Apache Error log

The error log was growing very fast, consuming all of the disk space due to students working on cgi programs.

I added a ScriptLogLength directive to apache.conf to restrict the max size of the file.

I also used the ScriptLog directive toput the file in the /tmp directory which should be more accessible to students.

trouble tickets

Installed request-tracker, it still seems like overkill, but we'll see if it is helpful.

trouble tickets

Installed request-tracker, it still seems like overkill, but we'll see if it is helpful.

Network monitoring

Trying to diagnose suspected problems with our network.

There don't seem to be any prepackaged diagnostic tools, so here is my current solution:

use netcat and dd to measure bandwidth, about once an hour
use udp packets with timestamps to measure latency about every two minutes, for this I'm using the Time::HiRes package to try to go down to micro seconds.

I'm measuring between machines in Hawkins 053b and 036b and within 053b.

Machine upgrades

Salvador would like to have graphics cards in the new lab machines to support csc451

Machine upgrades

Salvador would like to have graphics cards in the new lab machines to support csc451

dns

the multicast dns does not work well, which was causing hosts not to resolv
the fix was to remove [NOTFOUND=return] from /etc/nsswitch.conf

setting up wiki

setting up a new mediawiki:

installed some additional packages
setup the database
went very smooth so far

now to check into some plugins:
semantic wiki went easy
ldap was a bit of a pain, but I think I have it working
I ended up using a proxy to bind to the ldap and then needed to set a required group
to limit who could access the wiki

tasks - tried, but it looks to be based on mysql, there is not a lot of code, but I'm not
ambitious enough to port it tonight

open afs

working on getting afs installed

hmmm...
I need to think about how to handle the kerberos side

nfs testing

performance was poor today for students getting directory information,

testing again with iozone, but performance seems identical to earlier this year.

AFS

Trying out afs instead of nfs

raid

I had some problems with the raid.

Upon reboot I had lost the array configuration in the mdadm.conf file
then it did not want to take the sdc3 drive. The first problem dropped me into
single user mode on the reboot and then I had problems getting sdc3 back into the array. What I had to do was to start it without sdc3 and then readd it later.
It currently is rebuilding the spare.

Tonight I'll try some performance tests again to see if it makes a difference. It shouldn't but it would be nice to know.

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