SensorBase Blog

Now you can see more than one of the most recent blog posts on the front page just because.

If anyone tried to add columns to an existing table between Saturday and a few minutes ago, you may have encountered a bug which would not allow you to successfully add the new column. This was discovered and fixed this morning, so you should not be experiencing this problem any longer. This was caused by the fact that we moved the Sensorbase backend to a different machine this weekend and as such, had to reconfigure the MySQL server running on that machine (specifically the user permissions) to be as close to the original machine as possible.

I apologize for any inconveniences this may have caused.

Thanks!

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.

It is now possible to create your own account through the account creation page. Currently only a certain types of email addresses are supported, but the list will be expanded later. If you think your email domain should be included in the list, please let us know.

When you account is created, you will be sent an email to confirm your email address containing a link to activate your account.

Please let us know if you encounter any problems.

People have been asking about the progress that is being made to improve Sensorbase, and so I thought I should include a snippet of the latest blog entry (where most of the progress is docuemented) on the front page. Whenever a new entry is made in the blog, a snippet of it will be shown on the front page of Sensorbase. A link can then direct you to the blog where you can find the rest of the entries you may or may not have missed. Hope it’s helpful!

So, seeing how in the last week I’ve only seen 16 of the 330 registered users log into sensorbase, I thought I should add functionality to automatically reset a password and have a new one mailed to you. This lets anyone reset a password as long as they know a valid email, but only let’s this happen once a day.

Once a password is reset, the owner can log into sensorbase with this password and change it to another more appropriate password through the ol’ user_setttings page linked to from the top of the page when a user is logged in.

Perhaps I could make the resetter also be prompted for the the full name associated with the email before allowing a reset to occur, but for now it will just be an email that is necessary. Let me know if you encounter any problems.

Hey all,

So turns out the method in which passwords are encrypted on the MySQL server is not the correct way to go about things. Therefore, we’ve added some code to properly encyrpt your passwords whenever you log in. This will only happen the first time you log in after the implementation happened, but just thought I’d let you know. You won’t see anything different on your side, but if after a to-be-determined amount of time you haven’t logged in and therefore had your password re-encrypted, we’ll be sending out emails to remind people to log in.

Note: You shouldn’t worry about the safety of your password. The way it is currently encrypted is completely safe, but the function is not portable across MySQL distributions and therefore we need to re-encrypt passwords using another function.

Properly set up staging env so that if you go to the stage website, everything points correctly to the stage files, and if you’re on the main env, then everything points to the normal files. If you find any problems on the main distribution based off this change, please let me know and I’ll fix it.

I’ve been working on getting ready to move sensorbase or parts thereof to the thumper machine, but there are a lot of things to do before hand. I’ve had to move the old file structure to thumper for testing purposes, which seems to be taking quite a long time since it is so big.
People had also been complaining of SOAP issues, I’m unsure of where the problems may have arisen, but after restarting a few processes, the problem seems to have been quelled. If anyone knows more about this, people feel free to enlighten me.
Today we also got an email regarding an unresolved issue with the sensorbase website certificates for SSL. It is something that is been taken care of, and should be dealt with soon.
During one night this weekend I’ll be taking mysql down for a short period to perform a dump of the database in order to start the transfer process to thumper. This should happen at a relatively light load time for sensorbase, and will hopefully not affect the vast majority of users. If you’re planning on collecting data throughout the weekend, I ask that you consider changing your days, or not try to slog any data after 10pm this weekend. I’ll probably post something on the website when things actually happen. The reason why I can’t give a firm time/date yet is that I don’t know when I’ll have access to the thumper machine as I am still waiting for this, but at the same time, I want to be able to start this process as soon as possible. Thanks for your understanding.

Again, let me know of any questions or problems that arise.

Just fyi everyone, we’re installing Trac on the server so we can better stage the site before making changes final. There might be some small interruptions while we restart the apache to enable Trac. Please let me know if you encounter any problems. Thanks