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

[Troy A. Griffitts]

Thanks Jonathan.  Praying for your family.  I've tried your whilespace 
suggestion and removed the bounce alias I added in /etc/aliases.  If 
this email goes through, then maybe that is what fixed it.  Regarding 
the round about way to find the CORBA patch-- I honestly didn't remember 
where the files were.  Glad you found the bug!  Thanks, the links were 
helpful for me.  Thanks for the other suggestions as well.

	-Troy.



Jonathan Marsden wrote:
> 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
> 
> 
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