Links

Archives

Moodle Upgrade

I just grabbed the latest 1.5.3+ source code for Moodle, set the site in maintenance mode, untarred it, upgraded everything through the web admin interface, and turned off maintenance mode. All looks good so far.

PacketShaper redesign

I redesigned the way we break down traffic in the shaper today. The short version is that we’re now splitting the traffic tree first by IP address (or host list) to get to student network, blocked hosts, and college owned network. Then within those (if needed) we differentiate by application service.

The college owned network is the only base class that is not set as an exception class. Others are exception so that they will sort higher than the college network, which is simply set to include our entire class B space.

Within the student and college networks, I then create several folder classes for basic services (web browsing, FTP, DNS, etc.), chat programs, streaming media, P2P, games, etc. Each folder class has a partition assigned to it, and each application class has a priority policy assigned to it (except in the basic services, where I have more complicated policies). There’s also a “blocked” folder, which has a number of classes that are blocked with never-admit policies.

Things seem to be working at the moment, and the layout is extensible. We can partition the student net or the college net to a certain bandwidth (possibly useful in the future if we go to heftier pipes), and we can make different policy settings for the same application at different points in the network.

All the setup is done with a command file that is generated by a set of unix shell scripts. I have these on my laptop.

Moodle RSS update

Grabbed updated files from the Moodle distro site for an RSS block bug that had been reported.

Mark pointed me here and I found the three files involved in the fix. I got them off of the CVS web and put them into place on HEDD. Mark should be testing them shortly.

RAHU Groups home

Configured the other half of the first Xserve RAID as a space for groups and classes directories.

fc-raid-00-2 is set up similarly to rc-raid-00-1, but it’s got “groups” and “classes” top level directories, and the /home/groups/foo will be a symlink into the fc-raid-00-2/groups/foo. We’ll be moving over all the groups directories over the course of the fall, target completion by the end of the semester so that we can retire PAX.

MIR decomissioned

I turned off MIR this morning after having let it slowly fall out of service this spring.

Print services were turned off two weeks ago, and everything else had been off since much earlier in the semester. I’m planning to keep the box around in case wee need to get data off the hard drives for another little while, then I’ll wipe it and get it ready for recycling/selling/whatever.

Mailman Upgraded

After a little longer than I was anticipating to rebuild list archives, I’ve got Mailman upgraded.

There are a few archives that I still need to rebuild, but they’re not critical and I’ve got them rebuilding in the background. There may be an issue with people sending mail from USER@ke.earlham.edu rather than just earlham.edu, but people shoiuldn’t be doing that anyway. Although I may have to change some masquerade settings on KE to make that work. Everything else seems to have gone as planned.

Mailman close to ready

I’ve got the Mailman upgrade procedure worked out and I’m having some other people take a look at the new lists.

It turns out that the standard upgrade procedure is actually the best thing to do here. We lose real name information for all list members, but that’s the breaks when you deal with unsupported home-brew software. The basic procedure is, for each list:

1. tar up the list settings and archives.
2. untar the tarball on the new system in the new Mailman directory

Then run update -f to force an update on all lists. Run check_perms to fix permissions problems. Then configure the lists with new settings: web_page_url and which_archiver (to make sure we’re using MHonArc). Then wipe and rebuild the archives. Finally, run htdig to generate the search indices.

Mailman upgrade

Spent most of the day working on a Mailman upgrade, at long last.

It’s been a while in coming, but we’re finally getting to it. In looking through the FreeBSD port for Mailman, I also found reference to this site with a bunch of Mailman patches. In particular, there are patches to integrate Mailman and ht://Dig and easily add MHonArc into Mailman (which is what we’re using already). The ht://Dig part gives us searchable archives, even for private lists.

So today I managed to get most of this working. The main things left at this point are to figure out a decent migration strategy from our in-house-hacked version of Mailman to the new install, while keeping all the lists, their options, their passwords, and the membership. Shouldn’t be too hard with the help of dbdump and some interesting parsing.

NTP Changes

We’re deprecating MIR as an NTP server in preference to EIRENE as we retire MIR.

I pointed EIRENE at the same two NTP servers that MIR uses, as well as adding the *.pool.ntp.org round robin DNS servers. I’ve changed all the servers to talk to EIRENE, although in some cases we need an ntpd restart at the time that the new CNAME record is published.