IMPORTANT! Trying out some new servers

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IMPORTANT! Trying out some new servers

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Postby Ornette » Sat Oct 05, 2013 1:07 pm

So in an effort to bring all of you guys better service, we're trying out some new VPS hosting. The hosting allows us to install any distribution of linux we want (Gentoo) and whatever software and configuration that we want. Downside is the VPS has hard limits on disk space, memory, and bandwidth, unlike our shared hosting plan now where it's more of an "on-demand" thing. The upside is that we not only have full control but it's an 8 x Xeon processor system (via Xen), so that's a massive improvement.

We're only trying it out to see if it's feasible given our usage, so we'll try to move different parts of the site over some period of time, and it if doesn't work out, we'll move them back to Dreamhost.

Today, I moved the wiki over to Xen server, but the DNS change will take anywhere from 2 to 7 days to propagate through the internet. If you type: nslookup wiki.evageeks.org and it says "69.163.139.68", then it's the old server and the wiki will seem real slow (it's using the database over at the Xen server), but if it says "23.92.18.108", then you're using the Xen server and the wiki should seem (hopefully) a little faster. By next week, all DNS should be pointing to the Xen server.

Additionally, hosting on our own Xen server means we can employ SSL/TLS. That means if your DNS says the wiki is on "23.92.18.108", then you can actually go to:

https://wiki.evageeks.org/

and have everything will be encrypted, and the FBI (probably) won't know what you're viewing on the wiki. The cert is self signed, so you'll need to create an exception on your browser to accept the cert. It doesn't mean the data isn't encrypted, just that you trust that the server you're talking to is "wiki.evageeks.org".

Post your feedback here, or any issues, etc.

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Postby Ornette » Sat Oct 05, 2013 4:13 pm

I've also moved the front page over to the Xen server, it doesn't get as much traffic as the wiki does and moving it was mostly harmless.

So you can access it also via SSL/TLS: https://www.evageeks.org/

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Postby riffraff11235 » Mon Oct 07, 2013 4:04 pm

Not sure if this is relevant, but I noticed that before the switch, the forum would almost always open in a new tab when I followed the link from the homepage, which I found kind of annoying. Now it just opens it in the same tab, as it used to.
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Postby Ornette » Mon Oct 07, 2013 5:31 pm

View Original Postriffraff11235 wrote:Not sure if this is relevant, but I noticed that before the switch, the forum would almost always open in a new tab when I followed the link from the homepage, which I found kind of annoying. Now it just opens it in the same tab, as it used to.

No idea what's causing that, the CSS clearly says that all anchors will open in a new blank window/tab.

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Postby pwhodges » Mon Oct 07, 2013 5:38 pm

Some browsers may have means to override the HTML - Opera is very flexible in this regard, and maybe TabMix Pro in FireFox.

(Oh, hey - it's riffraff reporting it, who's the other Opera user, as I recall.)
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Postby Ornette » Mon Oct 07, 2013 7:27 pm

So the DB server at dreamhost went down again, prompting me to want to push the migration schedule of the forum up by a week.

So I'm going to plan on migrating the forum over to the Xen server tomorrow night (Tuesday). A few things to keep in mind regarding the migration:

1. In order to move the newest snapshot of the forum database, I'll need to lock the entire forum. We can't have any new posts being made during this move, would only be a couple of minutes at most.
2. I've gone ahead and set the TTL for "forum.evageeks.org" to something really low, this should make it so when the IP address changes, most people should get the new IP pretty quickly.
3. In the event that people's DNS still doesn't update in a timely manner, the forum instance on dreamhost will still be up and it'll connect to the migrated database on the Xen server. This means it'll be noticeably slower since it's got to connect to a database across the internet instead of one in the same data center.
4. There's bound to be some initial issues after such a migration, post any issues you have in here.

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Postby Ornette » Wed Oct 09, 2013 12:38 am

The migration seems to have worked. All three portions of the site are now on a Xen server. You can now use SSL:

https://forum.evageeks.org/
https://wiki.evageeks.org/
https://www.evageeks.org/

Again, post any unusual or broken stuff here or in Forum Wacky thread.

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Postby Ornette » Wed Oct 09, 2013 2:42 am

It looks like some unicode in usernames didn't make it entirely unscathed eventhough I was explicit in both the dumps and restors. Fortunately, post body unicode, or at least the Japanese, seems to have been ok: https://forum.evageeks.org/post/439425/Eva-2XX-Storyboards-vs-Final/#439425

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Postby Mr. Tines » Wed Oct 09, 2013 2:51 am

We had that in the last migration, with the handles like Fau?tin and Rust? being doubly UTF-8'd at some point in the process
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Postby Mr. Tines » Wed Oct 09, 2013 2:56 am

So, just did a little experiment -- Japanese text posts OK, but ISO-Latin-1 U+00DF and U+00FF reduce to question marks.
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Postby Ornette » Wed Oct 09, 2013 3:04 am

View Original PostMr. Tines wrote:So, just did a little experiment -- Japanese text posts OK, but ISO-Latin-1 U+00DF and U+00FF reduce to question marks.

No idea why that happens. Database character set and collation is the same.

Is it possible this is a php thing and not a database thing?

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Postby Lavinius » Wed Oct 09, 2013 6:55 am

Er, yes, the name of my roleplay uses an e with an accent aigu, but this either seems to be replaced with a question mark or otherwise results in the subject of the topic being blanked. It didn't do this before, so can this be fixed or will I have to just use the boring English spelling?
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Postby Mr. Tines » Wed Oct 09, 2013 7:16 am

View Original PostMr. Tines wrote:So, just did a little experiment -- Japanese text posts OK, but ISO-Latin-1 U+00DF and U+00FF reduce to question marks.


There's something different in the new set-up, but it may take some time to diagnose exactly what.
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Postby Mr. Tines » Wed Oct 09, 2013 7:35 am

OK, preview gets the high-bit 1-byte characters right by submitting as

application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=UTF-8

Catching the trace for a post, I see

[13:37:31.847] A form was submitted in the windows-1252 encoding which cannot encode all Unicode characters, so user input may get corrupted. To avoid this problem, the page should be changed so that the form is submitted in the UTF-8 encoding either by changing the encoding of the page itself to UTF-8 or by specifying accept-charset=utf-8 on the form element. @ http://forum.evageeks.org/posting.php?mode=editpost&p=670865
[13:37:31.932] POST http://forum.evageeks.org/posting.php [HTTP/1.1 200 OK 289ms]

Interestingly 75% of the warning noise from the submit comes from the twitter code!

[s:3ik7gc3x]I haven't yet looked at the behaviour of quick edit, which always used to lose 8+bit characters in the round trip.[/s:3ik7gc3x]

Some 8+bit characters in quick edit ? %uFEFF%uFF46%uFF55%uFF4C%uFF4C%uFF57%uFF49%uFF44%uFF54%uFF48 %uFF43%uFF48%uFF41%uFF52%uFF41%uFF43%uFF54%uFF45%uFF52%uFF53

The ISO-Latin-1 character U+00FF and the fullwidth characters showed OK as usual after submitting in quick edit (the AJAX round-trips OK);
Page refresh turns the ISO-Latin-1 character to a ? (new behaviour) and the fullwidth characters to %-escapes (old behaviour)
Re-entering quick-edit, the ISO-Latin-1 character remains a ? and the fullwidth characters show properly (old behaviour) in the edit box
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Postby Ornette » Wed Oct 09, 2013 10:20 am

Ok, the problem was that the forum is in bed with php5.3, and isn't compatible with 5.4 or 5.5.

! " # $ % & ' ( ) * + , - . /
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 : ; < = > ? @
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
[ \ ] ^ _ `
a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z
{ | } ~

À Á Â Ã Ä Å Æ Ç È É Ê Ë Ì Í Î Ï Ð Ñ Ò Ó Ô Õ Ö
×
Ø Ù Ú Û Ü Ý Þ
ß
à á â ã ä å æ ç è é ê ë ì í î ï ð ñ ò ó ô õ ö
÷
ø ù ú û ü ý þ
ÿ

Looks like that fixed the problem.

HOWEVER. the downside is that if you tried to edit a post that already has ISO 8859-1 chars in it, they'll have been turned into "?"'s.

At some point, and it will probably be filled with agony, we may have to upgrade the forum code to be compat with 5.5, because one day, 5.3 isn't going to be around anymore.

-------

Looks like the latin chars in usernames got fixed too.
Last edited by Ornette on Thu Oct 10, 2013 4:35 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Postby Monk Ed » Wed Oct 09, 2013 6:38 pm

View Original PostOrnette wrote:HOWEVER. the downside is that if you tried to edit a post that already has ISO 8859-1 chars in it, they'll have been turned into "?"'s.

Do they turn into "?"s in the edit box or after you post? Because I just hit "Edit" on your post just to see what would happen to the special characetrs in it and they showed up fine for me in the edit box.
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Postby Ornette » Wed Oct 09, 2013 6:57 pm

View Original PostMonk Ed wrote:Do they turn into "?"s in the edit box or after you post? Because I just hit "Edit" on your post just to see what would happen to the special characetrs in it and they showed up fine for me in the edit box.

What I meant is, before I swapped the forum to run on php 5.3, if someone tried to edit a post that had latin characters in it, then saved, those "?" characters got saved to the database, which means that now that the forum is running on php 5.3 and latin characters don't get clobbered, viewing that post that was edited will show "?"'s because it was edited while the forum was running on a php version it wasn't happy with and the clobbered latin characters were saved into the database.

You can edit my post now just fine because the forum is now running on a php version that it's chill with.

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Postby Monk Ed » Wed Oct 09, 2013 10:02 pm

Couple a' weird behaviors.

#1, sometimes, somehow I lose the new connection and connect instead to the old connection, which I notice because the security shield next to my URL bar disappears and the site reacts a little more slowly.

#2, when I'm on the new connection, when I hit "back" it seems to load the backed-to page fresh. I imagine that this might be specific to how my browser is treating it rather than something on the site's end?
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Postby Ornette » Wed Oct 09, 2013 10:19 pm

You are only connecting to the new server, the old dreamhost server isn't connected to a database, so all you'd see is errors.

There's probably a lot of http:// links sitting around the site. The forum wasn't written to be served under SSL, but we can take each instance case by case. That means if you are using HTTPS, then click on an intra-forum link that takes you to HTTP (no encryption, no "lock" icon), I'll need to know what that is so i can look at the intra link code.

As for #2, I noticed that too, no idea what that's happening. It's nothing the forum is doing.

EDIT: actually, now that I'm thinking a bit about it, it may have something to do with the settings on the apache server.

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Postby Ornette » Thu Oct 10, 2013 4:03 pm

It seems now latin text is OK, but Japanese text results in ????


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