MENTIRAS_MOVISTAR: Cómo repercute #Movistar_es al cliente sus propios fallos

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Hace unas horas hice mi primer cambio de compañía de telefonía móvil. En sólo 8 horas todo se complicó. Me pongo a escribir este post para canalizar mi frustración y mi ira por lo que me acaba de ocurrir con Movistar. Aunque el relato de los hechos comienza la víspera del día de Reyes en un centro comercial de Vigo voy a explicar brevemente mi relación hasta la fecha con las compañías de Telefonía. No te lo pierdas y sigue leyendo.

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Mahara: troubleshooting a nonrecoverable error when migrating and upgrading to another server

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Some days ago we moved our Mahara 1.7.2  database (MySQL)  to a new machine to separte both web and database servers. Some days later we performed and upgrade to 1.8.1 and, after sorting out some issues related to collation, everything seemed to run as it was expected but, as I tried to clean my inbox I received a «A nonrecoverable error occurred. This probably means you have encountered a bug in the system» message. I couldn’t delete any message neither through Mahara interface nor PHPMyAdmin as root.

As I could’t find anything interesting in error.log (from Apache and MySQL), I added some extra lines to config.php to report a higher level of debugging:

$cfg->log_dbg_targets     = LOG_TARGET_SCREEN | LOG_TARGET_ERRORLOG;
$cfg->log_info_targets    = LOG_TARGET_SCREEN | LOG_TARGET_ERRORLOG;
$cfg->log_warn_targets    = LOG_TARGET_SCREEN | LOG_TARGET_ERRORLOG;
$cfg->log_environ_targets = LOG_TARGET_SCREEN | LOG_TARGET_ERRORLOG;

This allowed me to get more details about what was happening in my intallation when I tried to delete all my messages. Below and excerpt:

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Mahara: How to solve collation issue when upgrading

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Today I upgraded our Mahara site from version 1.7.2 to 1.8.1 (current version). What it was expected to be an easy procedure turned out to a trouble due to a database (MySQL) collation issue. Below are the details:

After doing all backups as it’s required I downloaded and unzip the new version to perform the upgrade via cli-script.

me@myserver:/var/www/mahara# php ./admin/cli/upgrade.php
[WAR] 77 (lib/mahara.php:183) A column of your database is using a collation that is not the same as the database default. Please ensure all columns use the same collation as the database.
Call stack (most recent first):
  * ensure_upgrade_sanity() at /var/www/mahara/admin/cli/upgrade.php:46

A column of your database is using a collation that is not the same as the database default. Please ensure all columns use the same collation as the database.

My old Mahara version (1.7.2)  had an utf8_spanish2_ci collation in tables. As I had recently changed to a new server and I had configured MySQL to a utf8_general_ci default collation the upgrade process stopped  showing a warning about «.. not the same collation..».

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Halloween Moodle Panic: Cache Crisis

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The last three weeks of October were frightful  due to a series of incidents affecting the Moodle server of my School. Randomly server crashes and a set of strange behaviours using Moodle led me, as admin, to a stressing weeks. That’s way I’m goin to collect all the incidents and write a post called Moodle Panic 🙂

Affected Moodle version: 2.4.6

The next list of incidents ended up with a server freezing. Surprisingly none of them was correlated to peak times in the use of Moodle.

Date of freezing –> Errors showed when trying to access Moodle WEB Server

  • Friday 4th October at 00:00h AM –> Fatal error: $CFG->dataroot is not writable, admin has to fix directory permissions! Exiting.
  • Sunday 6th October at 04:00h AM –> Fatal error: $CFG->dataroot is not writable, admin has to fix directory permissions! Exiting.
  • Wednesday 16th October at 04:00h AM –> Fatal error: $CFG->dataroot is not writable, admin has to fix directory permissions! Exiting.
  • Saturday 26th October at 19:00h PM –> Fatal error: $CFG->dataroot is not writable, admin has to fix directory permissions! Exiting.
  • Monday 29th October at 00:00h AM –> Fatal error: $CFG->dataroot is not writable, admin has to fix directory permissions! Exiting.

All these incidents crashed the server and I had to reboot it manually. As soon as the server rebooted it started to rebuild the raid1 but everything started to work fine again… until the next incident.

Incidents reported by teachers using Moodle at School

  • Monday, 21st October at 18:06h –> A teacher posted a Glossary entry and something went wrong so she got the next error: «Detectado un error de codificación, debe ser corregido por un programador: Failed to unserialise data from file. Either failed to read, or failed to write.«

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