Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2006-08-21/Technology report

Technology report

Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

Outage

All Wikimedia projects were briefly locked down after most users were unable to access the site. The reason, according to developer Brion Vibber, was the readvertising of Wikimedia's IP space by Cogent. [1]

As a result of the IP snafu, which occurred on Friday at about 17:30 UTC, few users (mostly AOL users) were able to access the site, while most others were blocked. Developers made the decision to put all databases into read-only mode until the route was restored around 19:55 UTC; write access was enabled shortly afterward. A new IP space was given to Wikimedia, and the old space is or will soon be unavailable. River Tarnell said that developers were looking into obtaining a permanent IP space [2].

Database changes

Three tables have been added to the MediaWiki database structure since MediaWiki 1.6. These links are meant to contain more information either untracked, or in other locations in previous releases.

A new "langlinks" table tracks interlanguage links
A new "filearchive" table stores information on deleted files
A new "querycache_info" table stores information on query page updates

Operations report released

Domas Mituzas published an operations report for November 2005 to August 2006, covering major hardware and software changes. Image hosting systems are one of the next purchases planned, after high-performance caching and application hardware and Foundry routing hardware were purchased earlier this year.

New changes in Software

Bug 7037: Regression in login tab order fixed
Bug 7031: Requesting a password by e-mail when an e-mail address is not set results in an error message, rather than a false "success" message
Bug 7010: Don't send email notifications for watched talk pages when user has selected to receive only updates for their own talk page - Note: Email notifications are not activated on the English Wikipedia.
New magic word {{CURRENTHOUR}} added
revision 16116: Added [[:Image:Foo.png]] style links to the pagelinks table; i.e. such links now show up in Whatlinkshere.
Avoid duplicate revision imports with Special:Import
Bug 7054: Validate email address before sending email confirmation message
Bug 7061: Format title on "from (page)" links on Special:Allpages
Bug 7044: Introduce "padleft" and "padright" colon functions
Pass page title as parameters to "linkshere" and "nolinkshere" and update default message text