Neahttadigisanit

The Neahttadigisanit dictionary. NDS for short. The gtdict server (gtdict.uit.no) runs NDS. NDS is the only service gtdict runs.

Troubleshooting

Some common problems, and their solution.

Site doesn’t reply at all

ssh to the server. Try to restart both nginx, as well as all the services: sudo systemctl restart nginx to restart nginx, then sudo su neahtta, and nds restart all, to restart all the individual instances.

Server is very slow

Restart it. ssh to the server, restart the systemd service, for example for, sanit: sudo systemctl restart nds-sanit.

Dictionaries are not being updated

This could be that the automatic update has run into git conflicts in a dictionary’s repository. cd into the dictionary: cd /home/neahtta/gut/giellalt/dict-xxx-yyy (where dict-xxx-yyy is the dictionary in question), and check what git status says. If it says “git rebase in progress”, abort the rebase. Otherwise, resolve the issue. Finally run git pull and make sure it’s all up to date.

Another frequent issue, are that invalid XML are pushed to the dictionary sources. Fix the issues manually, or report the issue to the dictionary authors.

Language models are not being updated

Usually this is due to errors when building the language models. Check out the build log from Tino’s logs, which are found here (example for giellalt/lang-sme): https://apertium.projectjj.com/apt/logs/giella-sme/build.log.

If this all seems fine, check out apt logs on why the new packages are not being installed.

Endpoints

Users reach the Neahttadigisanit dictionary through the following addresses:

• https://baakoeh.oahpa.no
• https://bahkogirrje.oahpa.no
• https://kyv.oahpa.no
• https://muter.oahpa.no
• https://saan.oahpa.no
• https://saanih.oahpa.no
• https://sanat.oahpa.no
• https://sanj.oahpa.no
• https://sonad.oahpa.no
• https://vada.oahpa.no
• https://valks.oahpa.no

This list is also located on the publicly reachable address https://gtdict.uit.no, as a super simple, static html page.

About the application

NDS is an old Python application, using the Flask web framework. It runs on python version 3.10. There is some JavaScript functionality, using some old jQuery. Other JS code is written to be compatible with what MDN (Mozilla Developer Network) calls “baseline”, that is, browsers going back to 2015. We do this because we have users using very old computers, and we want most functionality to work for them.

Architecture

NDS instances are run by gunicorn. The gunicorn instance is managed by systemd.

Maintenance

Once ssh’d into the server, switch to the neahtta user using the command: sudo su neahtta. It will place you in /home/neahtta/neahttadigisanit/neahtta, and activate the python virtual environment, which you can see because the prompt starts with (venv) .... A message of the day with useful information on common nds commands will be printed.

nds is the command that does most of the maintenance. It can update dictionaries, and is also used to restart the servers, for example. See LINK-TO-NDS-COMMAND-DOCUMENTATION.

Automatic updates

Language models from apertium nighly, and the dictionaries are updated automatically.

A systemd timer /etc/systemd/system/autoupdate-nds.timer runs hourly. It runs the /etc/systemd/system/autoupdate-nds.service. That service runs the commmand nds autoupdate.

It does the following:

1. Update language models, from apertium, using apt
2. git pulls shared repositories (giellalt/giella-core)
3. for each instance (sanit, baakoeh, etc)
4. determines which dictionaries it uses (dict-xxx-yyy), and does a git pull on each dictionary
5. If any dictionaries had new data from the git pull: compile the dictionary
6. (if the sme-nob dictionary was updated, do add_stem (special case just for sme-nob))
7. restart the gunicorn server, so new dictionaries come online

NOTE: The autoupdate DOES NOT update the application itself. If you have made changes to giellatekno/neahttadigisanit, you must git pull in the directory, and restart all services.

TLS (SSL) certificates

Because services runs under a subdomain of oahpa.no, we use a wildcard certificate. Such a certificate can NOT be issued by letsencrypt, so we get these certificates sent to us regularly from ITA.

HOW CERTIFICATES WORKS, WHERE THEY ARE.

Logs

nginx entry and access logs are at /home/neahtta/logs/(access|error).<INSTANCE>.log, as controlled by the indivial nginx config files for each instance, at /etc/nginx/sites-available/<INSTANCE>.conf. In the nginx conf file, you can see that those logs also goes to the syslog, which ultimately pushes logs to Azure, for permanent storage, so that we don’t lose the logs, in case the server data loss. (See SERVERSLOGGINGTOAZURE)

Additionally, the application itself writes two different log files: /home/neahtta/morph_log.txt, and /home/neahtta/user_log.txt. These logs are as of this writing (2026-01-16) NOT automatically transferred to Azure. This is a WIP.