My blog has attracted the attention of comment spammers. So far the comments have been rather innocuous and appear to be tests to see if they get approved. I’m researching anti-spam utilities like WP-HashCash. This one seems to be the least intrustive to the user. The other option is to implement some sort of Captcha plugin. I’ll make it available to everyone once I find something stable and low impact.
The blog server is now in production, and the service is being advertised to the VU community. Several groups within ITS are actively maintaining blogs as info sources. I have received only a few queries regarding usage or functionality. I’ve also had to make some adjustments to the security measures on the blog server to accommodate WordPress functionality.
Several new sites have been migrated to the new environment. They include:
Several "co-hosted" virtual machines have been built for the Student Honor Council, Student Government, and CISO websites.
The new bastion hosts are deployed. The HC148 server is live, and the SC1113 server is waiting for network connectivity to allow for redundancy. I’m working with the rest of the App Hosting team members to get access and test connectivity.
Test instances of Drupal and Joomla have been created for the CSM project. I’m working on installing Apache Lenya and Typo3. Lenya is JSP-based and requires that a Tomcat instance be setup. The Typo3 installed errors out during the installation with non-helpful error so I am reading code to determine the issue.
The NetTracker backend system suffered a hardware failure and lost two internal hard drives and dual port SCSI HBA. I brought the system back online, and with Paul Lockaby’s assistance the application is ready for use.
The SSL certificates on JProd1/JProd2 have been replaced. The SSL certs on the Seeker and NetTracker systems are scheduled for the end of the month.
FamilyReunion.org and ImagineCollege.org join the list of migrated sites.
TrailGuides.org has joined the list of migrated sites. Several more on lined up for migration in the near future.
I had to submit a bug report regarding Adobe Contribute since we are having some connectivity issues with this client. It appears that Contribute tries to establish multiple connections during the configuration process. After prompting for server name, username, and password, the client is able to retrieve my home directory; however, it errors out on the next step with a "unable to verify connection information" message. It doesn't provide any specifics on what it's trying to verify. The system logs show a successful login. This definitely looks like a bug since it can go to the well once, but not the second time. None of the other SFTP clients exhibit this behavior. I can login and transfer files with WinSCP and FileZilla so file permissions are not an issue.
Nanotube.org and www.dyer.vanderbilt.edu join the list of sites migrated to the new servers.
AndyPorter.org is now being served from the new hosting environment. The site went live on the new server after a quick DNS change.
The final steps are being taken to make the blog server an official ITS service. The main index page is being created and reviewed, and the initial signup form is deployed. The signup form will initially generate a Magic ticket. This form will be changed to a self service in the near future. According to the logfiles, Google has already started indexing the feeds.
Five more student organizations are in the process of testing their sites on their new server. I’ve also setup a new blog for the Web Spiders group.
In preparation for some work on some of the hardware supporting the new web servers, several of web servers were migrated last night to different hardware using VMware Vmotion. In total, six machines including its.vanderbilt.edu and blogs.vanderbilt.edu were migrated, and there was no service outage. In fact, I happened to be SSH’d into one of the systems, and the connection didn’t even pause. This technology is definitely going to boost our availability numbers.