TWiki News at CERN

• 02-Jun-2021 TWiki service storage upgrade

There will be an upgrade to the TWiki service on Wednesday evening 18:00 - 20:00 . The service will remain available in read-only mode during the intervention but there will be brief service interruptions. See OTG0064199

• 06-Nov-2018 TWiki service upgrade

There will be an upgrade to the TWiki service on Tuesday morning. The service will remain available in read-only mode during the intervention. See OTG0046689

• 30-Aug-2018 TWiki service interruption

There will a Hypervisor reboot campaign starting on Sep-12. All VMs inlcuding the TWiki servers will be patched and rebooted during this time. The TWiki servers will be rebooted on Sep-12 and Sep-19 and so there will be short service interruptions during this time.

• 10-Apr-2018 File-server reboot

Due to a critical ZFS bug we need to urgently reboot the TWiki backend NFS filers at 15:00. TWIki will be read-only at 15:00 for about 15 minutes.

• 23-Jan-2017 Hypervisors reboots

The hypervisors housing the TWiki service will be rebooted on Wednesday 24-Jan-2017. If you do experience problems during this time, please clear you browser cache.

See https://cern.service-now.com/service-portal/view-outage.do?n=OTG0041682

• 15-Mar-2017 Network Interruptions

Network Intervention are scheduled for Wed 15 March 05:00 - 09:30. There will be several short interruptions to TWiki during this time. See https://cern.service-now.com/service-portal/view-outage.do?n=OTG0036115

• 22-Nov-2016 TWiki Upgrade

TWiki will be upgraded on Tuesday 22-Nov fom 07:30-09:00. During this time TWiki will be available in read-only mode.

• 03-Nov-2016 Datacenter network upgrade

There will be a Datacenter network upgrade ojn Thu, Nov 03, 2016 between 06:00 - 08:30 CET. TWiki will be available read-only during this time.

• 10-Mar-2016 TWiki storage intervention

There will be a TWiki storage intervention on Wed 16-Mar from 09:00. TWiki will be available in read-only from 08:30. The intervention will take between 15 minutes - an hour.

• 14-Jan-2016 New plugins added

The Plugins HistoryPlugin and ChecklistPlugin are now available. See the documentation associated with these plugins for further details.

• 26-Aug-2015 TWiki migration to new back-end

The TWiki service will be moved to a new back-end store at 08:00. During the move the service will be available in read-only mode for around 45 minutes

• 31-Mar-2014 TWikiGroups and egroups

Following the intervention on March 24, load times became mush faster for topics of large webs such as Atlas and CMS. However, the intervention did affect access control when e-groups are included inside TWikiGroups. We are working on a fix but in general users are advised to use e-groups for access control and not TWikiGroups.

• 24-Mar-2014 TWiki Intervention There will be an intervention to the LDAP module on TWiki between 08:00 and 08:30. This will help speed up page load on large webs such as Atlas and CMS

• 29-Oct-2014 TWiki Upgrade

There will be an intervention to TWiki early Wednesday morning. TWiki will move to a new OpenStack loadbalanced cluster and the TWiki software will be upgraded to version 6.0.1

The service will be available during this time but read-only for a few minutes. Information concerning this will appear on TWiki pages during this intervention.

See TWikiUpgrade29Oct14 for more details

• 10-Sep-2014 Intervention to backend store

There will be an intervention to the TWiki backend early Wednesday morning. The service will be available during this time but read-only for a few minutes. Infomation concerning this will appear on TWiki pages during this intervention.

• 27-Jan-2014 LDAP-integration

TWiki will move to an LDAP-integration for improved user authentication and authorisation. Following this upgrade, user registration will be automatic.

• 31-Oct-2013 Software upgrade

The will be an upgrade of the TWiki engine. During this procedure (from 08:00 - 08:30) TWiki will be available in read-only mode

• 21-Aug-2013 Hardware intervention

The TWiki backend will be moved to a new storage device. During this procedure (from 08:00 - 08:45) TWiki will be available in read-only mode

• 20-Nov-2012 New JQuery JqPlotPlugin

Add line, bar and pie charts to TWiki topics using jqPlot JavaScript library. See JqPlotPlugin

• 05-Nov 2012 New Gnu Plot Plugin available

This plugin allows users to plot data and functions using GnuPlot. See GnuPlotPlugin

• 05-Nov 2012 New Jira Plugin available

JIRA issues can be displayed as a TWiki table, based on a JQL (JIRA Query Language). See JiraPlugin

• 14-May 2012 SyntaxHighlightingPlugin reset

Following the upgrade the SyntaxHighlightingPlugin was put back to a previous version for compatibilty.

• 14-May 2012 TWIki upgrade

TWiki will be upgrade to version 5.1.1 on Monday 14-May at 08:00. The interruption should be minimal but the service will be in read-only mode for up to 30 minutes.

See WhatsNew511 for more details

The upgrade was finished at 08:30. Users that were alreay logged in and using TWiki would have to clear the browser cache and rest cookies and then preferably restart the web browser.

• 23-April 2012 Editor issues with IE9

The WYSIWYG editor does not work correctly with Internet Explorer 9. For the moment users are advised to use another browser for the WYSIWYG editor or the text editor. This problem is being investigated.

The short term workaround is to select the Compatibility View

Press the ALT button to get the tool bar. Then * Select Tools -> Compatibility View

• 31-August 2011 New cluster setup

The TWiki servers have been re-installed with a new cluster setup. This change should be fully transparent to users.

• 10--November 2010 E-groups support

TWiki webs can now be protected by E-groups. Please see HowToSecureWebPages for more information.

• 14-October-2010 Security patch installed

A security patch will be applied to TWiki at 15:00 in order to correct a an issue that could lead to a a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability.

There will be no downtime and the intervention will be totally transparent to all users.

• 19-August-2010 Service intervention

TWiki will be unavailable for approximately 10 minutes from 17:30 on 19-Aug, due to an intervention to the storage facility

• 14-June-2010 Upgrade of TWiki hardware

TWiki system intervention June-14 08:00 CET to upgrade to the new hardware, Service will be in read-only mode for 30 minutes.

• 02-March-2010 Migration of TWiki backend

In the morning of Tuesday 02-Mar-2010, the active file store of the CERN TWiki instance will be moved from AFS to NFS. The user impact is expected to be a small period of time (less than 1 h) during which items can only be read, but not edited.

• 08-December-2009 Move to SLC5 servers

The CERN TWiki installation is migrated to SLC5 servers on a new cluster at 17:30. If you should discover any issues with functionality or plugins, please contact Twiki.support@cernNOSPAMPLEASE.ch.

• 12-October-2009 Updated WYSWIG editor

The CERN TWiki installation has been patched to the latest release, TWiki 4.3.2. This patch includes an updated WYSWIG editor as well as security fixes.

• 18-August-2009 Upgrade of TWiki software

On Tuesday August 18th, the TWiki production software will be upgraded to TWiki 4.3.1. The new release brings many improvements and the upgrade should be mostly transparent to end users. From 13:00 to 14:00 CET, edit and attach will be disabled while moving to the new version.

• 01-July-2009 Bibliography Plugin available

BibliographyPlugin manages citations inside a TWiki topic, and can generate an References List at the end of the topic. This should be every usefull for writing conference papers, journal articles, ellaborated news, etc.

• 15-June-2009 Service unavailability

Following a major incident with the TWiki file storage at 14:45, the TWiki service was completely unavailable until 18h CET. Backups have been recovered from disk, with data from Sunday June 14th and later backups until Monday 15th at 14:40. Please note that attachments uploaded to topics that were made yesterday morning need to be re-done.

Please contact: Twiki.support@cernNOSPAMPLEASE.ch if you are missing data. We are really sorry for all the inconvenience caused by the major service interruption.

• 19-Mar-2009 Unavailablity due to Network Intervention

An important network maintenance operation that affects site wide services at CERN has been scheduled for the morning of Thursday March 19. TWiki will not be accessible or offer unstable service between 5AM and 8AM CET.

• 03-Mar-2009 Access problems

There were intermittent problems with the TWiki service from early Tuesday morning 3-Mars. Editing and reading authenticated pages was problematic at this time but public pages were accessible. The problems escalated causing connection problems to public pages from 08:00 when the TWiki servers were hit with 1000s of requests and at the same time the AFS servers were heavily loaded. The servers were rebooted and normal service was resumed just before 10:00.

• 12-Feb-2009 Oracle problem affecting TWiki

During the later part of the morning an Oracle problem affected several services including Twiki. Edits were not possible for a couple of hours and full service resumed early afternoon.

• 21-Jan-2009 AFS problem affecting TWiki

An AFS problem affected several services including Twiki. Many alarms were received for AFS57 affecting performance during the day.

• 22-Sep-2008 Restricted access to many webs

Many webs and topics have recently been protected, so that only authenticated users from CERN and partner institutes can access the content. Please remember to login using your CERN credentials.

• 24-Apr-2008 Access re-opened for light weight users

It is now again possible for validated external users to edit TWiki topics. If you are a light weight registered user and still have access issues then please email Twiki Support

• 24-Apr-2008 Drop Down Menu support

The DropDownMenu addon has been installed. With this you can easily add a (and CSS formatable) drop-down menu to a web with accessibility navigation based on a simple TWiki list.

Example Sandbox/DropDownMenuTest

• 20-Mar-2008 Restrictions for lightweight users

Until further notice, users who are not registered as CERN users with CERN accounts will not be able to edit or create content on this site. We apologize for the inconvenience caused by this restriction.

• 3-Mar-2008 Search with CERN Search

The search box in the upper right corner of the TWiki page now uses the CERN Search engine to search all public webs of the TWiki site. You may still carry out internal searches within TWiki webs using the standard WebSearch for each individual web.

• 20-Feb-2008 Spell checking with Firefox

The Firefox web browser has built-in spell checker which automatically checks for spelling mistakes as you type in forms or text boxes in web pages. All text that is incorrectly spelt will be underlined in red.

After installing a new version of the browser this functionality may not work and this is caused by missing dictionaries.

When in a editable text window right-click and if you see Add dictionaries then this means that no dictionaries are installed. Add the required dictionaries and the spell checker will be enabled when you next restart the browser.

• 12-Feb-2008 TWiki performance

More and more people are using TWiki at CERN and for the last two weeks server overload has affected performance. We apologise for this and today we put in place a load balancing system which is the first step in tackling this performance issue.

• 28-Nov-2007 Edit with emacs

Many users have asked if it would be possible to edit topics with emacs or any other editor of choice. For users of Firefox this is now possible with the It's all text add on . Once installed and configured all textareas can be edited with your favorite editor.

More tips kindly posted by Tibor Simko.

• 28-Nov-2007 New support web

CERN TWiki users can now post questions about TWIki in the Support web. This Support web is here for you if you have a technical question or any question about TWiki. This support web is for CERN TWiki users and maintained by CERN TWiki users.

• 8-Oct-2007 Session lease extended

The duration of the authentication session lease from the CERN login server has now been extended. Only sessions inactive for 5 hours will need to re-authenticate. The edit timeout problem should be solved by this fix, nevertheless it is a good idea to save edit sessions regularily.

• 25-Sep-2007 Timeout on edit.

Authentication to TWiki at CERN has been moved to the CERN Single Sign On (CERN login). After login user sessions eventually expire, and users must re-authenticate. There is known issue whereby the login session expires while the user's browser is in edit mode. On save an error message indicates that the session has expired. Note that the edit session can be regained by clicking 3 or 4 times on the browser's back button.

We advise users to regularly save their edit sessions by clicking on the Checkpoint button This saves the document and redirects you back to edit.

We are currently investigating a solution to this issue.

• 14-Sep-2007 Authentication change.

Authentication to TWiki at CERN will change from the current AFS login to the CERN Single Sign On (CERN login) on Tuesday September 18th. To logon to TWiki with the CERN login, you can use your CERN account (existing MAIL, NICE or AIS/EDH login) or your "external account" like for CDS, Indico or Simba mailing lists... more information. Please note that there are some inconsistencies with the TWiki user information. This will be corrected soon, meanwhile, please do not register again as a TWiki user if you already have a WikiName.

• 03-Apr-2007 Upgrade of TWiki

TWiki will be upgraded from 4.0.5 to 4.1.2 on Tuesday 3-apr. We will also test TWiki on SLC4 and so there will be an interruption to the service from 07:00 – 07:45

TWiki Release 4.1.2 (Edinburgh) is a minor release and introduces some good enhancements and quite many bug fixes since 4.0.5. The development team has done everything to maintain full compatibility with topics generated in TWiki-4.0 and there are no changes to the topic format.

• 15-Mar-2007 Upgrade of Plugins

Some Plugins were upgaded. The Twisty Plugin is now version 1.2 and the Table plugin is now version 1.020. These upgrades have fixed some errors and have added functionality.

• 17-Nov-2006 Upgrade to Release 4.0.5

TWiki Release 4.0.5

TWiki Release 4.0.5 supersedes TWiki Release 4.0.4

This release contains the fixes for 8 major and 23 minor Known Issues found since the release of TWiki-4.0.4.

• 28-Aug-2006 Hotfix installed

Now running TWiki 4.0.4-2. Hotfix installed

The hotfix fixed a few bugs such as - INCLUDE from external url with filename breaks relative links of included content, and the speed of connections due to sub-webs has been corrected.

• 4 -Jul-2006 TWiki upgrade

TWiki has been upgraded to version 4 - Dakar (see below). For any questions please email twiki support

• 29-Jun-2006 TWiki software upgrade 4-July

TWiki will be upgraded to version 4 (Dakar) on tuesday 4-July. Edit and attach options will be disabled between 07:00 - 09:00 CET. Reading documents will be possible but there will be some interruptions to the service at this time.

Major New Features

• • WYSIWYG editor
  • Revamped PatternSkin with a modern look and lots of customization options
  • New NatSkin
  • New editing model with conflict resolution allows freer collaboration
  • Hierarchical sub-webs
  • Spellchecking

• 22-Jun-2006 Computer centre powercut.

The temporary air conditioning equipment still needed to support the computer centre did not restart after a general powercut around 2am this morning. Non-critical IT services were shutdown as the temperature was rising rapidly and the machines powered off. Cooling was restored around 4am and we startd to resume services around 4:30. The Twiki cluster of machines was restarted at around 09:00.

• 19-Jun-2006 twiki DNS problem

During the morning of monday 19-June there was a problem resolving the twiki DNS name. This was corrected by CS group and the twiki service returned at 10:00.

• 12-May-2006 twiki data problem

We had a problem with the Twiki data directory and had to recover from backup. We were able to recover all data from the previous night's backup plus all files that have been created today. Unfortunately we were not able to recover the modifications made today on existing files.

Please see the WebChanges topic of your web to check which files have been updated.

The only method to recover this data is maybe for the user to use the back button on the browser to retrieve the update Twiki edit page. However, we understand that not every change can be recovered that way.

As of 16:15 CET TWiki is back in production.

I sincerly apologise for this and I hope that this did not effect too many of your files.

Peter Jones

• 24-Apr-2006 twiki hardware upgrades

The TWiki service has had a hardware upgrade. Three new dual 2.40GHz cpu servers have been added.

• 07-Mar-2006 twiki Dakar test area

The new version of TWiki (4.0.1 or Dakar) is being available for tests. Try it. Note this is only for tests and files amy be deleted at any time so please do not use it for storing any important documents.

• 08-Feb-2006 twiki access problem

There was a problem today with the access to Twiki from outside of the CERN site. This was solved at 16.00 CET.

• 30-Jan-2006 twiki.cern.ch

One can now access Twiki at CERN via the URL http://twiki.cern.ch. All previous URLs should still function.

• 20-Jan-2006 TreePlugin and ApprovalPlugin installed

TreePlugin : Enables dynamic generation of TWiki topic trees based on topics' parent-child relationships.

ApprovalPlugin : TWiki benefits from the fact that every user can modify a topic instantly without restrictions. However, sometimes it is desirable that one can control the content of the TWiki. In particular, if TWiki is used in a Quality System as a document server compliant with ISO 9000 (e.g. for the quality manual), it is essential that these documents are approved by the management before they can be applied by the employees.

• 09-Sep-2005 DrawPlugin 1.103 installed

TWikiDrawPlugin 1.103 now available.

• 23-Aug-2005 fixed PDF images problem.

The PDF feature did not render images correctly. The application had to rebuilt with openssl enabled. Images are now visible in PDF files.

• 04-Aug-2005 PDF feature fixed.

A problem concerning the TWiki addon TWiki:GenPDFAddOn, a plugin that creates a PDF document from TWiki pages, has been fixed after correcting a configuration file.

• 03-Aug-2005 Calendar plugin fixed.

A problem concerning the TWiki plugin TWiki:CalendarPlugin, a plugin that shows a monthly calendar with highlighted events, has been fixed after correcting a configuration file.

• 02-Aug-2005 TWiki web server upgrades.

The TWiki servers (lxmon01 and lxmon02) have been upgraded to SLC3.

-- PeterJones - 05 Aug 2005