June 30, 2004

Config caveat

A small warning about configuring RT:

The RT_Siteconfig.pm file is parsed by Apache when it starts or is given a SIGHUP, so be sure that there are no errors in this file, or Apache will fail to start. Restart Apache after making any changes to be sure, so Apache doesn't die at 4AM when syslog restarts it.

Posted by skylar at 08:03 PM | Comments (0)

June 29, 2004

mol

Per Jim's request, I created the mol mailing list for the Association for Mathematics of Language.

Posted by skylar at 12:23 AM | Comments (0)

June 27, 2004

DocumentRoot missing

I fixed an error in rt's virtual host configuration that kept the SSL host from working.

I found that the DocumentRoot statement was missing, which made for a rather short HTTPS transaction. I added the same DocumentRoot as the normal vhost, which got things working.

I don't think this is the error that caused Apache to die, though.

Posted by skylar at 02:52 PM | Comments (0)

June 26, 2004

SMTP Submission

I've added a rule to allow incoming requests to port 587 on quark. This will allow clients to use the SMTP AUTH port rather than the normal SMTP port.

Posted by skylar at 03:25 PM | Comments (0)

June 25, 2004

Image/acl0

I modified Quark's dhcpd.conf so that option-100 points to the new image's IP address. I then imaged ACL0. It ran into a problem in not being able to find /usr/share/systemimager/boot, which it needs to boot off of, so I scp'ed the files over from the new image. The image then went smoothly, except for one error:
2004/06/25 13:53:46 [5096] rsync on scripts/hosts from acl0.cs.earlham.edu (159.28.230.10)
2004/06/25 13:53:46 [5096] link_stat "hosts" (in scripts) failed: No such file or directory
2004/06/25 13:53:46 [5096] rsync error: some files could not be transferred (code 23) at main.c(397)

I don't have time to look into this further, but I'm guessing that this is a configuration problem on the new image.

Posted by arvesda at 03:36 PM | Comments (0)

June 24, 2004

The new image

Well, I installed Fedora Core 2 on Quarkprime this morning as the first step in our transition of swapping Q' and image. I did an NFS install off of office0, and it was fast and painless. The entire installation was pretty much a breeze. Some things I should point out about the install:

  • The partitioning is basically with / on the entire first drive, and /var/lib/systemimager on the second. I thought this was reasonable at the time, but looking at it now, the current image server has a lot more space in its /var/lib/systemimager partition
  • I was unsure whether the Poweredge has RAID or not. I'm guessing it does, since it has hot-swappable drives, but from what I've read about that, that seems to be a feature found on hardware RAID cards (which I'm guessing we have)
  • I chose the setting of 'No firewall' mainly because I am not familiar with the firewall settings on Linux. I thought that it might mess up the entire imaging process if it blocked some ports, so the firewall is disabled at the moment.
  • GRUB is the current bootloader. There was no choice for LILO, but GRUB's fairly painless once you understand it's hard drive naming convention.

    The aftermath:

  • I tried doing the hot-swappable hard drive thing, and it didn't work. I got SCSI read access failed errors, and errors about writing to the journal. Restarting seemed to clean it up.
  • I had a hell of a lot of trouble finding out where to set the hostname and NIS domainname once you exit the install. The way RedHat/Fedora handles initscrips bugs me. I still don't know how to make it reset the hostname without having to reset the box.
  • The current hostname is image.cs.earlham.edu, but its IP is still 159.28.230.91 (Quarkprime's)
  • /clients is mounted and NIS is working. Sudo seems to be working as well. I had to edit the /etc/group file manually...I thought this was one of the files that NIS took care of. (?)
  • I haven't messed with any of Quark's DNS settings yet. I figured I'd make sure everything is working well, and probably finish the image -> Q' transition before changing the IPs.

    Systemimager

  • Systemimager is installed, and ready to go (I think), but I don't really know how to use it. I popped the CD into ACL0, hoping that it might ask me the hostname or IP of the image server, but it's completely automatic. So....acl0 is getting reimaged right now off of the old image server.

    Posted by arvesda at 06:30 PM | Comments (0)
  • June 22, 2004

    Logs mailing list

    I've created a new Logs mailing list. This will allow us to easily archive the log messages we receive from all of our machines. I'm keeping the syslog user around as a member of that list for testing purposes. This will also allow us to opt-out of receiving messages not form quark.

    Posted by skylar at 09:32 PM | Comments (0)

    GLOW

    At Ian Kelly's request, I installed the GLOW add-on to the GLUT OpenGL libraries. I downloaded the source from http://glow.sourceforge.net, and compiled it. I then copied all the .so and .a files into /usr/local/lib on the RH9 image.

    Posted by skylar at 01:01 AM | Comments (0)

    June 19, 2004

    Proxy server

    I've setup a Squid proxy server on millie, with a CNAME proxy.cs.earlham.edu. The proxy server authenticates off quark's IMAP server to get its user information. This is especially useful for me, as rt.cs.earlham.edu cannot be run outside of a virtual host, and the Packet Shapers still need to be reconfigured to allow access to that IP address.

    Posted by skylar at 01:38 PM | Comments (0)

    June 12, 2004

    Upgrade to 4.10-STABLE

    After testing out quarkprime with 4.10-STABLE, I compiled and installed 4.10-STABLE on quark. All seems to be going well.

    I think we'll have some trouble upgrading the user-space tools, though, as some of them are tracked from ports. We can upgrade what we need on an individual basis, though.

    Posted by skylar at 07:56 PM | Comments (0)

    June 11, 2004

    Ticket manager

    I've installed RT, which is a request/ticket tracker. I'm thinking this might not be a bad idea for farming out tasks from the admin list, and also provides a nice web interface for users to track the status of their problems. I have it up here, but I haven't created any other users for it. It's got lots of options, and I'm just beginning to wade through all of them.

    I also ran into some trouble during the install wrt the setup of the Postgres database. I ended up giving pgsql a temporary password, which expires tomorrow.

    I'll also get SSL keys for rt up once I get a chance.

    Posted by skylar at 07:45 PM | Comments (0)

    June 10, 2004

    sparcstation 5

    I got my Sparcstation 5 (demeter.admin.cs.earlham.edu) up into a fairly usable state just now. I was having difficulty getting an IP via DHCP from admin but I was finally able to ping my box. I don't really know what was up with admin, because I thought I had edited the DNS and DHCP configs correctly, and restarted them correctly, according to the FreeBSD manual.

    I don't really know what demeter's purpose will be, but I would really like to play around with it since it is basically my first non-x86 system. I can already see problems arising with having to keep swapping the keyboard and monitor back and forth from millie. I know that when you did this, Skylar, you had to restart millie, and I had to as well. admin also got restarted because I think the power cable was loose.

    A sun KVM switch would be awesome.
    In the meantime, I might put demeter next to millie and then put admin's monitor on top of it. I think that'd be a perfect fit.

    Posted by arvesda at 05:26 AM | Comments (0)

    June 09, 2004

    perl5 upgrade

    The upgrade to perl 5.8.4 for suidexec wasn't as easy I thought it would be. None of the modules were moved from the 5.8.2 directories to 5.8.4. A nice fix, however, was to move 5.8.2 directories away, and symlink the new 5.8.4 directories into place. At least ports build now.

    Posted by skylar at 02:35 PM | Comments (0)

    June 07, 2004

    backup drive

    I've now started dumps from quarkprime, backup, and image to admin's 60GB IDE drive.

    Posted by skylar at 05:16 AM | Comments (0)

    perl 5.8.4

    I upgraded perl to 5.8.4 on quark. After some hocus-pocus with recompiling all the f***ing database and CGI modules, I finally got it working. Why can't this be automated?

    Posted by skylar at 02:49 AM | Comments (0)

    Squirrelmail 1.4.3a

    I upgraded quark and quarkprime to the latest and greatest Squirrelmail (1.4.3a). All looks good, and we've now pulled ahead of ECS's Squirrelmail installation.

    Posted by skylar at 12:09 AM | Comments (0)

    June 06, 2004

    IP aliasing

    I fixed the problem we had with IP aliasing on quark. It turned out that I had forgotten to set the netmask on the aliases to 0xffffffff, which caused some weird routing problems.

    Posted by skylar at 11:32 PM | Comments (0)

    June 04, 2004

    Netgroups and altneratives

    I've enabled netgroups for FreeBSD, with a STAFF netgroup containing basically the users in the wheel group. I also implemented an alternative for machines with pam_access installed. This involves using access.conf to limit logins to wheel group members.

    Posted by skylar at 11:21 PM | Comments (0)

    DNS recursion

    I've fixed a security hole in the way DNS recursion is implemented in BIND9.

    I added an acl rule for CS:

    acl cs {
    127.0.0.1;
    192.168.0.0/24;
    159.28.230.0/24;
    159.28.135.0/24;
    };

    In the options section, I added this line:

    allow-recursion { cs; };

    Posted by skylar at 10:39 PM | Comments (0)

    pkg-get update

    I'm updating all the packages on millie using pkg-get update.

    Posted by skylar at 11:56 AM | Comments (0)

    Finally!

    Dan and I rolled out the new image to all the ACLs yesterday. All is good....

    Posted by skylar at 11:55 AM | Comments (0)