The [Wayback/Archive] Embarcadero/IDERA Documentation Wiki has been mostly down since March 3rd, 2022 (not the main page, but almost all other pages are).
I modified [Wayback/Archive] Docwiki https – EmbarcaderoMonitoring to show the actual status of a deeper page as the (mostly static) top page is up, so monitoring that is useless as the deeper pages are down.e
The deeper pages are dynamic and require a functioning MySQL database connection. That connection is mostly down (the error message is not clear, so this could be a network or a database server problem, or maybe even a loadbalancer gradually entering bit heaven).
Since it had been down for like 6 days in February*, I’d expect Idera to keep an eye on it and prepare for more downtime. Apparently that’s either not a 24×7 thing for them or they missed the “pre” in preparation as it is dead-silent on .
It also runs on an unsupported version of Mediawiki 1.31** which by itself does not explain the outage, but does indicate that their idea of handling their internal lifetime management is different than what they advocate to clients in their software subscription model, see [Wayback/Archive] Delphi – Embarcadero store, [Wayback/Archive] Update Subscription – Embarcadero and [Wayback/Archive] Special Offers on RAD Studio, Delphi & C++Builder – Embarcadero:
Can I obtain updates and hotfixes without a subscription?
An active update subscription is the only way to obtain updates and hotfixes.
Back in the days Embarcadero were keen in advocating life cycle management. Maybe time to show they indeed still understand what that means.
*
The original 7 day outage from 20220217-20220224 was reported at [Wayback/Archive] docwiki.embarcadero.com is not working – General Help – Delphi-PRAXiS [en].
I amended some information at [Wayback/Archive] docwiki.embarcadero.com is not working – Page 2 – General Help – Delphi-PRAXiS [en] and redirected a [Wayback/Archive] UptimeRobot | Free Website Monitoring link at [Wayback/Archive] Docwiki https – EmbarcaderoMonitoring.
A few hours later it sort of looked to be operational again, but in the monitor actually showed it was having outages every few minutes for intervals of 5-45 minutes: [Wayback/Archive] Docwiki https – EmbarcaderoMonitoring.
**
The source of the docwiki home page at [Wayback] docwiki.embarcadero.com/ shows this:
<meta name="generator" content="MediaWiki 1.31.1">Mediawiki 1.31.1 is not even the most recent LTS version 1.31.16 (see [Wayback/Archive] Release notes/1.31 – MediaWiki), so here might even be CVE vulnerabilities.
When choosing for LTS, then they should go to the latest of 1.35 (at the time of writing 1.35.5), see [Wayback/Archive] Release notes/1.35 – MediaWiki and [Wayback/Archive] Version lifecycle – MediaWiki:
…
- A major release will be made every six months.
- A long-term support release (LTS) will be made every two years. There will be a one-year overlap in LTS support. For example, 1.23 was supported until May 2017. 1.27 was released the year before, so that people have it available as an LTS to move to and a year to make the transition.
Older Mediawiki versions can be vulnerable to attacks, even LTS ones when you do not stay on the most recent build inside an LTS branch.
Some related tweets and sites:
- [Wayback/Archive] Jeroen Wiert Pluimers on Twitter: “@b0rk @waybackmachine @archiveis @Wikimedia To see if some software development tool vendors use an embarrassingly old Mediawiki version, use this:
javascript:{v=document.querySelector('meta[name="generator"]')?.content; prompt("Mediawiki version",v)}Also found this useful: …” / Twitter- [Wayback/Archive]
"generator\" content=\"MediaWiki"– 20868 Web pages – PublicWWW.com- [Wayback/Archive] mediawiki cve – Google Search
- [Wayback/Archive] Mediawiki Mediawiki : CVE security vulnerabilities, versions and detailed reports
- [Wayback/Archive] Mediawiki : Security vulnerabilities
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 