Forum: Instiki – Topic: Idle Instiki was using 17% of CPU on a shared host

Problems not related. Sysadmins fixed a server problem. Instiki with high CPU usage has not recurred after that one incident.

Thanks

Forum: Instiki – Topic: Instiki hyperlinks failures

How about

"Environment Configuration":/aces/wiki_files/environments/AcesEnvironments.html

?

I don’t know how well Textile handles the “:” in the URL you were using.

Forum: Instiki – Topic: Instiki hyperlinks failures

I am having an issues with hyperlinks with our WIKI page using the textile markup. Hyperlinks to external webpages work eg. “www.google.com” but any internal html pages within the instiki filesystem end up getting application errors.
We have a folder inside the main Web folder called Wiki_files which has many different HTML files but if we link to any of them e.g…

“Environment Configuration”:http://acesrep:2500/aces/wiki_files/environments/AcesEnvironments.html)

I receive “Internal Error” An application error occurred while processing your request. Looking at the source of the page I get these dumps.

(d:/instiki-0.19.6/vendor/rails/actionpack/lib/action_controller/base.rb:1339:in perform_action' d:/instiki-0.19.6/vendor/rails/actionpack/lib/action_controller/filters.rb:617:in call_filters’ d:/instiki-0.19.6/vendor/rails/actionpack/lib/action_controller/filters.rb:638:in block in run_before_filters' d:/instiki-0.19.6/vendor/rails/actionpack/lib/action_controller/filters.rb:206:in call’ d:/instiki-0.19.6/vendor/rails/actionpack/lib/action_controller/filters.rb:206:in block in around_proc' d:/instiki-d:/0.19.6/vendor/rails/activesupport/lib/active_support/callbacks.rb:182:in call’ d:/instiki-0.19.6/vendor/rails/activesupport/lib/active_support/callbacks.rb:182:in evaluate_method' d:/instiki-0.19.6/vendor/rails/actionpack/lib/action_controller/filters.rb:184:in call’ d:/instiki-0.19.6/vendor/rails/actionpack/lib/action_controller/filters.rb:635:in run_before_filters' d:/instiki-0.19.6/vendor/rails/actionpack/lib/action_controller/filters.rb:615:in call_filters’ d:/instiki-0.19.6/vendor/rails/actionpack/lib/action_controller/filters.rb:638:in `block in run_before_filters')

If I open up the HTML document within the server itself it works fine but not as a link through instiki wiki.

Forum: Instiki – Topic: How do I bulk-clear the Instiki cache

Thanks, I did that.

It seems to be working fine, but one thing puzzles me. About a day after I cleared everything out as per the above, the full tree under instiki/cache/views/azimuth got repopulated – presumably when the site got crawled.

But the storage folder didn’t get repopulated. Or rather, now there is just a single file in it: azimuth-markdownMML-2015-02-12-11-11-03.zip, with a timestamp of yesterday.

Before I cleared out storage, there were tons of files it in, it looked something like one file per page of the wiki, though I didn’t look closely.

Does this make sense; are there any signs of ill-health here? What is the function of the storage folder?

Thanks.

Forum: Instiki – Topic: How do I bulk-clear the Instiki cache

How about:

rm instiki/storage/*

That should be fine.

rm -r instiki/cache/views/azimuth

As should that.

There’s a whole structure of directories and files under the last directory, that’s okay to wipe out?

All of those will be recreated, as needed.

Forum: Instiki – Topic: How do I bulk-clear the Instiki cache

Can we make the instructions more specific, because I’m cautions about disrupting a structure that I don’t understand.

How about:

rm instiki/storage/*

rm -r instiki/cache/views/azimuth

There’s a whole structure of directories and files under the last directory, that’s okay to wipe out?

Forum: Instiki – Topic: How do I bulk-clear the Instiki cache

What is the cleanest / simplest / safest way to purge the entire cache?

At the commandline, do an

rm -R

of the appropriate directory. There isn’t a GUI tool to do it.

In addition, the old URL is present in files in the top-level folder “storage.”

Those can all be deleted.

Forum: Instiki – Topic: How do I bulk-clear the Instiki cache

I did a bulk update in the database to change our forum URL from one location to another. (Updated the field Content in the Revisions table.)

Now a large number of entries in the cache are stale.

I grepped in the cache directory tree for the old url, and found it present in files in several subdirectories of the cache/views folder for the web in question. I saw it in the subdirectories source, tex, revision, …

In addition, the old URL is present in files in the top-level folder “storage.”

What is the cleanest / simplest / safest way to purge the entire cache?

Thanks!

Forum: Instiki – Topic: Idle Instiki was using 17% of CPU on a shared host

Good questions. Thanks. Research pending…

Forum: Instiki – Topic: Idle Instiki was using 17% of CPU on a shared host

Hmmm. Both of those sound bad. Are they related?

What version of Passenger are you running?

Forum: Instiki – Topic: Idle Instiki was using 17% of CPU on a shared host

But this isn’t my main concern tonight, which is off-topic: our shared host is crashing everyday, due to too many sleeping processes and not enough memory. They claim that 5G is enough memory, and are promising to fix it… Grr.

Forum: Instiki – Topic: Idle Instiki was using 17% of CPU on a shared host

Noticed this, then I touched tmp/restart.txt and usage went down to basically zero.

Forum: Instiki – Topic: Feature Requests

Thanks!

Forum: Instiki – Topic: Feature Requests

Try adding the entry

'dnsbl.tornevall.org' => 'https://dnsbl.tornevall.org/scan?ip='

to the DNSBLS hash in vendor/plugins/dnsbl_check/lib/dnsbl_check.rb. Apparently, the http://www.stopforumspam.com/ data is shared with that dnsbl list, and hence can be queried with the same kind of dnsbl lookup.

If that works, we can incorporate that in an update to Instiki. If not, we can look into implementing the API.

Forum: Instiki – Topic: Feature Requests

Background: The Azimuth wiki is getting consistently hit by a spammer promoting “coffre fort.” I’ll do what I can with keyword blocking, but the guy is creative with words.

Main point: The IPs are all in the database at www.stopforumspam.com.

Possible feature request: Option to have this web service called when validating an IP address.

One question is what the performance hit would be – what is the uptime of this service, and what is its response time.

A drawback of doing this is introducing a further dependence through the internet on an external system.

Forum: Instiki – Topic: Requirements for a server-side Instiki scripting package

You might want to look at this page

% ruby bundle exec rake db:fixtures:export_all
...
% ruby bundle exec rake db:fixtures:import_all

which, mind you, is about exporting a whole Instiki instance (rather than just the pages in a category). But it should give you the general idea.

More generally, it seems that what you want to do is write a few Rake tasks for the sort of administrative functions that you want to perform.

That may be worthwhile, even if you eventually get SSL running properly.

Forum: Instiki – Topic: How to develop an ABC music plugin for Instiki?

The Markdown+Blahtex engine works similarly: shelling out to Blahtex to produce png images for the equations (which are cached on the server.

So you might look closely at the Blahtex Math Extension in (my version of) Maruku.

Forum: Instiki – Topic: Requirements for a server-side Instiki scripting package

After considering these requirements, and enumerating the commands that are on the Edit Webs page, let’s take a breath, and then move on to discuss the SQL interpretation of these commands in another discussion thread.

Thanks for listening!

Forum: Instiki – Topic: Requirements for a server-side Instiki scripting package

Please if anyone sees any problems with these requirements, or has suggestions for simplifications, enhancements or new use cases – do tell!

Forum: Instiki – Topic: Requirements for a server-side Instiki scripting package

I believe that these specifications cover the story I mentioned above, which is to publish from one installation to another based on category:publish. They also cover more. For instance, multiple people could each have their own staging installation, and with these scripting commands, they could publish page sets to a common target installation.

Forum: Instiki – Topic: Requirements for a server-side Instiki scripting package

c) Import a page set P into I’.

Options: (1) overwrite existing pages, and clobber their histories, (2) append to the existing histories, (3) fail if the pages already exist.

There is a constraint here. If the export contains full histories of pages, it doesn’t make sense to use option (2) to append these histories to an already existing history. So if option 2 is specified, then an error should be generated if the imported data contains full histories and the targets already exist.

Forum: Instiki – Topic: Requirements for a server-side Instiki scripting package

b) Delete the page set for (W,C) from the target installation I’.

Forum: Instiki – Topic: Requirements for a server-side Instiki scripting package

Functions to support Use-Case 2.

a) Export. Given an Instiki instance I, define a page set by PageSet(W,C), where W is a list of web identifiers and C is a set of categories. This consists of all pages in webs W that fall under one of the categories in C.

The export function can be given a list of page-set-specifiers (W1,C1), …, (WN,CN). Allow the wildcard specification * for any of the arguments Wi or Ci.

Allow the export to also specify whether the full history should be exported, or just the most recent versions of the pages.

Output of the export statement may be based arounda collection of SQL insert statements, which can be applied to the database for another Instiki installation I’. (To keep the levels clear, let’s defer talk about the SQL specifics to a followup thread.) But as the following functions suggest, some more meta-data may be needed.

Forum: Instiki – Topic: Requirements for a server-side Instiki scripting package

Functions to support Use-Case 1.

TODO: just read off the functions from the Edit Webs page, and specify them as abstract commands here.

Forum: Instiki – Topic: Requirements for a server-side Instiki scripting package

Use Case 3: Develop new and more powerful methods for manipulating the data that constitutes Instiki webs.

This is open-ended, and ideas can grow here as we go along.

Forum: Instiki – Topic: Requirements for a server-side Instiki scripting package

The story behind use-case 2.

I maintain one Instiki installation that is competely private, password protected, and not referenced from anywhere on the internet. This is the staging area for Instiki webs that am planning to publish. For some things, I’d rather not think aloud in the open, and would prefer to release when I deem them completed.

I will maintain another Instiki installation for the published webs. It’s also a security precaution, to make sure that my staging webs won’t get compromised if the public installation gets hacked, attacked or spammed.

Now in the staging webs, I will build a full image of what the published webs will contain. To accomplish this, I will just add the line “category:publish:” to any page in a staging web that I want to get published.

So: I’ll want a scripting function that exports all of the data from one installation that is tagged with “publish”, and another one that imports the data into an existing Instiki installation.

Forum: Instiki – Topic: Requirements for a server-side Instiki scripting package

Use Case 2: I want to be able to write scripts to export subsets of the data on one Instiki installation, and import them into other Instiki installations.

Forum: Instiki – Topic: Requirements for a server-side Instiki scripting package

Sidenote: The saga behind use case 1.

The concrete thing which is motivating me here is that I am running Instiki on hosted server account, and want to manage it securely using https, but my host – RailsPlayground – which has been fantastic in every regard except for this one is having a bunch of technical problems getting https to work well. First, they don’t yet support SNI (server name identification) in Apache, so a dedicated IP, for 2 bucks per month, is required in order to get SSL to work. But worse than that is that they are claiming that the dedicated IP, along with a wildcard SSL certificate for the whole domain, will not work for the whole domain – that actually I’ll need a 2 dollar per month dedicated IP for each application running on each subdomain. On top of this, they say that for each login, they can only provide one dedicated IP!

I was also willing to use lynx and regular http to localhost, but lynx isn’t supported on this shared host. It’s rather confused and annoying. I’ve pleaded my case with them, and the admins are sympathetic, so they are going to escalate the issue internally.

In all fairness, I should say that overall I’m really happy with their service, which provides 5 shell/cPanel accounts, lots of bandwidth and ok storage. Each account gets 200G per month of bandwidth, and 6G of storage. Stuff is backed up (so they say), and custom php.ini is supported. Leaving https aside, these guys are real experts on managing Rails applications, and general system administration, and their level of responsiveness is impressive. The Azimuth wiki has been running without incident (well, just one brief incident, where the web server had to be restarted because Passenger stopped spawning processes), appears more responsive than it was on the previous VPS (at RailsPlaygrond also) that was running the Azimuth wiki, and does not manifest the “Smoke” error to do with growing cookies.

But even apart from this Saga, I rather like writing scripts to do things, so I’d be pretty happy administering Instiki this way.

Forum: Instiki – Topic: Requirements for a server-side Instiki scripting package

Use Case 1. I want to write scripts to perform the standard administrative operations that are made available from the Edit Web page of Instiki.

Forum: Instiki – Topic: Requirements for a server-side Instiki scripting package

There are three general use cases that motivate this feature for me.