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We're back up and running, with a slightly longer than expected downtime. As part of this maintenance cycle, we've installed new varnish configuration files which *should* hopefully fix the long standing issues with logging in, as well as articles not showing up on the main page.
Furthermore, we've dumped the static page generation used by slash in favor of simply varnishing everything. Now anonymous users are on a 5 minute page cache (so new comments and such will take a bit of time to show up, consistent with the other site), which logged in users can bypass the cache and get live access to articles. A couple of things such as comment count are still dependent on slashd's freshen.pl task, so those don't update in real time (yet).
In other news, we've (finally) got a proper development server up at http://dev.soylentnews.org/, running a copy of the production database where we can stage changes and other various things before deploying here. If you want to see what we're up to before we push it live, check it out. As usual, if we make any large scale changes, we'll announce it BEFORE pushing it here.
Furthermore, we've dumped the static page generation used by slash in favor of simply varnishing everything. Now anonymous users are on a 5 minute page cache (so new comments and such will take a bit of time to show up, consistent with the other site), which logged in users can bypass the cache and get live access to articles. A couple of things such as comment count are still dependent on slashd's freshen.pl task, so those don't update in real time (yet).
In other news, we've (finally) got a proper development server up at http://dev.soylentnews.org/, running a copy of the production database where we can stage changes and other various things before deploying here. If you want to see what we're up to before we push it live, check it out. As usual, if we make any large scale changes, we'll announce it BEFORE pushing it here.
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Site Maintence Complete: 21-03-2014
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In Tulsa, Oklahoma, it is against the law to open a soda bottle without
the supervision of a licensed engineer.
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Friday March 21 2014, @10:24PM
We had to physically shut nodes down because we needed to change their boot options (from Linode's kernel to stock Ubuntu kernels for now), which is somewhat painful but necessary for some features we'll be rolling out in the very near future for site security/performance. Normally we'd just leave apache up redirecting to a static page or something, but in this instance, we had to pull the plug.
Still always moving
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 21 2014, @11:10PM
Right (and thanks for the reply) but I'm saying you could let DNS handle some basic redirection for you too, at a higher level -- especially if downtime's going to be more than an hour or two. (Not sure just how low a TTL your registrar/DNS host will support.)
From a user perspective it's nice to see a note that things are okay, rather than thinking that another set of site upheaval drama is in play. Or maybe I'm just a worrywart.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday March 22 2014, @02:41AM
Maybe just a static page, link it on the main page and call it something obvious, like, uh, Status. You'd only need to change it if SN is down. Could be on a different domain, we don't care where, so long as we can be reassured. :)
Glad things are still going positively. I like it here.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 1) by neagix on Saturday March 22 2014, @08:12AM
this was not there? I am surprised...yeah it's easy to setup, please guys!
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday March 22 2014, @03:09PM
And I'm sure they could automate a basic announcement easily enough (both a status page and a twitter thing, for those who use the dirty bird), and update it with specifics when they get a chance. They seem to be pretty durn competent at all this.
Once a status page is enacted, we who care can bookmark it and if SN is nowhere to be found, at least we'll know what's the problem. Knowing is a whole lot better than worrying.
I think it says a lot that the stories with the most comments are frequently those about the site itself -- guys, you've got something good here, to make us care this much.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.