Question thread #61

[pauamma]

It's time for another question thread!

The rules:

- You may ask any dev-related question you have in a comment. (It doesn't even need to be about Dreamwidth, although if it involves a language/library/framework/database Dreamwidth doesn't use, you will probably get answers pointing that out and suggesting a better place to ask.)
- You may also answer any question, using the guidelines given in To Answer, Or Not To Answer and in this comment thread.

Comments

[octorok]

I'm having a bit of a dilemma. For some reason, email notifications stopped working on my site a few days ago and I haven't been able to figure out why. First they were working and then boom, two days later they weren't. I hadn't worked on the site at all during this time, so I'm not really sure where to even begin with this. :(

ETA: I forgot to add what is probably a very important tidbit: I get the "Welcome to Your Site" email notifications just fine when I create an account. It appears to be comment reply notifications that aren't being sent. Any ideas?

[pauamma]

Do you get comment notifications in your site inbox (like https://www.dreamwidth.org/inbox/, only for your site) for the same comments that are missing in email? (You will need to log in as the account you're checking notifications for.)

[octorok]

Nada. I'm not getting inbox notifications for any of my test accounts, no.

[pauamma]

OK. My guess is that the ESN workers (see http://wiki.dreamwidth.net/wiki/index.php/ESN#Firing_events_and_delivering_notifications) either stopped running or maybe never ran. Do you use bin/worker-manager, and if so what do you have in $LJHOME/ext/local/etc/workers.conf?

[octorok]

I do use the bin/worker-manager, and here's what my workers.conf looks like: https://pastebin.com/raw/cztBCHB5

[pauamma]

OK, you're missing one line under all: (probably not your fault - this looks like the stock workers.conf). Add:

esn-filter-subs: 1

to the "all:" configuration section. You may need to restart worker-manager. I don't remember whether it picks configuration changes on the fly.

[octorok]

Ok, I added that line to the conf file at the end of the "all" section, restarted the worker-manager, and still no go. I don't see notifs in my e-mail or dw inbox unfortunately.

[pauamma]

Hmm. With worker-manager running, what does

ps ux

output on your server? (This assumes you have a single server for all of your site. If you have several, I'd need more information on how you distributed features and modules among them.)

[octorok]

Just one server! :) Here's the output:

[pauamma]

Bah, my bad. I forgot that ps truncates by default. Try instead:

ps uxww

That said, it looks like you have several of everything running. Did you run worker-manager multiple times?

[octorok]

I did when I was trying to figure out why notifs stopped. I didn't know running it a few times would run multiple instances. Anyway, here's the output:

[geekosaur]

Uh, your terminal's in no-wrap mode for some reason. Try "tput reset", then run the "ps uxww" again.

[octorok]

Whoa, I had no idea. Thanks for the help. Here's a new screenshot:

[pauamma]

OK, so everything is running that should be, as far as I can tell. What do you see on http://www.example.com/admin/theschwartz (replacing www.example.com with the domain for your site)? You will need to grant yourself the appropriate priv, which I believe is siteadmin:theschwartz.

[octorok]

Okie dokie, gave my system account that priv and got this error message when I tried accessing theschwartz admin console:

Failed to retrieve outstanding job list: Table 'dw_schwartz.job' doesn't exist.

[pauamma]

OK, I think I'm beginning to have an idea what happened. To confirm my suspicion, I need you to check which tables exist in the dw_schwartz database. But first, what is in the @THESCHWARTZ_DBS array in $LJHOME/ext/local/etc/config-private.pl ? (Be sure to sanitize it by redacting the actual password.)

[octorok]

Here ya go:

@THESCHWARTZ_DBS = (
{
dsn => 'dbi:mysql:dw_schwartz;host=localhost', # CHANGETHIS if on Dreamhack to dreamhack_username instead of dw_schwartz
user => 'dw', # CHANGETHIS if on Dreamhack to dh_username
pass => 'password', # CHANGETHIS
},
);

[pauamma]

OK. I need you to list the tables in the dw_schwartz database. Something like:

mysql --user=dw --password=youractualpasswordgoesthere
show databases;
use dw_schwartz;
show tables;
exit

[octorok]

Okay. Here's what I got (a whole lot of nothing it looks like!):

[pauamma]

Yeah, that confirms my suspicion. More after I file the appropriate bug.

[pauamma]

OK, you were probably bitten by https://github.com/dreamwidth/dw-free/issues/2318. I'm afraid the notifications you never received are well and truly lost. There still is a solution for you that will let you use notifications in the future, and that is to point @THESCHWARTZ_DBS to where the tables actually live. Specifically:

1- Open ext/local/etc/config-private.pl (not etc/config-private.pl) with your favorite editor
2- In %DBINFO, note what user and pass are set to
3- In @THESCHWARTZ_DBS, make sure that user and pass match those in %DBINFO
4- Still in @THESCHWARTZ_DBS, change 'dw_schwartz' in dsn to 'dw'
5- Still in @THESCHWARTZ_DBS, add the following line before the closing }:

prefix => 'sch_',

6- Check @THESCHWARTZ_DBS: it should now look something like:

    @THESCHWARTZ_DBS = (
            {
                dsn => 'dbi:mysql:dw;host=localhost',
                user => 'yourusernamegoeshere',
                pass => 'yourpasswordgoeshere',
                prefix => 'sch_'
            },
        );

(perhaps with different indentation)
7- Save your changes
8- Test as much of the features that rely on TheSchwartz that you can and care for (for a should-be-complete list, see TheSchwartz workers in http://wiki.dreamwidth.net/wiki/index.php/Workers#List_of_workers )

[octorok]

That did the trick! :) Comment notifications seem to be working now. I'll do more testing on the other features to make sure everything's working and if I have any problems I'll be sure to bring them here. You guys are great! Thanks for the help.

[pauamma]

And adding this for completeness because I forgot it in my list above, but you appear to have done it anyway (or maybe it wasn't needed):
7.5- restart Apache and workers

[annathecrow]

I've been wondering, what's the logic behind making user's Reading page public?

I mean, the list of followed blogs/comms of a user is public, and so are the posts that are displayed, therefore nothing is technically divulged that couldn't be obtained in other ways. But all other social media I know of treat feeds/dashboards as private.

[pauamma]

I can't answer that authoritatively, but I think this is for historical reasons dating back to the early LiveJournal era.

[ironymaiden]

I think part of this was discoverability - here's who your friends or someone you follow are reading and maybe you would like it too.

[denise]

One part "it's been done that way since LJ added the concept of the friends page and it's not worth changing", one part "not wanting to give people a false sense of security by implying the contents of their reading page are private", one part "in about half the ways people use the site, public reading pages are an advantage in that they help people discover other nifty accounts they might not be following or allow people to build public reading lists to share with others", one part "because DW has the concept of locked/private entries, people don't have to rely on the concept of 'public but less discoverable' that they do on other sites", really.

[annathecrow]

Thanks for the replies, everyone :)