Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2005-11-21/Technology report

Temporary image downtime possible
Images may be unavailable for sometime on 21 November or 22 November in order to finish server configurations on the new image server, 'amane'.

HTML Tidy running smoothly again
After being disabled last week, HTML Tidy was re-enabled, just 5½ hours after it was disabled. Tim Starling noted that the likely cause of most errors attributed to Tidy was elsewhere; numerous parse and other errors were responsible for many of the problems. Many Apache machines reported error logs of over 100GB at the time. Without Tidy, many talk pages were rendered unreadable, mostly due to invalid HTML within user signatures. During the downtime, brion added a feature that disallowed signatures with invalid HTML.

Changing username re-enabled
The operation allowing users to change their username was re-enabled on 16 November. Special:Renameuser had been disabled since 26 September due to the page's inefficiency. brion restored the function with the 'archive' bit disabled, leaving a minor concern about the possibility for incorrect usernames in the histories of undeleted pages.

New squid statistics live
A new system for creating squid traffic statistics is now active. The site generates graphs showing statistics for all active squid farms. A previous statistics site has been phased out.

Last week in servers
Other server-related events and problems included:


 * 15 November — 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica scans converted to PNG files dynamically
 * 17 November — Servers srv51 through srv70 are being prepared for usage as Apache servers
 * 18 November — Page leech blocked