[xwiki-devs] Postmortem notes after the myxwiki.org upgrade of 17 March 2011

Things noticed that we should improve ============================== 1) When the apache server on myxwiki.org is down there's no maintenance page appearing. We should get a nice "maintenance in progress" page. 2) When doing upgrades it's best to plan it a bit ahead of time and notify of the upcoming upgrade using the myxwiki twitter account/mailing list 3) In the upgrade notes, I'd like to suggest that we do things differently: - before restarting tomcat, stop apache (after disabling the crontab) - create a tunnel to your local machine: ~C + -L8080:<ip>:8080 (you get the ip using /sbin/ifconfig) - start tomcat - ensure it all works fine - upgrade the XARs - verify all is ok - restart apache 4) Right now port 8080 is open on apache, this needs to be closed 5) we should subscribe the notifications list to the main wiki on myxwiki.org to perform community checking of the wiki Who can help perform 1), 4), 5)? I can do 3). Problems fixed while doing the upgrade =============================== I noticed that one user page was called frequently in the logs and after checking it had over 3K comments, all spams with lots of external URLs. I removed this page but we need to watch out for pages giving xwik guest rights to edit/comment on them. I hope this was the problem causing lots of downtime on myxwiki.org and poor perfs. Thanks -Vincent