Links to support.measurementlab.net are broken

[nkinkade]

support.measurementlab.net used to be served up by Zammad, the ticketing system that M-Lab used for a few years. However, after Chris left M-Lab, Zammad fell into disuse, and we eventually shut down the VM that it ran on. The VM still exists, so we can always turn it back on and login to Zammad to retrieve any data or content.

Links that I have found that are broken:

• The "Support" link in the footer of https://www.measurementlab.net
• Multiple links in this blog post: https://www.measurementlab.net/blog/speed-tests-accuracy/
• The "support website" link on the Contact page: https://www.measurementlab.net/contact/
• ./_pages/faq.md:redirect_to: "https://support.measurementlab.net/help/en-us"
• The "support website" link just below this heading: https://www.measurementlab.net/tests/#using-and-troubleshooting-m-lab-tests
• In the "In our support answer" line on the Contribute page: https://www.measurementlab.net/contribute/#use-an-m-lab-test-in-your-website-or-application
• In the IST OneBox at the bottom there is a link with text "About" that leads to a Google support page (on support.google.com). On that page, under "Understand your test results" is a link with text "Learn more about why your results from M-Lab can differ from other test results.", which points to the now non-existent site support.measurementlab.net, and is therefore broken.

There may be other places.

[nkinkade]

To help this process along, and to archive the Zammad "Knowledge Base", I turned on the Zammad VM and use wget to recursively download the entire knowledge base:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Rbbrt1BmT7tBwQxtc5q1RuKWydi9mZ_p/view

To view the site, download the archive, un-tar-gzip it:

tar xf zammad_support.measurementlab.net.tar.gz

And then <ctrl>-o in your browser to open a file-open dialog, and then navigate to the following file in the archive you extracted:

support.measurementlab.net/help/en-us.html

This at least captures the content so that we can replicate it on the website.

[nkinkade]

As a side note, it is apparently not possible (or at least easy) to export a Knowledge Base from Zammad. The only thing I could really find on it stated that Zammad didn't support this and the only thing to use would be some apparently undocumented API.

[nkinkade]

To temporarily get support pages working again, I started the Zammad VM. I upgraded Zammad to the latest version to install any bug fixes and security patches. This gets all links working again, but our intention is to not use Zammad any longer and to migrate the Zammad Knowledge Base content to actual pages on the website and to possibly update links.