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Gadget scripts missing after migration without upgrade

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PJTraill (talkcontribs)

We have recently migrated (1.13 on AIX with PHP-5.2.6 (apache) and MySQL 5.1.26-rc) to (1.19 on MSW/IIS with PHP-5.3.29 and MySQL-5.1.73), and can’t find the gadget scripts (I was particularly looking forward to having Navigation pop-ups). Extension:Gadgets gives me the impression that the scripts are meant to be present in the installation. I suppose that the scripts reside in the wiki DB as pages, and hence suspect that dropping and loading the DB must have lost them.

Does this mean that the colleague who migrated the DB overlooked something in the instructions? Looking at Manual:Moving a wiki, I see one is meant to upgrade the old server before migration: would this explain it? (Perhaps a warning there about the consequences would be in order.) And what does one do if the old server has run out of space: migrate to the old version and then upgrade? Or if it has failed totally?

All the same, the new wiki appears to be running quite satisfactorily, except that it reports several spurious Wanted pages, which I thinking come from treating a “:” as part of the page name when the pages actually exist in an explicit namespace. How confident can we be of the integrity of the new wiki?

Am I right in thinking that what I need to do now is (as a Bureaucrat) to create pages in our wiki such as MediaWiki:Gadget-edittop.js and MediaWiki:Gadget-popups.js using cut-and-paste from the same pages on this site (mediawiki.org)? Or is there a better way of going about it (if we do not need to redo the migration)?

MarkAHershberger (talkcontribs)

The problem of "missing" pages -- some that exist with the literal ":" in the name -- is usually caused by old pages conflicting with new namespaces.

For example, if you start your wiki with pages like "Meta:Foo" and "Meta:Bar", it works great... until you decide to create a "Meta" namespace.

See Dealing with existing pages for this.

PJTraill (talkcontribs)

Thanks, but this is the other way round: e.g. “Space:Dust” exists, in the namespace “Space”, but it is listed as wanted, as though it thought “:” was part of the name.

MarkAHershberger (talkcontribs)

How do you have your namespaces set up? Could you paste that snippet of your code?

Is your wiki public? Could you point to the problematic page?

PJTraill (talkcontribs)

I am afraid it is not public (accessed via a VPN, company confidential). The namespaces are defined as 100 to 135 (many unused!) with the last statements in LocalSettings.php starting with:

$wgExtraNamespaces[100] = "Xxxx";
$wgExtraNamespaces[101] = "Xxxx_talk";

The first listed page looks like “Xxxx:XX-xxxxxx (14 links)”, where Xxxx (=100) does not clash with any Extension default namespaces; the page exists and has going on for 1,000 links about which at a glance nothing odd strikes me.

But if upgrading to 1.19 (or 1.23) on AIX (AIX = 5.3 = quite old) would be straightforward, do you not think that is a better way to go? (4,570 total pages, mostly small, 96 files, the DB is some 137 Mb, if it is all held in MySQL/data/name – though on AIX du -m reports 141.78!) I presume this would also get the Gadgets working; loading them manually sounds a lot less reliable, as they may need tweaks or other components.

MarkAHershberger (talkcontribs)

If you can get a recent version of PHP for your "quite old" version of AIX, then you should be able to upgrade on that system without a problem.

Another thing to think about is any extensions. Did you update them to compatible versions?

PJTraill (talkcontribs)

I can apparently fix the (lesser) (un)Wanted Pages problem by finding the pages with select pl_title, page_title from page, pagelinks where page_id = pl_from and pl_namespace = 0 and pl_title like '%:%'; and editting the pages (saving with no changes) this throws up. Is there a query (for 1.19) with which I can clear the caches force a new parse of all pages thus found? (P.S. Just spotted Manual:Database layout etc., but I don’t see the answer.)

MarkAHershberger (talkcontribs)

I think those pages in the mediawiki namespace should be imported along with the rest of your page.

That said, if you want to import pages, I wrote an extension to handle part of this. It isn't complete, and I haven't recently used it, but you may find it useful.

Oh, and you should really udate to 1.23. 1.19 won't be supported after 1.25 comes out.

PJTraill (talkcontribs)

Thanks for the tip about 1.23. Actually I am starting to think we probably should redo the migration properly, i.e. starting with an upgrade of the old server.

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