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posted by martyb on Friday May 21 2021, @12:25AM   Printer-friendly

As many of you noticed, we had a site crash today. From around 1300 until 2200 UTC (2021-05-20).

A HUGE thank you goes to mechanicjay who spent the whole time trying to get our ndb (cluster) working again. It's an uncommon configuration, which made recovery especially challenging... there's just not a lot of documentation about it on the web.

I reached out and got hold of The Mighty Buzzard on the phone. Then put him in touch with mechanicjay who got us back up and running using backups.

Unfortunately, we had to go way back until April 14 to get a working backup. (I don't know all the details, but it appears something went sideways on neon).

We're all wiped out right now. When we have rested and had a chance to discuss things, we'll post an update.

In the meantime, please join me in thanking mechanicjay and TMB for all they did to get us up and running again!

 
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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by martyb on Friday May 21 2021, @02:30PM (3 children)

    by martyb (76) Subscriber Badge on Friday May 21 2021, @02:30PM (#1137543) Journal

    One thing to keep in mind is the "heritage" of our code.

    I was with /. before it even had userids! I've witnessed all kinds of attacks on the site. Page-widening trolls. Actual SPAM comments. Mod bombs. Whatever creative nerds could come up with, they threw it at /. and changes were made to mitigate them. It stood up under heavy fire.

    Slashcode begat rehash which is the open-source, freely available code that powers this site. Our foundation is solid.

    Also, there is MUCH MUCH more going on behind the scenes. I dare say the admin interface has AT LEAST as much going on as what is presented to the community. Quite possibly twice (or thrice) as much. Every once in a while I find yet-another setting or configuration that could be tweaked!

    The foundation is solid.

    Admittedly, the site would benefit from some tuning. When SoylentNews started, it was difficult to foresee what areas would grow fastest and what needed to be allocated. I mean, here is my first comment on the site: comment 255 [soylentnews.org], and here I am replying to comment number 1,137,513!

    Remember, too, this site is run by volunteers in their spare time.

    Sure, it would be wonderful to have paid, full-time staff monitoring the site 24/7/365 like on Reddit or the like. How much would that cost per year? 3 x 8-hour shifts per day x 365 days-per-year is 8760 hours. At $15.00 per hour (dirt cheap for these kinds of skills!) that works out to $131,400 per year! And that does not even include server hosting costs! More realistically, at just $30.00 per hour, that works out to $1,839,600 per year! And that does not even include hosing costs.

    SoylentNews gets by on just $7,000 for an entire year!. And that includes the annual costs of being incorporated, filing taxes,hosting expense, everything!

    .

    --
    Wit is intellect, dancing.
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +4  
       Insightful=2, Interesting=1, Informative=1, Total=4
    Extra 'Insightful' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   5  
  • (Score: 4, Informative) by martyb on Friday May 21 2021, @02:38PM

    by martyb (76) Subscriber Badge on Friday May 21 2021, @02:38PM (#1137546) Journal

    Oops! His submit instead of preview.

    s/hosing/hosting/

    s/131,400/919,800/

    There's prolly some more; it was a LONG day yesterday!

    --
    Wit is intellect, dancing.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 21 2021, @03:07PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 21 2021, @03:07PM (#1137552)
    Marty, I like you, but seriously, there are SO many flaws in your post.

    Yes, it’s expensive keeping a full-time dev on the payroll. That’s why hobby sites like soylent don’t do that - they use widely used open source CMS packages that have proper documentation, a developer community, and use a broadly used language combo - the most popular being written in php and any MySQL or PostgreSQL variant.

    Not slash. Not rehash. Perl lost the race a long time ago.

    What do users want? Articles, the ability to post comments, and journals. Plenty of CMS packages using php and a database server can do that without the legacy of Perl.

    Grab a copy of geeklog and play around with it. You should be able to have a functional site with stories, comments , and journals. And of c, the administrative backend contains all the functionality you want to hide from users.

    About Geeklog

    Geeklog is an open source application for managing dynamic web content. It is written in PHP and supports MySQL or PostgreSQL as the database backend.

    "Out of the box", Geeklog is a CMS, or a blog engine with support for comments, trackbacks, multiple syndication formats, spam protection, and all the other vital features of such a system.

    The core Geeklog distribution can easily be extended by the many community developed plugins and other add-ons to radically alter its functionality. Available plugins include forums, image galleries, and many more.

    This is what you use when you can’t afford to keep a team of developers on staff. Php has a wide user base, so you might actually attract developers, because nobody wants to screw around with Perl. The whole “TMTOWTDI” is a bug, not a feature.

    You might even want to give the site a new, fresher look.

    Seriously, give it a try. Take a shitbox computer, install Linux or FreeBSD on it, and give geeklog a try. It worked for groklaw under traffic you can only dream of. Don’t be fooled by groklaw’s blah appearance. If you know HTML and CSS, and have any graphics talent , you can make it look clean and modern and spiffy as all. Icons for stories? Screw that - real images or graphics that the text wraps around. (You can still keep the topic icons if you must, but they’re really dated).

    As for the whole editorial process, you’d best run a private copy for the editors to edit submissions before someone posts them to the main site. I get that the subs queue is there so people can check before submitting a story, but multiple submissions are a good thing if they contain more information. You’ll probably end up dropping ICQ if editors can see what their proposed stories and edits and included graphics look like, and other editors can cut n paste and change and tweak it, and see the changes right there in the thread in their comments.

    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 22 2021, @11:04AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 22 2021, @11:04AM (#1137719)

      Those php sites get pwned every now and then too.

      Geeklog's security track record is crap and the types of vulnerabilities are not confidence inspiring: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Geeklog%22+exploit [google.com]

      Go get a clue. If you're not going to spend much time and money on a site you don't pick shit that needs to be patched every month.