Journal PerlJedi's Journal: Slashdot Replatforming Complete 26
As of 3:26 PM EST on Wednesday February 1st 2012, Slashdot is now running completely on its new platform!
There were a few rough and long days in the last week completing the final capacity testing and roll out procedure, but it is now complete, and (*knocks on wood*) running smoothly. I owe many thanks to my team of engineers and the site operations team for all their help and support. The Editors here at Slashdot also deserve thanks for their help in testing, and their patience with me as I worked through the more complex pieces of functionality in the site. Though this project took a lot of work, I honestly believe that it was needed in order to allow us to keep Slashdot running, as well as to provide us the structural support we will need to build new features that will allow us to better serve our community into the future.
There were a few rough and long days in the last week completing the final capacity testing and roll out procedure, but it is now complete, and (*knocks on wood*) running smoothly. I owe many thanks to my team of engineers and the site operations team for all their help and support. The Editors here at Slashdot also deserve thanks for their help in testing, and their patience with me as I worked through the more complex pieces of functionality in the site. Though this project took a lot of work, I honestly believe that it was needed in order to allow us to keep Slashdot running, as well as to provide us the structural support we will need to build new features that will allow us to better serve our community into the future.
Advantages (Score:2)
Can you give us some advantages of the new situation? Is there Apache 2.2/MySQL 5.5 stuff you (or the sysadmin) are excited to be using?
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Nice! Yeah, at work we also had a similar situation. There are some fifty-ish Linux desktops and servers here, and they were running Debian with a custom compiled kernel. There were good reasons at the time, but nowadays, just your bog-standard software is pretty okay, and much easier to replicate as well (for testing purposes and such).
Also amazing to see how you can go from six to two database servers :-)
Thanks for the detailed answer! You guys rock.
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Thanks a lot for the answer. Custom built software is usually best for something temporary. We're creating desktop software for Linux boxes and at one point, compiled our own Qt libraries instead of the standard stuff. You always come to regret it, for some or other reason. Nice that you're working ahead of the pack!
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What happened to journal.pl ? (Score:2)
Better Service? I don't think so (Score:1)
You took away a lot of functions and actually made things much worse. Adding and editing journals is a bigger pain than it ever was. I can't see the list of journals without spending half the day clicking more, more, more... I used to be able to see all of everybody's journals and edit/delete all of mine with a simple http://slashdot.org/journal.pl?op=list&uid=2406408 [slashdot.org] (or any user ID), but you killed it.. Why? Why doesn't http://slashdot.org/users.pl [slashdot.org] work any more? I guarantee you that this is not 'bett
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Everything else on the site that needs to search for content uses a search engine, and that is working correctly.
For some reason search.pl does not use a that search engine, and is now broken.
Instead search.pl uses the the "match against" functionality of mysql to search
We recently upgrade to a new version of MySQL
In case you weren't aware, we have no QA team, we only have three engineers, and one
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Even better: confirming that Malda didn't release further versions of slashcode because it was shite.
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Hmm... finds Pudge to be incompetent... I think I'm beginning to like the new people around here.
Slashcode? (Score:2)
Slashcode.com and the sourceforge git repository have not been updated since 2009. Will Slashdot no longer be open-source?
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A serious design question (Score:3)
The items I am thinking of are related to "journal.pl". I know I was not the only one who used to use it regularly. It was a simpler interface for writing journal entries, for one. That function was taken away as we cannot use journal.pl at all any more. Second, journal.pl also had a list function that allowed us to easily see the titles and dates of all of our journal entries listed out in chronological order. I cannot find any way to do that now that journal.pl is gone.
I would like to know why these functions were taken away, and more importantly when we will have an equally functional way to do the same. The new way to write a journal entry is inferior to the old way, and I cannot find any way at all to display a list of all of my journal entries.
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I'm sorry, I didn't realize that journal.pl was broken. I will attempt to get it fixed today. As I noted in a previous post, we don't have a QA team, nor do we have a complete list of site functionality. I tested every function of the site I have ever used, and I asked all of my fellow slashdotter's here to do the same. Everything that was tested worked, but clearly not every piece of functionality was tested. If there are other items, please do let us know and we will repair them as quickly as we ca
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And I apologize if I came across as being too abrasive the first time around. Some of us users are a little jaded at the general approach of "roll out first, test later" that seemed to be so prevalent on slashdot in the not-too-distant past and we may carry with us the assumption - right or wrong - that such a mantra still pr
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Thank you for the offer of support in testing. One of the initiatives we will be undertaking in the current year may open the door to leverage that type of community assisted testing of new features and upgrades, so I'll be sure to let you (and anyone else in the community who cares to) know about that when in comes.