Maintenance

A change in the user agent string for Firefox 17 has triggered an error message in HotPot and Quandary exercises. An update to the applications will be required, which we'll do at home, but in the meantime all the existing exercises we provide to departments needed to be updated, including Greek, Latin, Spanish, XSLT (DHSI), Hulquminum and Arabic. Those have all now been updated.

This is basically what I did:

• Search and replace with regex on the dir trees in Oxygen:

  ([\t ]*alert\('Your browser may not be able to handle this page.'\);)
  //$1
  

• rsync of the HTML files to the site -- e.g.:

  rsync --verbose --progress --stats --recursive --include '*/' --include '*.htm' --exclude '*' arabic/ lancenrd@unix.uvic.ca:/u/lancenrd/www/arabic/
  

I'm setting up a TSM node for the Colonist project and am working on getting it running under an XP virtual machine.
The node is set up, with Martin and Stewart as co-admins.
The software is installed, but I can't get it to send any data to backup.uvic.ca for some reason.

Forgot to post this when it happened, but beet's SSD died last week, and I have been unable to recover any data. Unfortunately, there was some data loss for one project. Not unrecoverable, but an annoyance nonetheless.
While waiting for a replacement drive I put a old-school drive in beet and got it up and running. The replacement SSD has arrived and I'm now waiting for an opportunity to put the new drive in to beet.

We've been having spontaneous reboots on several machines in the last two months or so.
We've had an electrician double-check the power we're getting and all is well.
Looking in to potential computer-based issues I discover that many people experience this kind of thing with SSDs on Sabayon, Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, and likely other distros. There do not seem to be any real solutions, but suggestions include the usual:
1) Get the latest firmware for the drive. Right now we have at least 2 different model of SSD in our machines (haven't checked Martin's yet): OCZ Vertex (96GB running f/w v1.6) and Vertex2 (115GB running f/w v1.29 or 1.33). Firmware and general info on OCZ drives can be found here. Firmware is here
2) Adjust fstab and /etc/rc.local like this

I'll come back to this next week.

<egg_on_face>
Figured it out. The problem was I stupidly changed the security update config to reboot after a security update gets done. It explains everything. The file has been edited, the package updated. Now I wait with my fingers crossed...
</egg_on_face>

Some notes on how to configure Gnome 3, in preparation for trying to roll it out to the lab machines:

• Install gnome-tweak-tool.
• Get buttons on window title bars: gnome-tweak-tool / Shell / Arrangement of buttons in the title bar / All.
• My installed extensions:

  advanced-settings-in-usermenu@nuware.ru              places-menu@gnome-shell-extensions.gcampax.github.com
  apps-menu@gnome-shell-extensions.gcampax.github.com  RecentItems@bananenfisch.net
  force-quit@xtranophilist                             Shut_Down_Menu@rmy.pobox.com
  nohotcorner@azuri.free.fr                            panel-docklet@quina.at
  workspace-indicator@gnome-shell-extensions.gcampax.github.com
  

  These are in ~.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions.
• Settings also seem to be stored in ~/.gconf.
• Showing date on Gnome 3 panel:

  gsettings set org.gnome.shell.clock show-date true

Having built the Macs from a 32bit image I find that they are running in 32 bit mode. No surprise, but it *is* reversible. Run this in the terminal sudo nvram boot-args="arch=x86_64" and reboot. The machine should run in 64 bit mode from now on.

Due to my misunderstanding how the licensing works for fennel's ESXi server, our license lapsed the other day and we were unable to restart a VM.

For future reference, we now have to pay a fee for academic licenses for VMware products. We just got a 3 year subscription for ~$800 after taxes. What this provides is a 3 year lifespan on our "web store". Any approved HCMC user (right now this is only me) can go to the web store and download a 'free' copy of most VMware offerings. The ESXi server license I just downloaded says there is a 1 year term on the license (it looks like it's a full calendar year plus, it expires on Dec. 31/2013), so we'll need to head back to the store next December and get a whole new license - it doesn't get renewed.

Our WebStore URL: http://e5.onthehub.com/WebStore/Welcome.aspx?vsro=8&ws=2f6647eb-e7a0-df11-ad57-0030487d8897

GN and I repurposed Plum to replace the temporarily-suspended teijenkins machine, while licensing issues with VMWare are sorted out. This functioned as a fresh test of the Jenkins build script, which went great with two little hiccups (TEI packages have changed, and zip is no longer installed on Ubuntu Server by default). Those changes have been added to the build script in SVN. The new machine is running (but very slow to build, due to its Arm processor).

The apt server was running low on disk space, so I learned how to extend logical volumes today. This is what I did:

1) Find out how much total space you've got on (for e.g.) disk sdb:
sudo hdparm -I /dev/sdb | grep GB

2) Extend the logical volume by adding 20GB to the volume itself (not the disk)
sudo lvextend -L+20G /dev/mapper/vgpool-lvrepo

3) You also need to extend the filesystem, and you can't do it while the volume is mounted:
sudo umount /dev/mapper/vgpool-lvrepo

4) You need to run fsck before resizing a filesystem:
sudo e2fsck -f /dev/mapper/vgpool-lvrepo

5) Now you can resize the filesystem:
sudo resize2fs /dev/mapper/vgpool-lvrepo

6) And remount:
sudo mount /dev/mapper/vgpool-lvrepo /mountlocation

Done.

The Tomcat setup has recently changed with the move of stable apps to Grape, so this is an updated set of instructions. MDH and GN have rights to run the tomcat script; SA probably does too.

• ssh mholmes@pear.hcmc.uvic.ca
• cd /etc/init.d
• sudo ./tomcat stop

At this point, tomcat will seem to have stopped, but it probably hasn't. Confirm by doing this:

• ps aux | grep tomcat

If you see both tomcat running, you'll have to kill -9 tomcat. Since the process runs as hcmc, and you can't sudo-kill it, do this:

• su hcmc
• kill -9 [the process number]

Do ps aux again to check that the process is dead (you should not see tomcat running now). Assuming that worked, then

• exit (to return to mholmes)
• sudo ./tomcat start

Wait a couple of minutes, then check that tomcat is back up and that projects are working.