User:Jukeboksi/Blog/2018

December

Wednesday 2018-12-26

• Made, verified and distributed backups and took a snapshot of the system disk. Jukeboksi (talk) 19:44, 26 December 2018 (UTC)

November

Friday 2018-11-16

• Snapshotting complete with a downtime of 4 minutes. Jukeboksi (talk) 16:35, 16 November 2018 (UTC)
• Machine rebooted to new kernel. Going to take a snapshot of the system disk. This is going to cause a freeze, usually only for 3-4 minutes, but today the snapshotting of the other machine caused a freeze of 24 minutes, so the site may be unavailable for a while. Jukeboksi (talk) 15:56, 16 November 2018 (UTC)
• Rebooting the machine to take kernel version 4.9.0-8-amd64 into use. Jukeboksi (talk) 15:39, 16 November 2018 (UTC)
• Made, verified and distributed backups. Updated software with apt. There is a new kernel version. Going to reboot an almost identical server with less important sites on it first to see that all goes ok with the new kernel version. After that going to reboot this server for the new kernel version. Expected downtime will be 1-2 minutes. Jukeboksi (talk) 14:50, 16 November 2018 (UTC)

Thursday 2018-11-08

• Made, verified and distributed backups. Jukeboksi (talk) 12:59, 8 November 2018 (UTC)

October

Monday 2018-10-29

• Made, verified and distributed backups. Jukeboksi (talk) 21:12, 29 October 2018 (UTC)

Saturday 2018-10-27

• Also took a snapshot of the system disk. Jukeboksi (talk) 14:49, 27 October 2018 (UTC)
• Moved the little info on countries that Consumerium list of lists had to Countries of the world and am aiming to use that as a central place to add pieces of info on countries. Jukeboksi (talk) 14:34, 27 October 2018 (UTC)
• Made, verified and distributed backups. Jukeboksi (talk) 14:30, 27 October 2018 (UTC)

Tuesday 2018-10-23

• Today I did a small test to find out how much CPU load affects the power consumption of a laptop. I did this because I have recently resumed contributing my computational resources to the w:Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing or BOINC for short and am considering whether to add running BOINC to the things suggested to consumers who stumble upon the development wiki Main Page.

When, a Lenovo ThinkPad X230, was being mostly idle at 20-30% CPU utilization it consumed on average 30W or slightly under and when I put all cores into full labour with the w:hardware stress test program for Linux aptly named just 'stress' with the parameter '--cpu 4' (the CPU has 4 cores), which causes CPU utilization going to 100%. Under full workload on the CPU cores the computer used an average of 40W so cranking all CPU cores to the max causes an approximate +35% electricity consumption.

Also tested an another computer, a Dell Inpiron E6220 that had a very low power consumption of around 17W when idle with 10% of CPU in use and the stressing of the CPU to the max caused a much bigger rise in its electricity consumption: It went to 52W so that is a rise of +206% electricity consumption or +35W in terms of absolute consumption.

It is hard to draw a conclusion from a sample of only 2 computers, but it is clear that CPU utilization does play a major role in how much power the computer consumes. Jukeboksi (talk) 13:41, 23 October 2018 (UTC)

Monday 2018-10-15

• Made, verified and distributed backups. Jukeboksi (talk) 10:11, 15 October 2018 (UTC)

Friday 2018-10-12

• Made, verified and distributed backups. Jukeboksi (talk) 14:31, 12 October 2018 (UTC)
• Upgraded the server software with apt. Jukeboksi (talk) 14:34, 12 October 2018 (UTC)

September

Sunday 2018-09-30

• Made, verified and distributed backups. Jukeboksi (talk) 09:48, 30 September 2018 (UTC)

Saturday 2018-09-08

• Made, verified and distributed backups. Jukeboksi (talk) 10:23, 9 September 2018 (UTC)

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August

Tuesday 2018-08-28

• Made, verified and distributed backups. Jukeboksi (talk) 21:09, 28 August 2018 (UTC)

Thursday 2018-08-23

• There was a slight misconfiguration in the SSL/TLS certs. It is now fixed and it was not anything that would jeopardize the security of the TLS encryption. Jukeboksi (talk) 11:48, 23 August 2018 (UTC)

Tuesday 2018-08-21

• Made, verified and distributed backups. Jukeboksi (talk) 17:00, 21 August 2018 (UTC)

Wednesday 2018-08-15

• Made, verified and distributed backups. Jukeboksi (talk) 19:52, 15 August 2018 (UTC)

Sunday 2018-08-12

• The server time seems to occasionally drift towards the past. This may very well be due to the way the hosting guys' do the snapshotting of the system. The real time clock (RTC) is quite correct but the other clocks drift into the past. I think I'm going to enable NTP to stop this from happening. Jukeboksi (talk) 10:43, 12 August 2018 (UTC)

Saturday 2018-08-11

• Tested this wiki with gtemetrix.com website tester and the main suggestions it gave are to add gzipping of content and to utilize / leverage client-side caching so going to look into doing those. Jukeboksi (talk) 12:40, 11 August 2018 (UTC)

• Update: Enabled gzipping of applicable files with these instructions. The only thing those instructions did not mention was to do a 'sudo a2enmod headers'. Jukeboksi (talk) 12:19, 12 August 2018 (UTC)

• I am going to make some small investments in a (yet to be determined) selection of eurozone P2P lending services. (list). This will help me become better acquainted with the P2P lending ecosystem. Jukeboksi (talk) 10:59, 11 August 2018 (UTC)

Friday 2018-08-10

• Made, verified and distributed backups. Jukeboksi (talk) 10:53, 11 August 2018 (UTC)

Wednesday 2018-08-08

• Made, verified and distributed backups. Wrote a nifty little shell script to automate most parts of the task. Next going to write a script for verifying the backups automatically. Jukeboksi (talk) 10:34, 9 August 2018 (UTC)

Friday 2018-08-03

• Made, verified and distributed backups. Jukeboksi (talk) 09:38, 3 August 2018 (UTC)

July

Monday 2018-07-23

• Made, verified and distributed backups and also took a snapshot of the system disk. Jukeboksi (talk) 11:09, 23 July 2018 (UTC)

• Noticed the "change password" in preferences was warning about the password being sent over unencrypted .. After a little while of disbelief I checked the page source and there were a few 'http://' items there. Then checked the LocalSettings.php and in fact there were a few 'http://' values hardcoded back from setting the wiki family up. Sorry about that. Corrected those and now everything is TLS/SSL protected. Jukeboksi (talk) 16:51, 23 July 2018 (UTC)

• Installed mw:Extension:LinkedWiki on the test wiki, but not quite sure if it is properly installed now as I got some warnings when installing dependencies with yarn. Note to people who want to try installing LinkedWiki: yarn from standard Debian repositories (a tool to test command line programs) is not the yarn (package manager). You want the latter in order to install LinkedWiki. Jukeboksi (talk) 20:28, 23 July 2018 (UTC)

Update: mw:User:Karima Rafes promptly replied to my question on Mediawiki.org that only the SPARQL editor requires bootstrap and that it is somewhat "experimental".

Note to self: This is what I did to install the LinkedWiki:

1. wget the LinkedWiki-extension,  untar and cd to the directory LinkedWiki
2. install yarn as follows

   curl -sS https://dl.yarnpkg.com/debian/pubkey.gpg | sudo apt-key add -
   echo "deb https://dl.yarnpkg.com/debian/ stable main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/yarn.list
   sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install yarn

3. install node.js as follows

   curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_10.x | sudo -E bash -
   sudo apt-get install -y nodejs

4. Install dependencies

   composer install --no-dev
   yarn install --production=true

This warned that bootstrap is not installed, which breaks the experimental SPARQL editor

Update: Installed bootstrap

   yarn add jquery # dependency of bootstrap
   yarn add popper.js # dependency of bootstrap 
   yarn add bootstrap@4.1.2
   yarn install --production=true

and the

yarn install --production=true

run without warnings. Today I'm going to test the LinkedWiki extension to see if it works. Jukeboksi (talk) 10:28, 24 July 2018 (UTC)

Sunday 2018-07-15

• OS upgraded to Debian 9.5. Jukeboksi (talk) 10:23, 15 July 2018 (UTC)

Saturday 2018-07-14

• Added 48 P2P financial services into The Consumerium list of alternative financial services and checked all old entries for website existence and removed a defunct few sites. Added short descriptions to the entries that were still lacking them. Jukeboksi (talk) 09:51, 15 July 2018 (UTC)

Thursday 2018-07-12

• Enabled DNSSEC for Consumerium at Gandi.net (registrar) to protect this site and it's users better. DNSSEC protects against DNS spoofing and has additional security benefits. Jukeboksi (talk) 14:16, 12 July 2018 (UTC)

Sunday 2018-07-08

• Made, verified and distributed backups plus took a snapshot of the system disk. Jukeboksi (talk) 20:30, 8 July 2018 (UTC)

Saturday 2018-07-07

• Installed a wildcard TLS/SSL certificate and thus enabled https-protection for the users of this site. Wrote a blog post about how I did it. Jukeboksi (talk) 21:13, 7 July 2018 (UTC)

Wednesday 2018-07-04

• Upgraded all extensions to REL1.31 versions. Made, verified and distributed backups. Jukeboksi (talk) 10:20, 4 July 2018 (UTC)

Tuesday 2018-07-03

• Upgraded both wikis of this wiki family to Mediawiki version 1.31.0. Jukeboksi (talk) 20:14, 3 July 2018 (UTC)

June

• Made, verified and distributed backups. Jukeboksi (talk) 18:50, 26 June 2018 (UTC)

March

Wednesday 2018-03-14

• Made, verified and distributed backups. Jukeboksi (talk) 20:08, 14 March 2018 (UTC)
• Got a 2nd CPU core for the server and this resulted in significantly faster loading times. Jukeboksi (talk) 18:53, 14 March 2018 (UTC) 

Thursday 2018-03-08

• There was an outage due to MariaDB getting knocked off by technical difficulties. Now the server specs have been amped so basically threw RAM at the problem and hope a reasonable result. Jukeboksi (talk) 16:10, 8 March 2018 (UTC)

February

Friday 2018-02-23

• Installed mw:Extension:ArticlePlaceholder on the test wiki. See article placeholder on Consumerium for example output. Jukeboksi (talk) 11:45, 23 February 2018 (UTC)
• Installed mw:Extension:Scribunto. Jukeboksi (talk) 11:29, 23 February 2018 (UTC)
• Installed mw:Extension:UniversalLanguageSelector. Jukeboksi (talk) 11:17, 23 February 2018 (UTC)
• Installed mw:Extension:Babel. Jukeboksi (talk) 11:16, 23 February 2018 (UTC)
• Made, verified and distributed backups of this machine. Jukeboksi (talk) 11:03, 23 February 2018 (UTC)

Sunday 2018-02-18

• Made, verified and distributed backups of both production machines. Additionally snapshotted both machines. Upgraded diaspora* to 0.7.3.1. Other Consumium free social services were at latest version already. Jukeboksi (talk) 15:07, 18 February 2018 (UTC)

Tuesday 2018-02-06

• Today I installed a new wiki for testing Wikibase and maybe some other things. The new installation is part of a wiki family consisting of it and this wiki. The new wiki is configured to use a shared database so it gets its user table and some other tables from this wiki. Jukeboksi (talk) 18:09, 6 February 2018 (UTC)
• Made, verified and distributed backups of this wiki and also snapshotted the system disk. Jukeboksi (talk) 12:51, 6 February 2018 (UTC)

Saturday 2018-02-03

So I'm thinking to move as follows:

1. Configuring a mw:Manual:Wiki family where all the wikis share the same Mediawiki installation so instead of needing to upgrade N wikis we need to upgrade only one. This is in preparation for making en.consumerium.org/wiki/
2. mw:Manual:Shared database as that allows single login for a wiki family if one sets the $wgCookieDomain.
3. Figuring out how to draw information from Wikidata
4. Installing Wikibase repository and client on the enconsuwiki and the client on all future language versions of Consumerium.

• mw:Manual:SessionManager and AuthManager. SessionManager enables alternatives to PHP's session management and AuthManager may be useful because it provides new user account creation from information from authentication by the 3rd party. Jukeboksi (talk) 11:10, 3 February 2018 (UTC)

Friday 2018-02-02

• A few outages today due to trying to install Wikibase Client Extension so that it would access the Wikidata repository. This turns out to be impossible at the moment. Restored the wiki back to a working state from few hour old backup twice. Wikidata does have dumps so next logical thought is "Can we mirror it?". Jukeboksi (talk) 00:07, 3 February 2018 (UTC)

January

Wednesday 2018-01-31

• End of this week and the week-end I have time to look at a good way to install and take into use the Wikibase client extension. The installation instructions say to use Composer but some say that it can be done without composer and that composer sometimes add unnecessary or risky dependencies. Jukeboksi (talk) 16:34, 31 January 2018 (UTC)

• The favico.ico which is the small website logo you see in many if not most browser tabs. It is not in the right place because it is not showing up. Low priority thing I will look into starting tomorrow. Jukeboksi (talk) 16:04, 31 January 2018 (UTC)

Update: Favico.ico issue fixed. Jukeboksi (talk) 19:13, 2 February 2018 (UTC)

Monday 2018-01-29

• Letsencrypt.org is currently projecting a 2018-02-27 launch date for the wildcard certificates. It may be prudent to just make do with the unencrypted wiki until we can get a wildcard certificate which should make the management and adding wikis easier than individual certificates for each wiki. For the certificate renewal automation to work something needs to be done to how traffic landing on consumerium.org is dealt with. Currently the VirtualHost does a "permanent redirect" on all traffic coming to consumerium.org which is a problem since the ACME challenge that the Certbot needs to do to authenticate ownership of domain will not work with the current arrangement. Jukeboksi (talk) 14:43, 29 January 2018 (UTC)

Sunday 2018-01-28

• Managed to fix the email situation. Now the migration of this Development wiki to the new VPS dedicated solely for Consumerium would seem to be complete. Snapshotted the disk. Made, verified and distributed backups of this new server. Jukeboksi (talk) 19:43, 28 January 2018 (UTC)

Saturday 2018-01-27

Migration to new server seems to have otherwise been a success but the NOCAPTCHA is slightly broken. Looking into it now. Jukeboksi (talk) 20:52, 27 January 2018 (UTC)

NoCAPTCHA is now working but the email-sending system is not. I've been trying to get the emails to work but no luck and now I need some sleep. Jukeboksi (talk) 23:39, 27 January 2018 (UTC)

Today I configured the mw:Extension:ConfirmAccount to be minimally annoying i.e. It asks a person requesting an account only for user name, email address and a short message. Previously it required "Real Name" (and we've never had a "require real names" rule or guideline).

Testing that it works I needed to solve the NOCAPTCHA many times and noticed how annoying and time consuming it is. This is hindering participation and a good strategy to minimize the annoyance caused by spambots while maintaining also minimum annoyance for genuine contributors. Jukeboksi (talk) 18:13, 27 January 2018 (EET)

Friday 2018-01-26

• The server's clock had drifted to 13 minutes in the future and that is now fixed. For me the wiki is one hour in the future right now but this may be due to my preferences. I am planning to migrate the wiki to the new Debian 9 server this weekend. That server has NTP enabled so there should be no incorrect time over there. Jukeboksi (talk) 17:51, 26 January 2018 (EET)

Sunday 2018-01-21

• I'm looking into purchasing a new VPS from the same hosting guys more advanced platform based on w:OpenStack. Jukeboksi (talk) 17:21, 21 January 2018 (EET)

Update: Purchased the VPS and will migrate this Consumerium Development wiki there in the coming few days. Jukeboksi (talk) 23:32, 24 January 2018 (EET)

• Wikibase enables a wiki to act as a structured data system like Wikidata does for the Wikimedia wikis. I am looking into what is the best arrangement to install this, a dedicated wiki or as part of the English language Consumerium.org implementation wiki. Jukeboksi (talk) 17:05, 21 January 2018 (EET)

• Made, verified and distributed backups of both production machines (Consumerium:Itself and Consumium free social). Jukeboksi (talk) 16:56, 21 January 2018 (EET)

Saturday 2018-01-13

• Installed The ConfirmAccount extension to stop the bots that are able to pass the NoCAPTCHA from registering accounts en masse. In practice this means that account creation is moderated. This is unfortunate but seemed necessary at least for a while. Jukeboksi (talk) 15:00, 13 January 2018 (EET)

Wednesday 2018-01-03

• Made, verified and distributed backups of both production machines. Jukeboksi (talk) 17:01, 3 January 2018 (EET)