[RAS] mistake: data corruption in db

[Ivan Kurmanov]

I've started working on preparing (fixing) the Storable-serialized
data of RAS for proper (full) migration from nebka, and I was working
with the live code and live database. And I've made a mistake. The
mistake caused an important part of the data in the database -- the
data column in the objects table -- to be overwritten with a value
that was relevant to only one of these records. In other words, i've
put something which looks like a proper document details into
description of a large number of other documents. I don't know how
many of the records were affected, but i estimate that probably at
least several thousands.

When I realized what is going on, I've aborted the operation and
killed the mysql thread that was doing the job.

And before that I've also (via the same mistake) have rewritten all
institution details in the DB.

This corruption would mean that wrong data would be shown to the
users. Specifically, in research profile suggestions and in
institutions search.

With Thomas' help, I've taken RAS down and has put the Service
Temporarily Unavailable page online instead. At the same time I've
disabled most of the RAS-related cronjobs in the aras account.

And I've started a full update of RePEc in the update daemon, which
should rewrite the corrupted data with correct data taken from the
files. But this update may take days to complete. That's why i've
disabled the cronjobs to have as minimal concurrent jobs as possible.
I don't have a better estimate now. I'm watching the update daemon
log, but i don't expect it to finish soon anyway.



-ivan