check out: 2Pac Bono The Rolling Stones I didn’t know that 2Pac == Makavelli — I’m getting excited about AR. Can you … Continue reading “Unwrapping the thanksgiving present”
whicken sent MusicBrainz a Thanksgiving Day present that consisted of nearly 3000 AR relationships, and I finally had the chance to import the data and play with it. A few of URLs to check out:
I didn’t know that 2Pac == Makavelli — I’m getting excited about AR. Can you tell? If you want to see the data whicken sent our way, look here.
Thanks tons Wendell!! (whicken)
It’s TRM pruning time again.
At about 2300hrs UTC on January 25th the TRM database
was “pruned” again.
As we did last time, we removed all TRMs apart from the ones attached to
MusicBrainz tracks, this time using the additional criterion that
the TRM had to have been looked up at least twice.
Just before the prune we had about 3633572 TRMs; after the prune we had about 1898435.
For pretty pictures illustrating this, check out our
MRTG pages.
In the past, installing a MusicBrainz server has always been a testing and lengthy task, without any clear-cut set of instructions to follow. Over the last few days I’ve been putting together a method of installing mb_server, starting from scratch, using Debian. Installing the server just got a lot easier.
In the past, installing a MusicBrainz server has always been a testing and lengthy task, without any clear-cut set of instructions to follow. Over the last few days I’ve been putting together a method of installing mb_server, starting from scratch, using Debian. Installing the server just got a lot easier.
If you’ve been lusting for the new Advanced Relationships feature in MusicBrainz, take a look at our AR Todo list. We need to complete this list of tasks before we release AR on the world. We’re now officially done with the features, but we still need to do some performance tweaking and behind the scenes … Continue reading “AR todo list”
If you’ve been lusting for the new Advanced Relationships feature in MusicBrainz, take a look at our AR Todo list.
We need to complete this list of tasks before we release AR on the world. We’re now officially done with the features, but we still need to do some performance tweaking and behind the scenes futzing.
If you’d like to play, please go to the test server!
But keep in mind that the relationships on the test server will change! (They should be more complete and suck less for the first release.)
The TRM database has been pruned again, making the system much faster and more reliable again.
At about 2200hrs UTC on December 22nd the TRM database
was “pruned” again.
As we did last time, we removed all TRMs apart from the ones attached to
MusicBrainz tracks, where the TRM had been looked up at least once.
Just before the prune we had about 3632598 TRMs; after the prune we had about 1989632.
For pretty pictures illustrating this, check out our
MRTG pages.