Uploads:recover_from_tombstone not resurrecting images

Bug
1

Summary

I believe the uploads:recover_from_tombstone script is not restoring everything it should from the tombstone. My reasoning is as follows:

Recently, our Discourse forum had a problem where uploaded images would no longer appear:

And here is an example topic illustrating the issue.

Description

The problem began around December 30. I investigated yesterday, and events unfolded as follows:

  1. I upgraded to the latest version of Discourse (v2.0.0.beta1 +123) hoping it would magically fix the issue. But sadly not.

  2. We noticed that automatic backup was stuck in a pending state since two weeks. I canceled it via the web interface.

  3. I noticed Sidekiq was clogged with a huge number (>200,000) of pending jobs—mainly digest mails. Jobs were being processed, but the queue was growing too fast to keep up. I decided to go for the nuclear option and flushall. Since then, the Sidekiq queue has been under control.

  4. I saw that the broken images still had src="transparent.png" and data-orig-src="upload://...". I tried to run the uploads:recover_from_tombstone script (described here) to see if it could fix things, but the problem persisted.

  5. I did some digging to find out whether the missing images were really gone:

    • Examined HTML source of the example topic linked above; found base62-encoded string upload://mJGteOa4aQSVkvJYnln9v1xx8lV from post 16.
    • Decoded the string to get the SHA1 hex:
      : curtis@sirius ~/code/tech/discourse (master) »
echo 'require "Base62"\nprint Base62.decode("mJGteOa4aQSVkvJYnln9v1xx8lV").to_s(16)' | ruby
9f59dfb3553495e35970b917c7f79efd72f24997
    • Then checked on the server running Discourse:
      : curtis@tera /var/discourse (master) »
find . -name '*9f59dfb3553495e35970b917c7f79efd72f24997*'
./shared/standalone/uploads/tombstone/default/original/2X/9/9f59dfb3553495e35970b917c7f79efd72f24997.jpg

    So the file is there, but only in the tombstone.

  6. I tried running rake:recover_from_tombstone again today; here is the abbreviated output:

    : curtis@tera /var/discourse (master) »
sudo ./launcher enter app
root@tera-app:/var/www/discourse# rake uploads:recover_from_tombstone
        1 / 191 (  0.5%)
...
       39 / 191 ( 20.4%)
Restoring /var/www/discourse/public/uploads/tombstone/default/original/2X/f/f984d493b9ec03b98bd8bf6d1fc28b7f77ea448e.jpg...Restored into /upl
oads/default/original/2X/e/eb3f4c7aef16b46bbb835ac1d7ccea75bf94da7d.jpg
Restoring /var/www/discourse/public/uploads/tombstone/default/original/2X/f/f984d493b9ec03b98bd8bf6d1fc28b7f77ea448e.jpg...Restored into /upl
oads/default/original/2X/a/a14854b26712ca134dcd9951d28f9f14272f9e61.jpg
Restoring /var/www/discourse/public/uploads/tombstone/default/original/2X/f/f984d493b9ec03b98bd8bf6d1fc28b7f77ea448e.jpg...Restored into /upl
oads/default/original/2X/f/f984d493b9ec03b98bd8bf6d1fc28b7f77ea448e.jpg
       40 / 191 ( 20.9%)
...
      111 / 191 ( 58.1%)
Restoring /var/www/discourse/public/uploads/tombstone/default/original/2X/9/9d714b6674072837fb08955b0b323bc067e15bc7.png...Restored into /uploads/default/original/2X/9/9d714b6674072837fb08955b0b323bc067e15bc7.png
      112 / 191 ( 58.6%)
...
      116 / 191 ( 60.7%)
Restoring /var/www/discourse/public/uploads/tombstone/default/original/2X/9/9032d15fd85a5b49becce010babd99051a815411.png...Restored into /uploads/default/original/2X/9/9032d15fd85a5b49becce010babd99051a815411.png
      117 / 191 ( 61.3%)
...
      159 / 191 ( 83.2%)
Restoring /var/www/discourse/public/uploads/tombstone/default/original/2X/c/cce47b09e1b3febb74685ce135c754ae4699e72a.png...Restored into /uploads/default/original/2X/5/5af08ab461c4220d300c6efbafcca454441523d8.png
      160 / 191 ( 83.8%)
...
      191 / 191 (100.0%)

    So it did some stuff, but did not hit 9f59dfb3553495e35970b917c7f79efd72f24997 as I had hoped.

Questions

  1. Is this a bug or limitation of the recovery script? Looking at the source of that routine, I guess it only checks the src of each img and does not look at any data-orig-src attribute? Should it? Apologies if I am misreading things; my Ruby-fu is very weak.

  2. How should I proceed to fix my forum? I read on other threads that it is best not to manually copy things out of the tombstone. I am concerned that if I don’t fix this before Friday—when we migrate to hosted Discourse, woohoo! :fireworks:—these images will be permanently lost.

  3. Is it normal that even since yesterday, some additional images were recovered from the tombstone today? Is this typical? Or is it indicative of some other bug? How can I check?

  4. Why are these images ending up in the tombstone in the first place? Is there an outstanding bug here? Should I have been disabling Sidekiq during upgrades?

5 Likes
3

I believe @zogstrip will be looking at this.

3 Likes
8

I’ve pushed a fix, can you try recovering images again?

https://github.com/discourse/discourse/commit/2d49250107b3abb5e7d433de540810aa378c8f47

6 Likes
9

Thank you so much @zogstrip!

I had to add require "base62" to the top of the new uploads.rake, but then it worked! :beers:

3 Likes
10

Forgot about that, I only tested in “dev” environment and it worked fine without it.

5 Likes