OpenID logins/commenting on the two new webservers

[denise]

After some investigation, we've realized that our two new webservers are having a problem with the OpenID modules installed on them. (For those who care about that sort of thing: it's a case of version incompatability; newer versions of the OpenID modules require (without telling us that they require, ugh) a more up-to-date version of the JSON modules than we have installed or have tested against. So, we have to do some regression testing before we can just upgrade.)

So, for at least the next few days, you might notice that the option for commenting as an OpenID account doesn't appear sometimes when you load a comment form, or if you're logged into an OpenID account you might randomly get weird errors or seem to be logged out, etc. If that happens, just refresh the page until the problem clears up. (When you ask for a page, you get sent to the webserver that's next up, so about 1/4th of the time you'll get one of the webservers with the problem.)

We'll have this fixed as soon as possible! Sorry about the trouble.

Comments

[jjhunter]

Aha! I was wondering about that appearing-disappearing-appearing OpenID option, but didn't have a chance to file a bug report earlier. Glad you're already on it. :oD

[andy]

Out of curiosity - how do you usually install Perl dependency modules on your web servers? Do you let CPAN pick the newest version for you, do you use .debs, or do you have some other process in place?

[denise]

I'm not 100% positive, but I think CPAN.

[alierak]

I haven't ever set one up myself, but from studying them for a while I think it actually turns out to be a combination of all three. On these two new servers, 'dpkg -l | grep perl' produces 149 lines, so clearly a lot of modules are installed as .debs (and I think mark even used to recommend doing everything that way, via dh-make-perl and puppet). Now, the OpenID modules are not among them, so I think we can assume they were installed from CPAN by hand. Ordinarily, that would be perfectly fine, since one of them indicates a dependency on JSON, and CPAN appears to have installed the latest version of JSON too.

But then we have to consider the "other process in place" -- the installation of Dreamwidth itself, which contains quite a number of perl modules, either by copying a complete installation from another webserver or by extracting it from various version control repositories. Sadly, a copy of JSON 1.00 is included in this code tree and, thanks to "use lib", takes precedence over the newer one installed by CPAN.

[andy]

Thank you for your detailed response! Now that you brought it up, I actually recall that we might have phased out JSON 1.0 for the very reason a newer OpenID version didn't work with it, so we kinda had the same problem.

[cahwyguy]

Will this also address the problem where one could not log into an external OpenID website (such as my blog at www.cahighways.org/wordpress ) using one's DW id?

[denise]

No, that's not related-- looking at your support request, that seems to be happening because your blog is demanding OpenID 2.0 only, and we don't yet support OpenID 2.0. (it's on The List, we just haven't been able to get to it yet.)

[jordannamorgan]

As a still-newbie to how everything on DW works, I have an unrelated question.

A LiveJournal feature that I hugely value is the ability to filter my friend list by tags (i.e., to specifically exclude or include an entry from a community or friend if it uses a certain tag). Is this feature available on DW, and if not, do you have plans to include it in the future?

[azurelunatic]

This is a paid feature under the reading page filter options, and I believe that it existed here before LJ implemented it. :)

[denise]

Advanced reading filters are a paid user feature, but yes, it exists! If you have a paid account, you can go to the Manage Subscription Filters page, create filters, and for each person in the filter, specify whether to filter by rating, poster (in communities), or tag.

[jordannamorgan]

Thanks. Good to know for when LJ becomes *completely* unusable.

[gwendraith]

Sorry, I'm not very familiar with the workings of OpenID but I have several friends on LJ who comment on my posts here via my crosspost link on LJ and use OpenID. None of them have been able to comment for a some days now. Will refreshing the page work eventually in those instances?
Thanks.

[denise]

If the problem is that they're not seeing the OpenID radio button option when they go to comment, yes, refresh a few times and it should work (although I think that the underlying problem might be fixed now and the refreshing is no longer necessary). If they're getting error messages or other symptoms, have them open up a support request for us to look into it further!

[gwendraith]

Thanks, Denise :)