TreeTapper down Dec. 26-28

TreeTapper will be down Dec. 26-28, 2011, due to the upgrade process to UTK's infrastructure.

OS X upgrade recovery

Once OS X server is upgraded, TreeTapper no longer connects to a database because php it is using no longer has postgres support. The solution:

• Install macports (probably already done)
• sudo port install php5-postgresql
• cd /usr/libexec/apache2/
• sudo cp libphp5.so libphp5.so_ORIGINAL
• sudo cp /opt/local/apache2/modules/libphp5.so . [note the period]
•  Restart apache (aka turn off and turn on the web in Server Admin)

An OS X upgrade moves apache back to its base settings, apparently.

Momentarily down

A recent OS X server update broke php-postgres again. Now fixing....

Planned outage

From Sunday, May 15, 8:00pm to Monday, May 16, 9:30am, TreeTapper will be offline. University of Tennessee, Knoxville, will be turning off power to much of campus in order to wire some renovated buildings.

Merge codebase

When I left NESCent, I deposited TreeTapper's code in Google Code ( http://code.google.com/p/treetapper/ ). Subsequent development happened on a privately-hosted version of that code (I was worried about accidentally committing a file with database access passwords). I've since learned a lot more about SVN and have svn:ignored the dangerous files, as well as files that aren't really things to put in version control, such as cached images. Now, changes made on the Google Code repository will be made live on the site. This should make it easier to collaborate with others going forward.

Impending downtime

UTK's Office of Information Technology will be performing some work on the network that will result in the main university website, department websites, individual sites, and many campus buildings to be completely offline from the afternoon of Friday March 18 until sometime March 20. TreeTapper will sadly be included in this outage.

TreeTapper hosting moving

Today, TreeTapper is moving from hosting at NESCent to hosting at the U of Tennessee. NESCent hosting has been excellent (I remember one occasion during a weekend snow storm when NESCent's sysadmin braved Durham's poorly-treated streets and spinning drivers to go in and take care of servers that were, ironically enough, overheating). However, it will be a bit easier for me to maintain if TreeTapper is hosted locally, as I'll be able to directly log in to the production server and change things without needing to worry as much about other sites (though other O'Meara lab sites, like http://www.myrmecocystus.org, are also hosted on the server). So far the move has gone well, now to see if the DNS starts pointing properly. TreeTapper may be down for a few hours while the move completes. MacPorts has been helpful for things like recompiling a version of PHP that can talk to a database.