Just letting everyone know that the backend maintenance which was scheduled for earlier today is complete and went as planned. There should have been no other side affects other than the loss of service for a few minutes as stated before. Please let us know if you experience any problems.
As you may have read in the email sent to you, Sensorbase will be going down for a twenty minute period on Monday May 9th, 2009 at 11 am. We need to take down the backend in order to perform some maintenance and run some configurations on the underlying database server. We’ll post if there are any complications and upon completion. Thanks.
Well we’re back to running Sensorbase on the normal backend server. I’m not sure how long actually passed in which service was down, (no more than 7 hours) but it’s back up and running. I’m sorry again for the error, please refer back to the previous blog post if you don’t know what happened.
It seems that today while modifying the database user permissions on sensorbase, I inadvertently screwed up the permissions for all database connections originating from the sensorbase machine. (The backend database is kept on a separate machine and therefore is more restrictive on which users can log into it remotely) The problem probably happened somewhere around 5-7pm today while I was finishing up some work, which explains why no one had contacted me asking what the hell happened when they saw a bunch of errors come up while accessing the site. It is now midnight and as a temporary fix, I’ve brought up the old database server that runs locally on the sensorbase machine to handle incoming data. Please note that while we’re back on this server, your more recent data won’t be visible, and it might take some time to get data stored after this point back onto the main database once this whole mess is over. Since the backend machine is maintained in another department, it might be a while before we can get access to that machine again. I apologize profusely for this error on my part, and will do everything in my power to try and get this fixed as soon as possible.
Sorry again,
Keith
A number of users have requested that projects have more definable attributes, such as start and end dates, which could be interpreted as dates of the study or campaign a project is a part of. You can now specify these dates in the project settings page pertaining to each project you have build access to. Please let me know if you encounter any problems. More definable attributes to come soon!
Edit: Please note, if you’re having trouble using some of the javascript related features on the site, please do a full reload of the page, ctrl+F5 in firefox, so that any cached files will be redownloaded to your machine. This should fix any recently developed problems.
Due to demand for a function to retrieve data rows based off of SBID(s) which you may have discovered through usage of the POST functions, functionality has been added to data_get to retrieve rows in this fashion. (by CSV list of SBIDs for rows pertaining to a specified table) If you would like to learn more about this function which still may have bugs due to rapid development, please let me know and I’ll describe the function call format. Once I’ve had time to thoroughly test it, I’ll add a write up in the help section usage instructions. Thanks!
Just a FYI for everyone, I just updated a few of the javascript libraries that Sensorbase uses from time to time, like scriptaculous and prototype to the latest versions. Please let me know if you encounter any javascript related problems. I spotted a few earlier, but I think everything is fixed. Again, just let me know, thanks!
Remember that old feature we had in place that would direct you back to your main user page after you had clicked to go to some specific page on sensorbase and it turned out you were logged out and had log back in? Yeah, that’s the one. Well, we decided it was too good of a feature to keep on the site, so we’re replaced it with another which will redirect your back to your intended destination on the site after re-logging back in. Hopefully, people enjoy this feature a little more : )
If you notice any problems, please let me know!
Now you can see more than one of the most recent blog posts on the front page just because.
The day has finally come. The MySQL backend of Sensorbase has been separated out from the front end and placed on the massive Thumper machine with a much larger quantity of disk space. As stated in the email sent out last week, if you haven’t logged in lately, you will come into problems when trying to access your account. To remedy this, simply go to the log in page and click on the “Forgot your password?” link. Your password will be reset and emailed to you. You can then log in using this new password and change your password back using by clicking the settings link at the top of the page once you’ve logged in.
Also, if you’ve recently changed your password using the settings link on the top of the page, you might still run into the same problem and require a password reset. We’re sorry for the inconvienience, but there isn’t much we can do to avoid these problems since the MySQL databases had to be transferred over different physical machines with different architectures.
Please let us know if you come into any problems and we’ll address them as soon as we can.
Thanks!
Edit: Also, I should mention that if there was any data slogged during the early afternoon on March 21st, it is possible that the data was not exported since the database dump was occurring during those hours. If so, please notify us so we can make sure to move that data over to the new machine as soon as possible.