August 30, 2004

Meeting Minutes - August 30, 2004

Present: Charlie, Dan, Skylar

Image list:

* Ask Jim to try reading theory PS on laptop in Preview

Quark list:

* Fix lpd to return FQDNs

* Investigate FreeBSD 5-RELEASE

* More details from Toby wrt PHP problem, how critical?

* Use strace to fix dvips option

* Apache problems

Long-term:

* Automated image testing (with applied groups?)

Other list:

* Clean up fourth floor

* Move fan into 2nd floor closet

* Gigabit between quark/quarkprime/backup. Does quark support jumbo frames?

* Quarkprime's RAID battery

Next meeting:

* Change root passwords.
* Fan on 4th floor.
* Key system.
* Discuss switch/hub utilization
* Account expiration

Posted by skylar at 12:34 PM | Comments (0)

August 27, 2004

office1 kernel upgrade

I've upgraded the kernel on office1 to 2.6.8, which fixed some issues I had been having with the nvidia modules.

Posted by arvesda at 09:41 PM | Comments (0)

August 26, 2004

fortune

I installed fortune from FreeBSD source for the content group.

Posted by skylar at 09:17 AM | Comments (0)

Image freeze

We've rolled out the new image today. The production ACL image (ACL2004040101) is now frozen.

Posted by skylar at 09:16 AM | Comments (0)

August 25, 2004

Pine debugging

I fixed pine so it wouldn't produce debug files. To do that, I changed the build line in pine.spec to read like so:

./build DEBUG=-O lrh

(That's on "oh" not a "zero".)

I then rebuilt pine, and installed it.

Posted by skylar at 08:26 PM | Comments (0)

August 24, 2004

New users

I've created test/guest user accounts for Jim, newuser[0-19].

Here's the script I used to generate them:

#!/usr/bin/perl

for (my $n = 0; $n < 20; $n++) {
system("echo xxxxxx|pw adduser -n newuser$n -c 'Newuser $n' -g guest -e 01-Oct-2004 -w random -b /clients/users -m -k /etc/skel -h 0");
system("edquota -p newuser newuser$n");
system("cd /var/yp;make");
}

Posted by skylar at 10:01 PM | Comments (0)

Tcl/Tk upgrade

I've upgraded Tcl and Tk to 8.4 on the production ACL image. It was a standard RPM upgrade, except I had to symlink libtcl8.4.so to libtcl8.3.so and libtk8.4.so to libtk8.3.so. I also patched exmh againt the Tcl 8.4 problem using this patch:

*** exmh~ Mon Dec 23 16:31:55 2002
--- exmh Thu Dec 26 16:21:52 2002
***************
*** 51,56 ****
--- 51,68 ----
error "Tk 4.1 (final release) or higher required."
exit 1
}
+
+ if {[info commands "tkEntrySeeInsert"] == ""} {
+ # Dang - the procs have been renamed - restore them
+ tk::unsupported::ExposePrivateCommand tkEntrySeeInsert
+ tk::unsupported::ExposePrivateCommand tkEntryBackspace
+ tk::unsupported::ExposePrivateCommand tkMenuUnpost
+ tk::unsupported::ExposePrivateCommand tkTextResetAnchor
+ tk::unsupported::ExposePrivateCommand tkEntryButton1
+ tk::unsupported::ExposePrivateCommand tkTextButton1
+ tk::unsupported::ExposePrivateVariable tkPriv
+ }
+
# Do this so popups related to user initialization
# appear all alone.
wm withdraw .

Posted by skylar at 05:22 PM | Comments (0)

Bulletin mailing list

I've created the bulletin mailing list on quark, as an opt-out option to the clients mailing list for less important system announcements.

To create the user list, I first dumped a listing of /clients/users into a file bulletin.members. I then ran this little bit of sed magic to add "@cs.earlham.edu" to the end of each line:

sed -e 's/.*/&@cs.earlham.edu/' < bulletin.members > bulletin.members.new

Using the add_members command, I added all these email address to the mailing list:

bin/add_members -r bulletin.members bulletin

Posted by skylar at 04:36 PM | Comments (0)

August 22, 2004

mod_auth_imap

To add some extra flexibility to our authentication scheme, I've installed mod_auth_imap on quark.

Here's the basic .htaccess setup you need to do:

Auth_IMAP_Enabled on
Auth_IMAP_Authoritative on
Auth_IMAP_Server imap.server.example.com
Auth_IMAP_Log on
AuthName "blah blah blah"

Posted by skylar at 08:20 PM | Comments (0)

Pink XDM

I fixed the problem with pink XDM fonts by commenting out this line in quark's /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xdm/Xresources file:

Chooser*Foreground: maroon

Posted by skylar at 06:09 PM | Comments (0)

Backup scheme

Here is the procedure for doing an image dump to quarkprime's DDS-III drive:

1. Label a fresh DDS-III tape with the current month.
2. Pop it in quarkprime's DDS-III drive.
3. Run this command on quarkprime as root:

RSH=/usr/bin/ssh dump 0aun -f 192.168.1.2:/dev/sa0 /var/lib/systemimager/

Posted by skylar at 03:31 PM | Comments (0)

New NIC

I've added a third NIC to quarkprime, allowing a crossover connection between quarkprime and image for monthly image backups.

It should be noted that the NICs in quarkprime are numbered starting from the bottom; that is, the bottom NIC is xl0, the next one up is xl1, and the top one is xl2.

Posted by skylar at 03:29 PM | Comments (0)

August 20, 2004

GLUI

Jim reported a problem with GLUI on the new image. It manifested itself in an inconsistent object/header combination. Due to problems with the original source (couldn't find any X libraries), I downloaded and compiled glui on a FreeBSD box. I then copied the source tree over to office0, did a make clean, and remade the source for Linux. This worked perfectly, and is now on the development ACL image.

Posted by skylar at 09:19 PM | Comments (0)

August 19, 2004

Nagios

I've successfully moved Nagios from millie to image, leaving millie available for cluster work. I installed all the plugins from RPMs, and then copied all the configuration stuff to image. I made sure to change the paths where necessary.

Posted by skylar at 09:47 PM | Comments (0)

August 18, 2004

LPRngTool

I've installed LPRngTool on the ACLs. This also involved installing ifhp.

Posted by skylar at 10:26 AM | Comments (0)

August 17, 2004

LAM

I've installed LAM 7 on the ACLs for cluster work.

I built it with the --with-trillium option in the spec file to enable trillium support.

Posted by skylar at 05:39 PM | Comments (0)

DNS slave

I've setup a DNS slave on quarkprime.

I copied all of /var/db/namedb, /usr/local/etc/namedb, and all the rndc keys to quarkprime. I then changed both forward and reverse CS zones to slave, and pointed the master to quark.

Posted by skylar at 03:19 PM | Comments (0)

Second NIC

I added a second 3com NIC to quarkprime, so that it can have its own dedicated link to quark. It's only a 100Mbps link, but I don't know if quarkprime's disks can saturate that anyways.

Posted by skylar at 01:56 PM | Comments (0)

August 16, 2004

FAH

I've restored FAH on image from backup. It appeared to have gotten lost in the shuffle.

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

New development image

I've created a new development image for the ACLs called ACL2004081601. To create it, I just used cpimage to copy ACL2004040101, and then added on the Tcl and Tk fixes for exmh. All changes should go to the development image, and then pulled onto acl8, before they go into the production ACL2004040101 image.

Posted by skylar at 03:14 PM | Comments (0)

VirtualHost problem

I fixed a virtual host problem on quark that manifested itself in requests to quark.cs.earlham.edu would go to the math department's (presumably outdated) website rather than to the CS home page.

Posted by skylar at 12:11 PM | Comments (0)

August 15, 2004

Jikes

I installed the Jikes Java compiler on the ACLs for Sam Neff.

Posted by skylar at 12:48 PM | Comments (0)

Firefox upgrade

I've upgraded Firefox on the ACLs from 0.8 to 0.9.3 to fix some rendering issues and security holes.

Posted by skylar at 11:50 AM | Comments (0)

August 14, 2004

Working!

Image is now working. Apparently rsync requires a group with the ID 'root' to have rsync work, so I created that and updateclient is now working on the ACLs.

Posted by skylar at 06:29 PM | Comments (0)

Mylex booting

I fixed the booting problem we were having with the quarkprime. Apparently the BIOS will try to boot off a hard drive connected to the integrated SCSI controller and completely ignore anything bootable from the Mylex RAID array. When I removed the 4GB SCSI hard drive, the system started booting from the RAID array without a hitch.

Posted by skylar at 02:40 PM | Comments (0)

August 13, 2004

SpamAssassin upgrade

I've upgraded SpamAssassin to 2.64 to get the latest and greatest spam definitions.

Posted by skylar at 04:22 PM | Comments (0)

August 09, 2004

ports fetching

I added a "-p" to the FETCH_CMD and FTP_CMD in /usr/ports/Mk/bsd.ports.mk to force passive mode FTP transfers. This fixes a number of hanging problems when fetching from certain FTP servers.

Posted by skylar at 03:00 PM | Comments (0)