SoylentNews was Misbehaving: Story Hits and Comment Counts Weren't Updating [UPDATED}

[2021-02-14 15:53:00 UTC: UPDATE added need to check apache log before doing a slash -restart]

martyb writes:

We seem to have experienced some difficulties with the SoylentNews site.

I've noticed that both the number of hits and comments for each story do not seem to be updating.

Corrective measures taken:

1. "Bounce" the Servers I doubted it would help, but it causes no harm to try it, so why not? And, as expected, it did not help, either.:This is my personal "bounce" script:
   cat ~/bin/bounce

   #!/bin/bash
   servers='hydrogen fluorine'
   for server in ${servers} ; do echo Accessing: ${server} && rsh ${server} /home/bob/bin/bounce ; done

   Which, in turn, runs the following script on each of the above servers:

   cat /home/bob/bin/bounce

   #!/bin/bash
   sudo /etc/init.d/varnish restart
   sudo -u slash /srv/soylentnews.org/apache/bin/apachectl -k restart

2. Restart slash For those who are unaware, slash has its own internal implementation of what is, effectively, cron. It periodically fires off tasks that support the site's operations. But, this potentially has side-effects, so first need to check the apache error_log.

   # Go to the appropriate server:
   ssh fluorine
   # Ensure the apache log is not showing issues:tail -f /srv/soylentnews.org/apache/logs/error_log
   # Restart slash:
   sudo /etc/init.d/slash restart
   >> slashd slash has no PID file
   >> Sleeping 10 seconds in a probably futile attempt to be clean: ok.
   >> Starting slashd slash: ok PID = 3274

   NB: this failed to run to a successful conclusion when I originally tried it a few hour ago. I gave it one more try while writing this story... it seemed to run okay this time?!

Things appears to be running okay, now. Please reply in the comments if anything else is amiss. Alternatively, mention it in the #dev channel on IRC (Internet Relay Chat, or send an email to admin (at) soylentnews (dot) org.

We now return you to the ongoing discussion of: teco or ed?

Original Submission

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