[AT] Atis outage - the details

Gene Dotson gdotsly at watchtv.net
Sun Jan 16 19:50:53 PST 2011


    Spencer;

    Thank you very much. All this and I can't even understand my new GPS in 
my airplane..

    The beer will be on all us at Portland.

        Gene



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Spencer Yost" <yostsw at atis.net>
To: "Antique tractor email discussion group" <at at lists.antique-tractor.com>; 
<sel at lists.stationary-engine.com>
Sent: Sunday, January 16, 2011 10:10 PM
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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