[Box-Admins] SqueakSource problem

[David T. Lewis]

I am currently unable to log in to http://squeaksource.com, which is showing
a password violation. I also do not have write access to the repository from
Monticello in Squeak for my account (dtl).

I do not have confirmation yet, but I assume this is a problem that affects
all users, and that squeaksource.com is effectively read-only right now. I
do not know the cause of the problem but I'm reporting it on box-admins now
and will follow up if and when I figure out what went wrong.

Here is what happened:

A day or so ago I created a new project (EtoysProject) on SqueakSource. Today
I looked at it, and the new project was gone, and I could see that a new
account registration for Marcel had also disappeared.

Looking on dan.box.squeak.org, I could see that the squeaksource image had
automatically restarted about 35 hours earlier, before I had created the new
project. Probably this is unrelated to the current problem, and would have
been caused by the image running out of file handles. This is a known bug,
and I have a monitor process in the image that watches for it and restarts
the image if it happens.

The ss.log file shows projects being recovered some time after my new project
changes. This seems to happen every once in a while, and I do not know the
reason. But in this case it may indicate something going wrong that may
have led to the lost EtoysProject information.

The lost project information was in the image, but the MCZ file for this
project was still on disk.

After seeing the above problem, I re-created the EtoysProject project through
the web interface, reloaded the MCZ file (so the image would know about it,
even though it was on disk already), and verified that the MCZ was now
visible in the archive from a Squeak MC browser.

I then tried to make a backup of the image in its updated stated. I connected
through VNC, saved the image interactively, and made a backkup copy of it
in the ./BACKUPS directory.

After this last step, I checked http://squeaksource.com and found that I
could no longer log in as 'dtl'. I tried copying an MCZ from a Squeak image
to SqueakSource, and got an access violation there as well.

I do not know what is wrong, but it appears to have happened as a side
effect of my saving the image through a VNC session.

The last known good backup of the squeaksource.com image (tested and verified
today on my home PC) is:

  dan.box.squeak.org://srv/squeaksourcecom/SqueakSource/BACKUPS/ss-image-save-20170917.tgz

This backup was taken about 2 1/2 weeks ago, and if necessary, squeaksource.com
may be restarted from this image. But this would result in any new project definitions
or user account changes being lost (all the disk-resident MCZ files will still
be present).

I am taking no further action at this time, just trying to figure out what
went wrong, and I am writing this up so we have a record of the problem.

Dave