749125 - http://www.mozilla-europe.org/locale/press down / broken feed http://www.mozilla.org/locale/press/

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Infrastructure & Operations Graveyard :: WebOps: Other, task)

Comment 1

[Valerie Ponell]

Hi team,

The content feed to our local press pages is not working. The press releases that should show up on the following pages have disappeared:

http://www.mozilla.org/pl/press/
http://www.mozilla.org/es/press/
http://www.mozilla.org/it/press/
http://www.mozilla.org/fr/press/
http://www.mozilla.org/de/press/

The content was pulled from the following pages (which are now a construction site so perhaps that's why it not working):

http://www.mozilla-europe.org/pl/press
http://www.mozilla-europe.org/es/press
http://www.mozilla-europe.org/it/press
http://www.mozilla-europe.org/fr/press
http://www.mozilla-europe.org/de/press

We will switch to a WordPress-based solution in a few weeks, but would need to access the old content somehow, otherwise we'll have nothing to move to the new press centers.

The issues might be related to this bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=726718

Thanks in advance for your help!

Valerie

Comment 2

[Shyam Mani [:fox2mike]]

We have nothing to do with mozilla-europe.org or mozilla.org.

Comment 3

[Valerie Ponell]

Thanks Shyam, wasn't sure where the right would be to flag this.

Comment 4

[Shyam Mani [:fox2mike]]

You're welcome! The actual content of those sites isn't managed by IT. I'm hoping Pascal will have a better idea.

Comment 5

[Pascal Chevrel:pascalc]

I don't know why the pages show a maintenance service, there hasn't been any commit to the repo for months (http://viewvc.svn.mozilla.org/vc/projects/mozilla-europe.org/tags/production/) so this is definitely something on the IT side :)

Comment 6

[Pascal Chevrel:pascalc]

This is a server issue, not a content or webdev issue, the whole domain is redirecting to a maintenance page. Back to IT

Comment 7

[Shyam Mani [:fox2mike]]

(In reply to Pascal Chevrel:pascalc from comment #6)
> This is a server issue, not a content or webdev issue, the whole domain is
> redirecting to a maintenance page. Back to IT

Which domain?

Comment 8

[Ashish Vijayaram [:ashish]]

Since when has http://www.mozilla-europe.org/ been redirected to hardhat.mozilla.net? This is usually done for outages or other events. Without the right bug/info, it might not be right to revert the redirect.

Comment 9

[Valerie Ponell]

I just saw that this week. http://www.mozilla-europe.org/pl/press redirected to http://www.mozilla.org/pl/press/ before, same for the other locales.

Comment 10

[Ashish Vijayaram [:ashish]]

The hosts for this service was migrated to the new datacenter in SCL3 last week, but DNS wasn't updated. This is fixed now. You should be able to access http://www.mozilla-europe.org/ now (otherwise in about 10-15 mins).

Comment 11

[Valerie Ponell]

Hi Ashish, unfortunately I still cannot access https://www.mozilla-europe.org/ ("This webpage is not available") and the feeds at http://www.mozilla.org/pl/press/ and all the other locales are still empty. Any chance you can look into this again? Thanks, Valerie

Comment 12

[Ashish Vijayaram [:ashish]]

Valerie - I can confirm the site is up. I get redirected to the Login page at https://www.mozilla-europe.org/compose/auth.php in fact. I don't have a login there to verify though. Have you tried logging in using a different browser?

Comment 13

[Shyam Mani [:fox2mike]]

Valerie, can you try http://www.mozilla-europe.org/ now? This seems to be a really old version of the site though :| I'm trying to figure out what happened here.

Comment 14

[Shyam Mani [:fox2mike]]

Okay, so there seems to be some confusion on our end here. I'm working on figuring this out. I'll keep you posted.

Comment 15

[Valerie Ponell]

Thanks for double-checking Shyam - http://www.mozilla-europe.org/ redirects to http://www.mozilla.org/firefox/fx/ now for me. https://www.mozilla-europe.org/compose/auth.php does still not exist for me, neither in Firefox nor in Chrome. http://www.mozilla-europe.org/pl/press now redirects to http://www.mozilla.org/pl/press/ again, which is correct, but it doesn't show the content feed that is supposed to be pulled from the original site. Hope this helps a bit...

Comment 16

[Shyam Mani [:fox2mike]]

We got the site back up to what it was before the move, so I guess this is it. Unless you had a different site...in which case, you have to reopen this bug.

Comment 17

[Valerie Ponell]

Thanks Shyam - and sorry for being a pain :) My actual probelm though didn't get fixed, which is that our press pages are still empty, the content feed is not working, the content (press releases) disappeared on the following pages: 

http://www.mozilla.org/pl/press/
http://www.mozilla.org/es/press/
http://www.mozilla.org/it/press/
http://www.mozilla.org/fr/press/
http://www.mozilla.org/de/press/

I have no clue what happened here but that would mean that all our content from the past years is now gone? Not sure even this is even an IT issue, but perhaps you can let me know if you can access the old pages (http://www.mozilla-europe.org/pl/press - before the redirect)? Here's where the content should be that is supposed to be pulled to http://www.mozilla.org/pl/press/.

Thanks again for your help!

Comment 18

[Shyam Mani [:fox2mike]]

Valerie,

I'll ask Webops to look into this.

Comment 19

[Jake Maul [:jakem]]

Adding James Long...

@jlongster: any idea what populates these? Guessing it's a cron job, but those seem to be working fine, at least at a glance (perhaps they squelch error information that I'm not seeing).

The cron's in place are:

*/10 * * * * /data/bedrock/src/update-www.mozilla.org.sh
*/10 * * * * cd /data/bedrock/src/www.mozilla.org/org/includes/; ./feed-parser.php -c ./feed-parser-config.xml
25 * * * *   cd /data/bedrock/src/www.mozilla.org/tools; php -f refresh-press-center-feed.php
*/5 * * * *  cd /data/bedrock/src/www.mozilla.org/includes/feeds; php feed-cache-cron.php
*/15 * * * * /data/bedrock/src/update-www.mozilla.org-cron-svn-locale.sh &> /dev/null

Comment 20

[Jake Maul [:jakem]]

As best I can tell:

http://www.mozilla.org/de/press/
is blank because:
http://europe.mozilla.org/de/news.rdf
is blank.

europe.mozilla.org seems to be just a ServerAlias for www.mozilla-europe.org.

What we need to find out now is, how do these rdf files get populated.

I'm looking at the backoffice.mozilla-europe.org server, and I think it's supposed to pull down information from a database, populate these files, and (perhaps?) commit them to SVN. Then europe.mozilla.org can check them out. I haven't found any code that actually does all this, just config files that have SVN and MySQL information.

Unfortunately as far as I can tell these files haven't been modified in SVN since 2007. So I really don't know how it's supposed to work.

Also pulling in Rik, because some of this code has his name on it... even though it seems to have been a while since he touched it.

Comment 21

[Jake Maul [:jakem]]

I am at a brick wall with this. There's nothing we can really do here until someone can tell us how this workflow is supposed to work. At this point all of the relevant developers I know of are already CC'd on this bug, but please feel free to include other people if it'll help.

Comment 22

[Jake Maul [:jakem]]

With some fresh eyes and access to the backoffice.mozilla-europe.org system, I was able to figure out what's up with this.

Backoffice writes it's entries to a database. This, along with the backoffice system itself, is in SCL3 now. The SVN settings are more or less a red herring... it doesn't write anything to SVN.

The main site, www.mozilla-europe.org (or more appropriately europe.mozilla.org, as far as www.mozilla.org is concerned) is in PHX1.

As mentioned in comment 20, only the file europe.mozilla.org/<locale>/news.rdf matters. This is an empty file... on disk and in SVN- this is what led me astray, because it *looks* like it should be getting updated in SVN. HOWEVER, there is an Apache config that serves these news.rdf files using a PHP script handler. This handler is basically an RSS feed generator, and it generates the contents of these files on-the-fly, based on the database written to by backoffice.mozilla-europe.org! It doesn't access the backoffice *website*, it accesses the backend database directly. MySQL connection.

This means the generichrhel6 servers in PHX1 need access to the relevant database server in SCL3, and the config telling PHX1 what IP to connect to to reach the database has to change to match the new database VIP in SCL3. That's what bug 753875 is all about. Once all that was done, you can now see the rdf files properly:

http://europe.mozilla.org/de/news.rdf

And thus, you can see the main press center pages again:

http://www.mozilla.org/de/press/

This content is not cached anywhere along the way. If the backoffice.mozilla-europe.org database is unreachable, everything upstream of it will be broken too.


So yeah, it's very convoluted, but it's fixed now. I would normally recommend a cleanup project to simplify all of this. However since it's all going away with the new Press Center anyway, it seems unnecessary unless that gets significantly delayed even further.