GNOME sysadmin summary - March 2005

[Ross Golder <ross golder org>]

GNOME Sysadmin Summary - March 2005
======================================


On the 3rd, Vincent Untz pointed out that the foundation membership list
was not being updated from CVS. It turns out that that the update script
had been disabled. It was re-enabled, and error output directed to
'gnome-web-list gnome org' so we might spot this sooner if it happens
again. (Ross)

Also on the 3rd, 'AddDefaultCharSet utf-8' was added globally to the
Apache configuration on window (Ross). The only problem that seems to
have occurred is a few dodgy characters in the API docs. The API docs
should be regenerated using a UTF-8 friendly encoding (e.g. US-ASCII) to
resolve the problem.

Also on the 3rd, an area was set up on l.g.o.
(http://live.gnome.org/Infrastructure), and the content from the
sysadmin.gnome.org site content began being migrated there. (Ross)

On the 7th, a new RewriteRule was added to bugzilla's virtual host to
allow <http://bugzilla.gnome.org/12345> URLs to work. Requested by Olav
Vitters (Ross).

On the 9th, at approx 09:00 (UTC), window.gnome.org started going into
out-of-memory death for unknown reasons. It was down for approximately 5
hours before it could be rebooted (Owen). We're not sure what caused it
yet.

On the 10th, Toni noticed that crond wasn't running on container,
meaning that account updates weren't taking effect. Toni restarted cron
on container, which prompted Ross to notice that cron was also not
running on menubar for a few days and button for over a week. They were
both restarted.

Also on the 10th, Jim Hodapp reported a problem with the database
holding the gnomejournal.org articles. Owen responded by repairing the
MySQL table. The problem was due to the format of the gnomejournal
database tables not being upgraded from the old to the new ISAM format
when mySQL was upgraded last month.

On Tuesday 15th, Kjartan set up a 'bugzilla-test.gnome.org' virtualhost
and associated databases on window as per a request from Olav. On Sun
19th, Ross moved the databases onto button, and set the
max_allowed_packet to 2M to allow Olav to import some attachments.

On Sun 19th, Ross followed some instructions from James Henstridge that
updated the viewcvs program and allowed it to make use of the data in
the bonsai CVS commits database. It didn't work first time, so viewcvs
got b0rked for a day or so.

On Thu 24th, Owen noticed that www.gnome.org was unresponsive and had a
high load due to the slashdotting of Seth's blogpagem, which was running
as a python CGI. Owen upped the number of httpd daemon processes, and
Toni (and Stric and maswan) cached a copy of the page and added some
Rewrite rules to calm things down. The rewrite rule has since been
removed.

On Sat 26th, Ross set up a very basic SMTP AUTH account for Tim Ney, who
was having trouble communicating with IBM regarding GNOME business due
to an unusual anti-spam measure on the IBM mailservers.

--
Ross