[server-admins] mvnForums / tomcat

[Troy A. Griffitts]

Welcome Manfred,

I'm not sure if anyone currently claims ownership of mvnForums on the 
server, but I suspect it might be Chris.  If he can pipe in on what he 
feels about upgrading, or if he even considers himself the owner this 
component, maybe we can see where we go after that.

Jonathan, response below.

Jonathan Marsden wrote:
> Troy A. Griffitts wrote:
> 
>> I hack the java CORBA library ...
> 
>> Tomcat runs fine with no 100% spin, even if you hit SWORDWeb, until
>> after a little bit of usage.  This all started after I hacked the
>> Java CORBA lib.
> 
> OK, that narrows down the cause considerably.  What would the
> user-visible issues be if you/we ran Tomcat un-hacked for a week or two,
>  just as a test?

First, it was the JDK which was hacked, not tomcat. The modified JDK 
classes are in a jar I created which resides at /opt/tomcat/endorses, 
which tells tomcat to use these classes instead of the default classes 
in the JDK.

Second, SWORDWeb will currently only work with western character sets 
without this hack, so it really isn't a feasible test.  The old version 
of SWORDWeb had hacks all throughout the code, whenever we retrieved 
text from the SWORD orb, to cast the data to UTF-8.  We removed all 
those hacks in favor of this centralized fix.

Sun probably hasn't accepted the patch because it really does not fix 
the problem for them.  They do not correctly read 'wrapped' encoding 
designations in the CORBA header, which is how ORBit sends encoding. 
Our fix just defaults the character encoding to UTF-8-- which I feel it 
should be, but have no idea what the spec says the default should be. 
Anyway, it fixed the problem for us: Java CORBA still doesn't see the 
encoding designator from the ORBit orb and so it default, as it should, 
but now to UTF-8.

At work, so gotta leave it at this for now.

	-Troy.


> It might also be interesting to unpack a copy of
> Tomcat and diff it against the currently running one, just so we *know*
> exactly what has been changed.  I'll look at doing that, if no-one else
> beats me to it.
> 
>> I didn't know about update.php or I would have run it (if i knew how).
>> DM has graciously volunteered to own the wiki, which leaves me
>> wonderfully ignorant about the mediawiki package.  I'd like to keep it
>> that way, so whatever DM decided we should do (script to know when
>> mediawiki is updated and do some additional task, email DM when it's
>> updated, yum update post script, whatever...), I'll put in place at his
>> recommendation.
> 
> OK.  So the issue here is that two admin tasks that have been assigned
> to different admins interact.  I'll put together a quick shell script to:
> 
>   (a) back up the wiki
>   (b) run yum update
>   (c) run the update.php script
> 
> Then, as long as all yum updates are done that way (running the script)
> not by manually typing in sudo yum update, the issue is solved.
> 
> Do we have a "development" or "staging" server instance somewhere to
> test out such things?  If not, would having one be worth the time
> investment in setting it up?  The main server seems to have plenty of
> CPU/RAM/disk, so perhaps a virtual machine running on it could serve as
> such a development machine?
> 
>> Jonathan, thanks for looking into the exim/mailman stuff.  I'll have a
>> look at your suggestions when I've had some rest.  I'm not amiss to
>> granting permissions to people who are willing to own things long term,
>> so let me know if you decide you're up for a long haul commitment.
> 
> Understood.  I'm somewhat commitment-shy right now... (mostly because of
> work plus local church involvement, plus continuing immigration
> hassles...).  Can you grant me just read access to the
> (mail/exim/mailman) logs, for the moment?  Also, (assuming no radical
> changes to new software, e.g. I stick with exim) what is the minimum
> length of a long term server admin commitment -- three months?  six
> months?  a year?
> 
> Jonathan
> 
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