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

[Jonathan Marsden]

Troy A. Griffitts wrote:

> 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.

OK, I'll take a look when I next devote time to the CrossWire server 
(real work has had me working late more than one evening this week, so 
time for volunteer computing has been reduced accordingly).  I suspect 
at least the backup script should be fine.  I'd be interested to know 
whether DM tested the yum/wiki update one, and how well that worked, 
since I couldn't test it myself :)

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

No problem, I'm still something of an outsider looking in, at least 
until I make a larger commitment.  That's understood, and that's fine.

> 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.

OK.  With multiple admins, I think at least the bug list is highly 
recommended (and you already have a working bug tracker installed, so 
the setup time is very small), but ... it's your server :)

> 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

You already have a wiki... perhaps you could create a wiki page called 
PumpkinHolders with that info in it, that only you (or only you and the 
pumpkin holders) can edit?

> 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.

It's more about minimizing mistakes and downtime for services running on 
production machines, not so much about coolness.  What used to be 
expensive because of additional hardware costs and rack space, is now 
"almost free" because of virtualization.

"Out of sync"?  Not unless people are changing things on the production 
server very often indeed.  Doing an appropriate rsync (or set of smaller 
rsyncs) daily would minimize the out-of-sync-ness to at most 24 hours. 
Alternatively, update scripts per major subsystem that admins use before 
testing something would probably be workable.  Absolute worst case, you 
could P2V the entire production server every weekend if you really had 
to... it can be an interesting way to do server image backups, 
actually... :)

>> 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.

I now have a Fedora Core 10 VM running at home already, and I expect I 
will soon populate it with the set of RPM packages that the crosswire 
server has.

> :) 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.

OK.  I can do that.  Looks like 
http://bugs.sun.com/view_bug.do?bug_id=6567407 is the one.  That points 
right back to

   Source: http://crosswire.org/~scribe/corba-utf8-src.zip
   Source patch: 
http://crosswire.org/~scribe/CORBA-lenient-utf-8-default.patch

So you asked me to search for a bug that points back to the files I was 
asking for... on the Crosswire server!  That seems a little tortuous, 
but I have found the files now :)

> This isn't an item high on my priority list right now; ...

Understood.  A bug tracker item would have a way to indicate that kind 
of info about each issue :) :)

> 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.

OK.  If this list is 'the' shared medium for admins, then I'd suggest 
you post your ideas/thoughts/plans here before implementing them, so you 
can get feedback from the team.

>>>> 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.

Sounds workable... but it looks like you actually added exim to the 
jmarsden group, which does not have the desired effect :)

BTW, did you edit the exim.conf to add the whitespace to the 
mailman_router stanza?  Did it make any difference?  The file appears 
unchanged since 2009-04-14 so I'm guessing you didn't try that yet.

>>>> 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?

> 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)  :)

So you're saying a six month commitment is really only a two-week 
commitment? :)  Two weeks I can probably commit to...!  Longer needs to 
wait until I know I'm really really staying in the USA for the long 
term... family intercontinental moves and the implied work/ church/ 
housing changes *really* eat up time and energy!

When you have immigration lawyers advising you to get ready to leave the 
country at a few days notice (and stay out for at least a year), you 
tend not to be ready to make long term commitments to much of 
anything...  and right now (after several months when things seemed to 
be OK on that front) that's where I'm at (again!).  We (our lawyers, 
after I reviewed and edited their draft) just responded to an official 
"RFE" (Request For Evidence) from the USCIS legal people, and now await 
their response.  It's now all in God's hands, and God has very capable 
hands :)

Jonathan