December 2005 Archives

Update: 12/28, 9:30 PM The upgrades and changes to the server installation proved more daunting than originally planned.

There was one last issue, related to the display of high-ASCII characters (ex. Asian or Cyrillic characters, accented characters, curly quotes) that should now be resolved.

You may need to empty your browser’s cache and restart your browser if you still see any scrambled characters on your blog pages.

It seems that there is a bug in the Apache 2 web server software that we had to compensate for by adding a line to the httpd configuration file (detailed explanation).

I apologize that the high-ASCII character problem persisted for an entire week. If you should come across any other problems related to your weblog, please bring them to our attention by e-mailing blogs@princeton.edu.

There will be a scheduled outage of the Communitas weblog server on Wednesday morning, December 21, from 8 AM to 12 noon. All weblogs accessed from communitas.princeton.edu, blogs.princeton.edu, and commons.princeton.edu will be unavailable during that time. The Movable Type admin interface will also be unavailable.

If everything goes well, the outage should not last the entire scheduled four hours.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. Numerous customer requests for LDAP authentication capability, combined with some security concerns brought to our attention by the OIT UNIX Systems Group, necessitated this outage.

The purpose of this outage is to reinstall and upgrade the version of Red Hat Linux Enterprise that powers the weblog server (from version 3 to 4). Also, we will be performing an incremental upgrade on the Apache web server from 2.0.46 to 2.0.52. PHP will move from version 4 to version 5. Finally, we will be adding an LDAP authentication module to the Apache installation.

Once this module is installed and configured, we will be able to add LDAP password protection to any weblog upon request just by adding a few lines of text to a “.htaccess” file.

More announcements about LDAP authentication will come in January.

Following the outage, all services should return to normal functioning, albeit with (hopefully) increased performance and security.