Before deadweek was able to rear its ugly head, all services were finally transitioned to a much cleaner, more consistent, and stable environment. This environment is a fresh FreeBSD install on all of the servers. The transition project began a little before summer. It wasn’t so much simply moving everything, but rather, re-doing the way a lot of things are done. The logic behind various things had to be re-evaluated. I think people are happy with the result so far, and it will continue to improve. Administration is certainly infinitely more efficient. The old machines are no longer even online.

Hope everyone who reads the actual Planet Restek likes the new look. I do.

I’m having a lot of fun now that I have a little bit of time to take care of smaller things which got pushed aside during transitions. I set up Thunderbird how I like it, and Enigmail/GPG. I’m also able to go back through old files and delete things which aren’t needed.

I decided to get around to upgrading vulnerable ports on a couple of boxes today since I’m in the clean-up stage, taking care of small things like that. Everything was coming right along, until I came to upgrade php4 on the web server. The upgrade was minor, only php4-4.4.0 to php4-4.4.1_1, essentially only supposed to be minor fixes such as the recent few vulnerabilities found within the php codebase. Anyway, the upgrade seemed fine until somebody noticed the public pages were returning absolutely nothing, that is, returning blank pages for certain links. Ryan tracked down some information from php.net seen here. Apparently the recent build of php4 breaks Apache2’s mod_rewrite, which we rely on.

You would think it would be easy to undo such an upgrade, and it may be, but it turned out to be a huge hassle. After giving up trying to find workarounds, I ended up taking Mike and Lawrance’s advice and cvsup’ing to grab a week old ports tree and reinstalling the old port. I never really knew about using cvsup to grab outdated ports trees, though it makes a lot of sense in this case.


/usr/share/examples/cvsup/ports-supfile:*default release=cvs date=2005.10.30.05.30.3030

That worked. Little bit more than I was hoping to deal with after a minor upgrade though. Guess I’ll be reading bug reports and such more often now before even minor upgrades.

Authoritative DNS has been moved to the new server. That happened on Friday and the switch went quite smoothly except for one minor thing (that I know of) broke and I found out about it on Saturday morning. It was the imoviefest website and for some reason I knew that would be what broke. I got it fixed in like 10 minutes though so it wasn’t catastrophic. Now that everything major has been moved, I am going to spend the next couple of days finishing up…that is, making sure I haven’t forgotten anything. Then I can give the new servers their official names. I will also be securing the boxes this week and getting them all organized. They’re pretty clean already but a little more organization never hurt. It’s good to see we survived this with minimal injury to ourselves or our students…

What remains of the old servers:

Now serving our students:

For the rest of the pictures Nick and I took of Bond Hall: http://www.flickr.com/photos/82942115@N00/sets/957578/

I also received my Rio Carbon on Friday. I’m already loving it. Good recommendation, Pat.