09.01.09

Class of 2013 WSO logins

Posted in WSO, services, accounts at 11:31 pm by dave

Due to technical issues with the college’s directory servers, members of the class of 2013 have not yet been added to the WSO user directory. This means that their profiles are not listed in the online WSO Facebook, and frosh are not currently able to access Factrak and other WSO services. We apologize for the inconvenience, and we’re working to get this fixed before the end of the week.

In particular, there’s no need to contact WSO or do anything special to set up or enable your account. Once this issue is fixed you should be able to log into WSO using the same username and password that you use for your email account.

Update 9/03/09: As of last night, freshmen are listed in the WSO facebook and should be able to log in to all WSO web services. Contact root@wso.williams.edu if you have problems logging in.

08.06.09

blank names in discussions

Posted in WSO at 11:10 pm by dave

There’s been an ongoing issue over the past few years in which a few people’s discussion accounts were somehow not getting the correct name information, so when they posted comments or discussions no name would show up. I’m still not sure of the root cause here (my guess is that there’s some intermittent issue with the OIT LDAP server which feeds the discussion accounts), but tonight I wrote a quick script to find the broken accounts and update their information, so at least the symptoms have been fixed. As of now, all current Williams students, faculty, and staff should be able to post in discussions under their proper name.

07.29.09

mod_rails, Facebook, and Campus Events updates

Posted in WSO, systems, services, website at 12:24 am by dave

Three bits of progress recently:

  • WSO is now using mod_rails (Passenger) instead of Mongrel to serve the main Ruby on Rails site. Since most of the speed and reliability problems with the site over the past year have been directly related to Mongrel, hopefully this will make things a lot better going forward. In addition, now that our Mongrel problems are out of the way, we’ve returned to serving the front page from Nancy, the main WSO web server, rather than Petunia, the development server, which has actually been running WSO for quite some time. This restores the natural order of things and frees up Petunia to return to its old role as a development machine. So far the transition seems to have gone mostly smoothly. The only issue I’ve noticed is that some URLs which are not part of the Rails site (e.g. /wiki and /discuss) now return 404 errors until you make a more specific request (e.g. /wiki/index.php). I’m not sure exactly what the problem is, but I’ve hard-coded a fix for those two particular cases (which are important since they’re linked from the front page) and will try to look deeper into the problem in the near future.
  • We’ve been in correspondence with OIT about getting the WSO facebook updated. Essentially, the problem is that the LDAP server we’ve been pulling information from has been abandoned by OIT (thus the outdated housing information), and WSO doesn’t have the privileges to access the new, up-to-date server. While this is being ironed out, I went ahead and wrote a quick hack to grab housing information from ph.williams.edu, so the facebook now reflects accurate housing information for the upcoming year. Further updates (e.g. adding the class of 2013) will hopefully be forthcoming once we figure out the LDAP issues.
  • The Campus Events section on the main page has been broken for a few months since the format of the RSS feed changed. At least part of the problem was that the feed was presenting events in the opposite order from what we were expecting, so we were showing far-future events on the main page. I went ahead and changed the code on our end to generate the event list using the new order, and re-enabled display of the Campus Events feed. Hopefully that was the only issue, and everything will work fine now - I guess we’ll see.

P.S. Steve, if you’re reading this, I reset the password on this blog, since I didn’t know what it was and doing that seemed easier than asking you. The new password is in /root/.passwords on nancy.

06.04.08

Login improvements and Facebook privacy

Posted in WSO, website at 4:52 pm by Ben

I recently finished some coding projects that needed doing.

Logins: Alumni can now log in to and use Announcements, Exchange, Lost and Found, Jobs, Rides, and Willipedia with their AWC username and password. Additionally, anyone with a valid OIT username (measure as present on the LDAP at nds1.williams.edu) can log in regardless of whether WSO already has a record for that user already. Full facebook profile information is still only updated from OIT’s directories periodically.

Facebook: When students edit their WSO facebook profiles, they’ll see an option to hide or show themselves in the WSO Facebook, as well as an option to hide or show their home info in the facebook. You no longer need to go all the way through the college directory information rigamarole to control info on WSO Facebook.

Issues? Email root at wso dot williams dot edu.

Update: It seems that the LDAP directory at alumni.williams.edu that is used to authetnticate alumni users is, as I thought, not egalitarian. Some people can authenticate against it and some can’t. For now this is the state of things.

04.30.08

Website updates: bug fixes

Posted in WSO, services, website at 12:16 am by Ben

After a couple reports of problems with the site recently, we’ve done some updates to fix a few bugs. You may have seen a little Service Temporarily Unavailable, Server Error, or Maintenance message this evening while we did the updates.

  • Facebook photo uploads are fixed. (For the past 2 weeks, JPEG uploads didn’t work)
  • Announcements should now properly assign posts to the section you tell it to use. (there was a bug where a new announcement would land in the Announcements section no matter where you posted it if you had to re-login when you clicked the Submit button.)
  • “Random” 500 Internal Server Errors - They shouldn’t show up so much (any???) now. Please let us know if they do. The problems came from moving session storage to the database and storing massive amounts of session data (e.g. giant facebook query results, whole user records, etc.). Some tweaks to Facebook have simplified things to remove these problems, which were really leftover from the live search days and manifested by moving session to the db.
  • Broken links at the bottom of the home page are corrected. Double check them.
  • Rides are now sorted intelligently.

04.10.08

System updates = downtime

Posted in WSO, systems, services at 9:26 am by Ben

Now that the WSO machines have moved into our new rack, we’ll be doing some major software updates on our web server and some reconfiguration of user services this Friday into Saturday, starting after 6pm on Friday and continuing on Saturday. During that time, a variety of services will be unavailable. We don’t have an exact timeline, but here’s the shortlist of what’s going down and what’s not.

  1. Mail forwarding and mailing lists will remain available the entire time.
  2. The main WSO website will be down almost the entire time.
  3. User and organization websites and ssh logins will be down for a shorter time.

UPDATE: We’re back on the web just after 8pm Saturday. There will be a short bit of downtime later this evening, but it should be, er, short. Please let us know at webmaster at wso.williams.edu if something that used to work is broken…

04.07.08

Downtime Wednesday 4pm for move

Posted in WSO, systems, services, facilities at 10:51 pm by Ben

All WSO services will be down starting at 4pm and hopefully ending by 5:30 or 6:00 on Wednesday April 9th. During this time, all WSO services, including the website, email forwarding, email lists, user logins, etc., will be unavailable. All email sent to wso.williams.edu addresses during this time will be queued at other servers and sent through later in the day. (We’ll try to minimize downtime of the mail server too…)

WSO has been outfitted with a shiny new four-post rack complete with KVM, etc. thanks to Gabriel McHale at OIT. We’ll be moving into it on Wednesday and getting all our machines nice and tidied up. (The current setup doesn’t quite exude an aura of organization…)

Update:

We finished the move in a little under 3 hours. Planning and organizing a rack layout took longer than expected, but it’s really nice to see the results.  We’ll post pictures somewhere sometime soon if we get around to taking them.

02.07.08

Home page updates

Posted in WSO, website at 5:15 pm by Ben

So now that the new home page has been out a few days, things seem to be quieting down. We’re slowly adding or tweaking features on the page in response to people’s opinions.

New today:

  • a little more color (purple section headings. Not much, I know)
  • “helpful” links, clustered at the bottom of the page.

Originally, getting the links off was a first-class goal of the design, but it looks like putting the links at the bottom seems to fit into the scheme of the rest of the page without introduce too much more clutter. The top of the page represents links to commonly used extra-WSO services, followed by WSO services. The middle is recent content, and the bottom is the mass of links to useful but hard to find pages. Putting the links in a block instead of a sidebar also means that

  1. we don’t sacrifice any width in the layout.
  2. you can see them all at the same time. No more scrolling up and down trying to find the right category and then the right link. You can do all that with your eyes.

To do:

  1. Icons for services.
  2. alternate color scheme (user chooses)?

Database problem.

Posted in WSO, website at 5:05 pm by Ben

That server error you might’ve seen was the database filling up with session info (that tracks info like what your user name is when you’re logged in). Due to an oversight when switching from file-based to database-based sessions, we neglected to empty them periodically, resulting in the DB “filling up.” That’s been fixed, so hopefully we won’t be bitten by this again.

Now, once you’re logged in, your session expires after an hour (of inactivity, I think.)

02.06.08

Another power outage, Connections fixed.

Posted in WSO at 8:31 am by Ben

The 30-40 minute power outage this morning knocked out the firewall again. I checked connections with Todd Gould in NetSys this morning and it turns out that half of our machines were only on generator power, not the magical in-floor UPS. Everything is hooked up to UPS power now, so this should not happen again in the future.

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