[Labs-l] Problems when setting up an instance of Wikidata

Tue Apr 17 17:30:19 UTC 2012

Gah, accidentally sent this before i was finished :(

On Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 10:23 AM, Leslie Carr <lcarr at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 10:14 AM, Daniel Kinzler <daniel at brightbyte.de> wrote:
>> Hi Ryan
>>
>>> Agreed, this would be convenient. That said, we tend to use "role"
>>> classes, that do most things via a single class.
>>
>> So, we'd need to make a role class for wikidata wikis? which includes all the
>> webserver, mysql, etc cruft? This seems kind of redundant...
>
You can take the role class and include other classes in it (see most
any other server for examples).  That way you don't duplicate
packages. for example

 class wikidata {
   include misc::puppet,
               generic::db:data
}
>
>

>>
>>>> * BROKEN: We were unable to install a mysql server. Trying to apply db:core
>>>> failed with an error. The error ocurrs when trying ot restart the ganglia
>>>> monitoring daemon (gmon or whatever). It complains about a syntax error
>>>> (unexpected token "}") in the config file.
>>
>> What about this? This seems to be a serious bug... Has anyone been hitting it?
>
 The best thing about git is that anyone can submit a bugfix :)

>>>> * BROKEN: Actually, installing mysql (db:core) initially failed with a different
>>>> error: it's missing the directory /a. If that dir is needed, the puppet script
>>>> should create it, no?
>>
>> So, is there any "plain" mysql class that we can use?
 Add in generic::mysql::server using this page -
 https://labsconsole.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:NovaPuppetGroup
>
>
>>
>>>> * UNCLEAR: after changing the puppet config for an instance, when are the
>>>> changes applied? We ended up running puppetd -tv manually from the shell...
>>>> shouldn't the console just trigger that whenever the config is changes?
>>>>
>
FYI it also runs once an hour.

>>>> * MISSING/UNCLEAR: some puppet bundles are incompatible with each other. Trying
>>>> to install all of apache2 and apache2:php5 and apache2:php5-mysql fails with an
>>>> unhelpful error message about conflicting declarations. So, dependencies and
>>>> conflicts between bundles should somehow be indicated (or at least there should
>>>> be meaningful messages on the console).

sadly this is mentioned in the comments in production puppet config
and not viewable from the web interface

>>>> We'd be very grateful for any input on the above issues. As it stands, we'll be
>>>> using labs as a plain VM hoster, and install everything by hand. Which kind of
>>>> sucks...
>>>>
>>>
>>> Well, at its most basic level, that's what Labs is. The strength of
>>> Labs is the ability to change things about it, and letting us know
>>> your issues like this is definitely one way to help the community do
>>> so. I hope our responses helped you some.

I have to sort of second that.  In a way, labs is exactly how our
production environment is, i.e. confusing and takes a LOT of manual
work to bring up anything new (and often anything updated).  We're
hoping people will put fixes in the labs git repo which we can port to
production to help this.

-- 
Leslie Carr
Wikimedia Foundation
AS 14907, 43821
http://as14907.peeringdb.com/