From yuri at sims.berkeley.edu Mon Aug 11 07:26:24 2008 From: yuri at sims.berkeley.edu (Yuri Takhteyev) Date: Mon Aug 11 07:37:55 2008 Subject: [Sputnik-list] ANN: Sputnik 8.08.11 (salts, new saci) Message-ID: fa4efbc00808110226r6c19546by4da232c52f85dc6f@mail.gmail.com

Sputnik 8.08.11 is here. It's mostly a bunch of bug fixes.

The installation instructions are at http://sputnik.freewisdom.org/en/Installation

Perhaps the most important of those fixes is a change to how salts are handled. Prior to this version, Sputnik had a parameter called "SECRETCODE" that was used as salt for both passwords and cookies. People weren't setting this parameter, it seems, with the effect that login info was getting carried over from one Sputnik site to another. Not good. So, I made two changes. First, there are two different salts now: PASSWORDSALT and TOKEN_SALT. Second, both are set to random strings as a part of the installation procedure.

If you are running an earlier version of "Earth" and do not want to have to reset all the passwords, then set PASSWORDSALT to whatever your SECRETCODE was set before. Set it to nil if you never set SECRET_CODE. (This means your passwords will only be as secure as unsalted MD5, which is not very secure.) Either way, keep the random value for TOKEN_SALT (or set it to some other random value).

Another substantial change is in the new version of Saci used by Sputnik 8.08.11 (Saci 8.08.08). The new version caches nodes within each request, avoiding requesting the same node over and over again. This leads to rather dramatic performance speed-up for index pages such as "history" (http://sputnik.freewisdom.org/en/history) and "sitemap" (http://sputnik.freewisdom.org/en/sitemap).

Finally, if you want some lorem ipsum data to load into your new Sputnik for experimenting, you can get it from http://media.freewisdom.org/etc/lorem-ipsum.zip. This file unzips into a wiki data directory with 120 random interlinked pages, each with a fake history.

• yuri

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