Happy Sys-admin day to me!
Thanks for the mushy popsicles that you guys bought. I’ll be sure to get you all something nice for virus-dude day, programmer-man day, windows-tweaker-guy day, email-forwarding-manager day, design-fu-master day, PR-chick day, T-shirt-orderer-person day, or crazy-idea-nut day.
Did I forget any summer staff?
I started on a new interface to styx, and it’s looking pretty good.
It has the ability to pick the time ranges to rank students in. It’s also pretty. I added a new column that shows the highest rate they transfered at in one 5 min period. Still needs a little work, but I’m pretty happy with it. Once all the only styx features are in place I’ll make this live.
To answer Bart’s question about that Incredibly Informative Error Message from qmail, here’s how I got it working:
The file /var/qmail/bin/config-sanity-check checks that your configuration is setup right. If not it simply prints Some error detected, sleeping for 30 seconds for safety.
Since I was trying to get this running on port 527 I needed an entry in /etc/services for that port. Some newer OS’s have an entry. The command getent services 527 should return something.
There also could be something else weird. Try searching through all the start up and config files.
Mike :: Jul.20.2004 :: General :: 1 Comment »
So to properly do the fake DNS with selective forwarding requires 3 nameservers. That is going to be a pain to pull off with the limited number of servers we have. DNS servers only work on one port, UDP 53. So we can’t just run a bunch of bind servers on different ports on one server. But we could have a server with multiple IPs and have each bind process running on a different IP. Bingo.
So we already have a single location where all gentoo machines store their distfiles. We have most of the latest distfiles for all popular portage apps. If we served the distfiles up on a webserver with an alias to it like http://mirror.restek.wwu.edu/gentoo/distfiles/ then students could put the following line in the /etc/make.conf and get much faster downloads of gentoo distfiles.
GENTOO_MIRRORS="http://mirror.restek.wwu.edu/gentoo http://gentoo.oregonstate.edu"
Their portage setup will automatically try the main gentoo mirror if ours fails. This would really help out people that are using gentoo and wanting to say install X or something else that requires almost 100megs of downloads. It will also save all the bandwidth that would have been used by people downloading these files themselves.
We could do something similar for FreeBSD or other operating systems. We could have a whole page on the public site explaining all of our Open Source OS local mirror stuff.