GNOME sysadmin summary - January 2005

[Ross Golder <ross golder org>]

GNOME Sysadmin Summary - January 2005
======================================


Several people reported that the mailman cgi-bin scripts were returning
a HTTP 403 Forbidden error. The virtualhost was for mail.gnome.org was
updated to allow following symbolic links in mailman's cgi-bin directory
(Ross).

On 4th Jan, the gnome-sysadmin list stopped working. On investigation,
everything was ending up in the mailman shunt queue. After manually
cleaning out over a hundred spam e-mails, and moving the legitimate
mails back into the queue, things seem to have settled again (Ross).

Novell has told the Ximian guys to start using '@novell.com' addresses.
Federico submitted a request to automatically change all the addresses
in the mailman subscriptions and bugzilla databases. However, it was
eventually determined that some people would also be changing their
usernames, so it was suggested that they are instructed to update their
subscriptions themselves individually. Before that fact was established,
I had already replaced them in the aliases file, which broke (at least)
Tim Ney's e-mail for a day or so, as he didn't have an equivalent
'@novell.com' account.

The mailman 'post-only' patch stopped working on Dec 20th (reported by
Luis Villa). It seems the custom mailman RPM got upgraded by RHN at that
time. Kurt von Finck stepped up and has taken on the role of 'mailman
RPM manager' to maintain an up-to-date mailman RPM with all the patches
we use.

On the 17th, Dave Neary pointed us to a patch which would solve the
problem downloading the gzipped mboxes of the mailman list archives.
This was applied, and the problem seems to have been solved.

On the 22nd, Toni Willberg pointed out that our domain registration
(whois) for gnome.org was horribly out of date. Owen quickly responded
with a plan and presented it to the board.

Jim Hodapp requested that 'www.gnomejournal.org' be hosted on the
gnome.org servers, as they had lost their co-host. Jeff approved, on
behalf of the web group. Ross received the content and data from Jim,
set it up on window (and button), and ensured Jim had appropriate access
to maintain it. However, he forgot to create the logfile directory, so
when the logfiles rotated and httpd was restarted, httpd failed to come
up. Tomas spotted it and identified the cause and Christian corrected
it. The GNOME websites were therefore down from 04:02 until 06:45 on the
23rd.

On the 31st, Ross set up and announced the 'moderator gnome org' alias,
to provide a list moderation service for GNOME list owners who may not
otherwise have time to moderate their list.



Reboots
-------

13 Jan - Rebooted servers to apply recent kernel errata
(Matt/Christian).
20 Jan - Rebooted servers to apply recent kernel errata
(Matt/Christian).