[server-admins] Tomcat, JDK changes, development server, log file access

[Troy A. Griffitts]

Jonathan,

You have a number of great suggestions.  And thank you for offering the 
scripts to DM for the wiki.  It sounds like he's utilized them already. 
  Please let me know if we need to put anything in place.

There are two suggestions which you have mentions I'd like to address 
quickly and negatively (sorry, considered and appreciate the advice):

No there is no staging mirror of our current server running in a VM 
under our server, nor do we have a list of bugs to be fixed on our server.

I don't mean to make these things sound ridiculous-- they are not. 
There comes a point when we have to decide what will take more time: 
fixing the current outstanding problems, or maintaining a bug list, and 
server mirror VM for testing.

I appreciate your enthusiams :)  And some people probably think it would 
be beneficial to have both of these.  Appreciate the suggestion.  I 
think will do without for now.

One thing I wouldn't mind is a list of pumpkin holders for the 
components on the server, as I sometimes forget who has expressly 
claimed which parts-- but I usually have a fairly good idea and can 
always look at /etc/groups and /etc/sudoers

More answers to your questions below (sorry for the delay; it's been a 
busy start of the week).


Jonathan Marsden wrote:
> Troy A. Griffitts wrote:
> 
>> 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.  
> 
> OK.  Then I really would like an answer to:
> 
>>> 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?

Addressed above.  I don't think it worth the time involved to keep a 
shared VM resource yum updated and configured the same state as the 
server.  Cool, yes, but I imagine it always out of sync with reality.


> if I am to look at this without first making a long term admin commitment.
> 
> I'll start creating a Fedora 12 virtual machine here, and see how far I
> get, in the meantime, but I think a shared admin test resource would be
> more valuable than one only I can use.
> 
> Meanwhile, /opt/tomcat/endorsed/ contains a single .jar file,
> corba-utf8.jar, which contains a few compiled Java classes... is the
> source code for these somewhere at hand, so I don't need to decompile
> them in order to read them?  I may be fairly techie, and speak a good
> few languages, but I don't speak or read Java bytecode :)

:) Right, I mentioned that you could find my patch and description of my 
changes on Sun's JDK bugtracker by searching for CORBA ORBit UTF-8. 
This isn't an item high on my priority list right now; as you mention, 
we have 7 other cores not doing anything and it shouldn't be causing our 
current trouble with mail and mailman.  I need to reinvestigate other 
options for fixing this UTF-8 CORBA ORBit problem anyway, and have been 
thinking about it for a couple months.

>
> Since the current Tomcat server approach "works", maybe this isn't
> really a priority issue for CrossWire, but as a long time admin, it bugs
> me to see a server running like this!

Yeah, it doesn't sit comfortably with me either.


> 
>>> Can you grant me just read access to the
>>> (mail/exim/mailman) logs, for the moment?

I've added you to the exim group, which should at least give you 
permissions to read the exim logs.  the mailman logs should be world 
readable, and the mail logs are empty.


>>> 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?
> 
> Answers to these two questions would also be useful, when you have a chance.

Well, I'd like at least a 6 month commitment, but we so seldom change 
anything, I would hope in a couple weeks we could get things running 
smoothly and never touch it again until our next major server upgrade in 
a couple of years (if that helps you feel more at ease to a longer 
commitment)  :)

Thanks for your help.  You are one of those guys I can't keep up with 
and I'm trying to figure out how to channel your energy to exploit you 
the best we can! :)  Thank you.

	-Troy.




> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Jonathan
> 
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