Maintaining openacs.org

About This Document:

This is a central place for recording everything the the community needs to know to maintain the openacs.org website and Linux server.

If you are troubelshooting, fixing, upgrading, maintaining or otherwise messing with the openacs.org box, please refer to this document, add to it, and keep it up to date!

Who has sudo:

As of 2003/04/27, the following people have sudo:

Don Baccus, Ben Adida, Dan Wickstrom, Jeff Davis, Janine Sisk, Lars Pind, Roberto Mello,

TODO: These people also have sudo, but maybe should not due to no longer being involved with the project or whatever:

ts (TechSquare group login account?), josh (who?) Arjun Sanyal, Yonatan Feldman, Eric Lorenzo,

Hardware and Hosting:

OpenForce generously donated the current machine to the OpenACS community.

The box is a dual Pentium-III Dell TODO: Add much more info.

The box is currently in the physical posession of Mike and Janine Sisk Furfly, and they host it at Furfly's cage at Exodus, in Waltham, MA.

Operating System:

Running Red Hat (TODO: what version?), Linux kernel 2.4.3 (TODO: needs to upgraded).

Some time ago, Roberto noticed rpm packages where not being updated and many were outdated with published security vulnerabilities. So sometime in 2002, Roberto manually downloaded a bunch of RPM packages and upgraded a bunch of stuff. TODO: Unknown whether anything has been updated since. Probalby mostly not, but now that Furfly's involved they may have done something recently so ask them. --atp@piskorski.com, 2003/04/27 05:10 EDT

TODO: Imperative, hook up the box under the Red Hat network foo so it is kept up-to-date. Roberto noticed that rhnsd is running, so maybe it's already been done, not sure.

Updating the openacs.org Website:

All (?) code that runs the openacs.org website is under CVS, and the Production working copy is in /web/openacs.org/.

Right now (April 2003), there is no separate Development or Staging copy of the website.

AOLserver:

openacs.org currently (April 2003) uses AOLserver 3.3+ad13. All binaries, config files, and log files are in /usr/local/aolserver/.

The production openacs.org AOLserver logs are /usr/local/aolserver/log/openacs.org*

TODO: The openacs.org.tcl config file is currently readable only by root. Move the database passwords into their own separate Tcl file, and make the main config file readable by everyone.

TODO: Put the website config files under under CVS.

Sometime in early 2003 (?), Roberto moved all AOLserver instances on the machine to be under supervise. (Thus there are unused, commented out AOLserver entries in /etc/inittab.) Supervise used to be under /var/netsaint/bin along with other djb utilities, but that directory no longer exists. Roberto says, "It seems it has been replaced with the djb-blessed /command." TODO: What??

It seems netsaint is not being started on boot. The symlink from /etc/init.d/ is dead:

25 Jan 31 2002 S91netsaint -> /etc/rc.d/init.d/netsaint

TODO: svscanboot probably isn't running at all. Figure out how it's supposed to be started. (Probably via an init.d script, check DJB and RPM package docs.)

PostgreSQL:

We have PostgreSQL 7.1 (in /usr/local/pgsql) and 7.2.3 (in /usr/local/pgsql-7.2.3) running. 7.1 is there solely for dotlrn.org I think. TODO: We should get rid of that and upgrade to 7.2.4. Both are started on boot via init scripts.

PG 7.2 is analyzed hourly via a /etc/cron.hourly script Roberto setup from another script.

Backups:

TODO: Lots.

PostgreSQL databases (I think both 7.1 and 7.2.3) are backed up to /var/DB_BACKUPS via /etc/cron.daily scripts setup by TechSquare.

The CVS repository is backed up to /var/CVSROOT_BACKUPS. TODO: How, when, etc.?

TODO: Off-site backup? E.g. rsync of CVS archive, database dumps, (what else?) to some other machine?

CVS Repository and Access:

The CVS repository is in "/cvsroot/". TODO: How to give/revoke CVS commit for some user.

Common Tasks:

TODO: Adding a unix user. Giving CVS commit. What else?