wiki troubles

Posted by on Sep 5, 2011 in blog, hosting, MediaWiki, site administration, site history, wikiGong, wikiGong wiki | One Comment

…in which we once more feel the pain of webmastering…

Today started out bright and sunny with a fine breakfast and a quick look at the website revealing slow performance and database connection errors. These came and went, and by afternoon everything looked fine. Maybe it was just network congestion, or the last of those pesky SEO plug-in link-rewrites I had to back out last week. Fingers were crossed.

But then I received a notification from my hosting company to upgrade my wiki installation to MediaWiki 1.17. This has always worked before. But this time, the upgrade showed an error (in fact, the error stated it was from installation in November 2009). And then I clicked a Categories link. Oh, crud.

The rest of the day has been a slow battle to find out what and where things went wrong and how far back the database went silly. So far I’m missing only three pages—isolated to the wiki—and have an ill-behaved wiki sidebar. I’ve tested both the old database and the newly restored one (after complete uninstall of the application) to no avail. The sun set into Tech Support….

Apologies for any inconvenience. Stick to the blogs and shared files and life should be fine. More news as it develops….

1 Comment

  1. gongMaster
    2011/09/08

    Well, we got through that one. A baffling combination of (1) errors caused by update script execution by PHP4 rather than PHP5 (Watch out for this! It bit me in WordPress, too, with my hosting service), (2) unattributed changes to .htaccess (all I know is I didn’t make them!), and (3) the baffling behavior of the Apache rewrite engine (I also find the pattern syntax quite opaque). Thirty-two hours in Hell, with hair loss to show for it.

    But that’s just me. Apologies to anyone who experienced broken links or the mess that was my Categories tag set on the wiki .