[AT] Atis outage - the details

Lew Best lew at lewslittlefarm.com
Sun Jan 16 19:22:31 PST 2011


You're way over my head with this but MANY THANKS for sticking with it &
getting it up & running again!!!!!!!! 

Lew near Waco, TX

-----Original Message-----
From: at-bounces at lists.antique-tractor.com
[mailto:at-bounces at lists.antique-tractor.com] On Behalf Of Spencer Yost
Sent: Sunday, January 16, 2011 9:11 PM
To: Antique tractor email discussion group; sel at lists.stationary-engine.com
Subject: [AT] Atis outage - the details

First - I appreciate all the "Thank you"s - They do mean a lot.

Here is the full story, for anyone who is interested in ugly technical 
details.....

The server went down the evening of 1-3, but interestingly so did my 
home computer (on the same power backup).   The power backup was fried, 
but the house computer came back up when plugged into the wall.   The 
ATIS server did not.   I replaced the ATIS server power supply about a 
year ago, so I figured the cheap Chinese replacement couldn't handle 
whatever the power backup did.    So I replaced the power supply again, 
but the server would only boot intermittently.    After a few of these 
power cycles, it wouldn't even boot.   In the afternoon of 1-4 I took it 
to the local techs and a quick check of the motherboard confirmed the 
motherboard was dead.

To be honest, I don't know if the power backup fried the board, or a bad 
power supply fried the power backup and the board.  In the end, it 
didn't matter.   It was dead.


Thank Goodness data was OK, as disk was good.

I bought a new server on 1-5, installed the old drive along the new one, 
and began the process of re-building.  It only took me a few days to 
install a new operating system, get my security, BIND and mail services 
running.  But I ran into serious problems with the mailing list 
software(Mailman).     So I punted Mailman for the moment and worked on 
everything else.  Within another day I had web services up.   BTW - as a 
tip to all the other systems folks reading on:   The latest version of 
Apache and PHP do NOT work together on Fedora 14 machines.  Just a word 
to the wise  (-:  Within another day I had the database software 
upgraded and that meant I could upgrade the bulletin board software and 
get that running.  So for all intents and purpose the system was up in 
less than a week; except for Mailman.

While I luckily had a vacation day 1-4,  the rest of the time I am 
working, and commuting, a total of 12 hours a day.  So by now, I am 
running on about 4 hours a sleep a night.

The mailing list software was another matter.   The language Mailman 
uses is called python.  Unfortunately, they never updated the current 
version of Mailman to use the most current versions of python.   The 
previous versions of Mailman obviously didn't support the new pythons 
either, so downgrading python was the only answer.  Unfortunately a lot 
of system utility, scripts, and other software use python, and many of 
them make use of the newer features in the latest versions of the 
language.  So downgrading ended up not being a possibility.    I was 
stuck - no way to downgrade either software, and no upgrades that solved 
my problems were available.

So my only option was to run  parallel copies of python.   So I rounded 
up an old copy of python that was compatible with Mailman and built and 
installed that in a completely separate directory structure, outside of 
normal system paths.   Then I modified all the headers, make files, 
import statements, etc in Mailman to use that parallel copy.  At this 
point, Mailman was working but required extensive additional tweaks 
inside a bunch of other utilities it includes.  In addition, there were 
some re-configurations of both the old version of python and Mailman.  
This ended up taking me a few days.

In the end - the system is a BUNCH faster, very, very up to date, and 
should serve us for years to come.


I think I am going to get more sleep now.....


Spencer
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