Last Friday I “accidentally” upgraded the instance of Mediawiki on the server used by the design for learning site… And true to form things broke. The database needed an update, the custom skins were no longer working, the LDAP authentication broke and loads of stuff just was not happy. The last couple of days have involved quite a lot of time playing “whack a mole” trying to make these problems go away, re-building the skin, double checking the logins etc. A round of emails with an end user led to my also discovering that it was now using a server-side thing called memcached and that this was stopping mw delivering pages beyond the navigation bars. Clearly this is not how it ought to be – I’m sure memcached is a perfectly good bit of kit, but rather than spend yet more time working out quite what was wrong with it I went for simply disabling it. All _seems_ to be working now and the users content.

The silver lining to this cloud is that it brings the dfl installation more in line with the other cetis and intrawiki instances – and the even gooder news is that those instances were not affected at all. It may also be worth having a little re-jig of the mediawiki instances on the server to make the whole business of running a farm a little more resilient. But that is one for some other time.