Worklog

General update

March 29, 2006 03:55 PM

Several projects eating time in the last couple of weeks.

Solaris patches

March 14, 2006 03:51 PM

I’m getting bitten by Solaris patches. In particular, several recent patches have decided to muck with /etc/rc3.d scripts in the postpatch script. I remove a number of these scripts at Jumpstart time so that the systems they start won’t be started (things like automounter and volume management, which mostly serve to bite one in the hindquarters). Sun adding them back in messes with my systems. They have every right to modify the main file in /etc/init.d, but they should keep their hands off of my territory in /etc/rc?.d.

So I copied out the portion of my Jumpstart script that disables these, and I’ve made it a standalone script that can be run after any patches are applied. Just run it. Good maintenance, and swat those pesky Sun idjits.

PacketShaper tuning

March 10, 2006 03:59 PM

I tweaked the PacketShaper a little this afternoon, after numerous comments that incoming connections were taking a long time (particularly e-mail related ones, like IMAP, and from multiple people). I think the single biggest thing I did was to bump up the priority on the Default class for the main college address space from priority 1 to priority 3 (higher is better). I seem to recall an offhand comment on the list at some point that the first few packets of a flow are usually unclassified and thus put into Default. Increasing the priority of that lets them through faster and then lets them get classified faster, allowing them to take advantage of the policies and partitions for their particular traffic type that much sooner. IMAP feels a lot faster, both in Pine and Mail.app now.

A lot of Cyrus work

March 10, 2006 03:52 PM

This week has been mostly a continuation of Cyrus IMAP work. The system itself is ready for production use, but there are a number of helper scripts and utilities that need to be developed before we can start the migration.

Pine and Perdition

March 2, 2006 06:56 PM

Testing Pine with Perdition — I have my .pinerc stored on the IMAP server, and I simply replaced all the hostnames that point to KE (mailer.earlham.edu) with ones that point to mailproxy.earlham.edu (Perdition and Sendmail running on SIPALA).

It works flawlessly. I get my mail folders on KE, and I send mail through SIPALA.

SIPALA Notes

March 2, 2006 06:34 PM

Most of work this week has been working on SIPALA and various pieces of the new mail system. At this point, just about everything is working. I think the main things to do are VxFS/VxVM installation for the message store and considering a milter for antivirus checking.

Cyrus, Perdition, LDAP

February 24, 2006 01:47 PM

I got Cyrus working again on Solaris, as per entries last spring. Not terribly difficult. The harder part was getting Perdition, the IMAP/POP3 proxy, working. There are some source code errors that made the build on Solaris tricky.

SULA, Big RAM

February 16, 2006 01:50 PM

Got SULA installed, mostly, and Aaron’s taking it over now. It’s got 8GB of RAM, which entailed turning on the PAE extensions for FreeBSD’s kernel. And that entailed making a static kernel, which entailed compiling in the IPFilter stuff. All is well now, and MySQL is up and running for development work.

Lumana and Jumpstart tweaks

February 10, 2006 12:16 PM

There were still a few bugs in the SVM script that I was tweaking the other day, but I got them worked out, jumpstarted Lumana, and things are pretty good now.

Jumpstart and V440

February 8, 2006 05:07 PM

The Solaris 9 version we had on ROJ was too ancient to support the new V440, so when it tried to boot in Jumpstart, it failed. Updating the Solaris version in the Jumpstart area has always been a pain; something about the script seemed to always bomb out on ROJ, requiring editing of the script and running it from somewhere other than the CD. Fortunately, Doug Hughes clued me in to the fact that all I had to do was copy the Solaris_9 directory contents from the DVD into the expected place in the Jumpstart area, and all would be good.

Next up, though, is making my volume manager Jumpstart script work with four disks. It’s always assumed two disks for a simple mirroring setup, but the V440 has four, and I’d like to add those in to the mix at Jumpstart time, too. I think I got it working now — now that I’ve removed a couple of lines of stale code that were causing a test bug and leaving the system in a pretty sad state. To test it all tomorrow.

SANs and LUNs and devices, oh my...

February 3, 2006 01:38 PM

Once you tell the ITMPT driver in Solaris that it can access more than the first LUN on a fibre channel device, mapping out the SAN makes a lot more sense.

Wildcard SSL certificate

January 31, 2006 04:02 PM

We purchased an wildcard SSL certificate last week for use across our SSL services. Installation has been pretty painless. Apache is easy, sendmail and UW-IMAP are pretty straightforward. The main holdouts are EZproxy and the LDAP servers.

Server installs, continued...

January 18, 2006 03:40 PM

All the new servers, etc. have arrived and are in the racks.

Toys!

January 4, 2006 05:00 PM

Santa brought me several cartloads of toys this year. Still trying to get all of them unboxed, racked, and inspected, much less set up and configured. That’s for the rest of winter.

Moodle Upgrade

December 14, 2005 11:07 AM

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.