Some of my MySQL Forge snippets are resurfacing

Some time ago, MySQL Forge went offline.

As part of the Forge dismissal operations, I got a backup of my snippets from the MySQL community team, and I have been lazily looking around for an alternative place where to put them.

I found such a place: Github GIST

Gist is a simple way to share snippets and pastes with others. All gists are git repositories, so they are automatically versioned, forkable and usable as a git repository.

Out of my 25 snippets, these are the ones that still look useful (at least, people have been asking me about those).

• Measuring replication speed
• Poor man's replicator monitor
• Purge process list from slow queries or idle connections
• The partition helper
• Poor man's schema comparison

When I need to publish a snippet, this is the place where it will end up. Eventually, the collection will grow again with more useful stuff.

What happened to MySQL Forge?

Update
Soon after I posted this article, the Forge came back online! Thanks!

MySQL Forge has been offline for two days now. (2011-06-14) No sign of acknowledgement of this problem from the MySQL team. What is happening? For those not well acquainted with MySQL Forge, here are the facts. The MySQL Forge is a site that was intended to contain all community contributions. The reality did not follow the plans very closely, and some sections of the forge ended up with less contents than what should be useful. However, there are a few sections of the forge that are extremely useful to users:

• The Wiki, which is full of irreplaceable documentation, such as the MySQL internals, description of preview features, slides and recordings of MySQL University, manual of many tools (such as the Random Query Generator, and more
• The worklogs, or the blueprints for most MySQL features, past, present, and future
• The tools/snippets, which is a collection of community contributed scripts. Not many, but most of them of high quality and quite useful.

I know that there was a lot of spam in the forge, but I really hope that it was taken off line on purpose. If its maintenance is a problem, I am sure we can find plenty of volunteers in the community that want to host the wiki and the rest of the useful stuff. Hello? Anybody there at Oracle/MySQL? Please give us back the forge. Thanks.

Forge 2.0

It took a bit more than expected, but MySQL Forge 2.0 is out. Jay announced the stage server a few weeks ago. Since then, there were 29 bug reports, which Jay duly fixed, but the unsung hero of this cat-and-mouse race is Diego Medina, who alone reported 22 bugs! Thanks, Jay! Thanks Diego! Thanks to all the ones who tested the Forge and gave feedback. So, folks: delete your forge.mysql.com cookies, and enjoy the new Forge.

New Forge: Missing the bug!

Forge 2.0 was announced yesterday, and Jay and I were bracing ourselves for an avalanche of bugs, which did not come.
When Bug#34916 (Login not working on new forge site) was reported, I thought nothing of it. It was simply the wrong environment. The reporter could not log in, because he did not have an account.

I explained the problem, and felt good about it.
Sometimes I experienced reporting a bug and being told that it was intended behavior, not a bug, read the manual, thanks for writing, and that was it. So dry and clueless. Not inspiring for a further analysis.
So I took some minutes to explain what had happened, before closing the bug with the fatal words.
And the reporter, Diego Medina, wrote back, saying that indeed he did not have an account on wiki, and thus there was no bug. However, he reported a lack of message on a failed login, which made me suspicious.
So I tried logging in with a non existing account, and I was refused. Then I tried my account, with a wrong password. To my surprise, I was admitted. Then I logged out and I logged in again as Jay Pipes, with a wrong password, of course, because I don't know it.
Bingo! The system accepted my login. I was logged in as Jay. So the Forge was not checking the password at all. Something must have gone awry during the latest bug fixes.
I alerted Jay (not before changing his profile to a "lazy guy", though!) and he fixed the vulnerability in a few minutes. Apparently nobody noticed.
I found out the security hole thanks to Diego's suggestion. He actually found the bug, but he did not realize how serious it was. I feel positive vibes because I triggered Diego's comment with my explanation.
Note to bug verifiers (not all of them, but someone): sometimes, being kind can win you back some benefits!
Thanks Diego, for sending me to the right direction!
Community, please keep testing the new Forge!

Testing the new MySQL Forge

As Jay just just announced, we are launching Forge 2.0. This is a one man show, and that man is Jay. He designed and implemented the new Forge (and the old one, for that matter) almost entirely on his own. He fixed countless bugs, and after much suffering the community can now experience the new look and feel and the new cool features. Thanks, Jay! Now, if you want to help, enjoy the new Forge and report problems in our bugs system. Let me show you the general picture first,a nd then we'll see what to test.

A quick tour

There are many new features in the Forge:

• The login. In the old Forge, you had two logins, one for the main forge and one for the wiki. In the new one there is only one login. If you had an account, use your email address and the wiki password to access the Forge.
• The people section gives information on the user, and a summary of his/her contributions;
• All sections can get votes. You can enter a vote from 1 to five for any project, tool, worklog.
• The old snippets section is now called tools and code, to better describe what it contains. The code supports more languages than before (86 of them, actually!).
• Comments. You can comment on any object (project, tool, worklog), using some HTML and special code tags.
• The wiki is fully integrated, with the same look and feel, and a shared toolbar.
  

(Actually, I made a mistake in the example shown in this picture. I should have written "<b>bold</b> text" but you got the idea)

A testing check list

The new Forge has passed many checks, but we are sure that we must have missed something. And we know about some known bugs that we have not had time to fix, but we will tackle soon. Your help is much appreciated. If you have experience with MediaWiki and want to share your experience in fixing similar problems, by all means drop me or Jay a line, and we will be grateful.
Everyone else, you can just go through the list below, and report bugs to bugs system (Category: MySQL Forge).

• Log in
• edit an existing project (if you have created one before)
• edit an existing tool (again, if you have created one before)
• add a tag to a worklog/project/tool/person
• search by tag
• add a comment, using HTML or code tags
• vote for a project/tool/worklog
• add a new project and add tags
• add a new tool and add tags
• switch to the wiki, search for pages that you know in the old wiki, check that they are correct;
• edit a wiki page
• create a new wiki page
• create a new user, login with this new entity, and do all the above

If that does not look enough to you, run around, and try to break things. Don't worry. We'll reload the database and fix the contents if you mess up too much.
However, remember that this is still a test environment. Everything you do will be overwritten on Monday, when we put the new Forge in production. Thus, play with it, but save important contents in the old wiki.

Troubleshooting

If your login does not work, remove all cookies related to forge1.mysql.com or forge.mysql.com and try again.
Remember that the new Forge uses the email address and the password of the old Forge wiki, not the main Forge.
One possible source of problems is when you had a different email address in the main forge and in the wiki. If that happened, we will be able to assign you ownership of the wiki pages you wrote, but not the projects and snippets. To fix that, go back to the old Forge and make sure that the email address used to login to the main forge matches the one used in the wiki, When we reload the database on Monday your previous work will be recognized. In the meantime, just create a fake account in the test forge, and enjoy the features!