I'm tinkering with some old steganography code that I wrote a while back. It's basically a Perl script that makes use of some PerlMagick functions. So what's in the picture? Besides the four Volvos, I've embedded a listing of the year and model of each. Look in the wrong place, and you'll find the cast listing of the Matrix.
Web Services: I migrated the following virtual hosts to the new servers:
In addition, several organizations have staged content on the server that will be replacing web-srv1. Dining Services is actually in production on the new server. I am utilizing a RewriteRule to make their content appear on web-srv1. Also, several student organizations are now utilizing the new studentorgs server. MSA and VUcept are in the process of building their new websites. The pending migration has been communicated to the user community.
On the web-srv2 side of the shared hosting environment, swdist.vanderbilt.edu is staged on the primary ITS server. The change for this migration has been scheduled for 9 Feb 2007. The Office of Greek Life and the Student Honor Council are also migrating their sites to their dedicated VMs. I have spent some time working with individual web publishers testing their code. I spent some time in email exchange demonstrating (using some sample code found via a quick Google search) to a Niche Provider developer that the PHP/LDAP implementation on our new web servers was functional. The VICC server for the Sitemason migration is built and ready. We have set some preliminary dates and identified data/sites that need to be moved.
Blog Services: WordPress on the blog server has been upgraded from 2.0.5 to 2.0.7 to fix a couple of security vulnerabilities. I've added a couple of plugins to control comment spam. There are now 20 organizational and 48 individual blogs in production.
CMS Project: Three (Drupal, Joomla, Typo3) of the four potential candidates for the CMS are live and in testing mode. Apache Lenya is in progress.
Bastion Hosts: The new bastion hosts are live, and I've spent some time working with other team members to ensure that they are able to login to them. Everyone on the team should be able to access the bastion hosts using their SSH key pair. I owe some documentation on themes and plugins to Partner Support.
WebMetrics: I spent a week working with Kevin, Gary, and Guy to diagnose and report the WebMetrics alerts for the Proofpoint appliances. We were able to collect and correlate data to identify causes. I identified several kernel tunings that could be performed at the Linux OS level to reclaim system resources more quickly, and some of them were approved by the vendor. The approved settings were tested on mailgate03 for a week, and later scheduled to be made permanent on all of them.
DST Patching: web-srv1-preproduction and seeker-be are complete. The vacation servers and the new Linux web servers are scheduled in the near future.
Daily Unix Administration: I ran a quick audit of the production address space, and I was able to reclaim about 15 IP addresses that no longer in use. I also built a VM for the storage folks to use as a front NAS server. It's basically a clone of one of the bastion hosts. Startup and shutdown documentation for my servers is complete; however, I need to place them into the document tree.
Two new Linux servers are now in production mode. The Dining Services website is now being hosted on a new Linux VM, but appears to still located on the original server with the help of an Apache RewriteRule. The links on this site are written with relative paths so it will be a smooth transition when the main site is fully cutover.
I added another RewriteRule to redirect the VUcept website to their new home on the student organizations server. There are a couple of other organizations that are currently setting up their websites, and I'll soon be adding RewriteRules for them also.
I just migrated th Material Religion website over to the new servers. The site is relatively small compared to some of the other migrations. The vast majority of the content is static HTML so it does not require much processing power from the server. The site is slightly faster (about 10%). Once all of the DNS caching has expired, I'll archive the original site and remove it from the old server.
We had a 10 minute outage on the Sitemason frontend server this morning. One of the Sitemason monitor script shutdown Apache at 0721. Service was restored at 0730. After digging through the system logs, I found the following:
[Tue Jan 23 10:00:38 2007] [notice] Apache/1.3.34 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.8.25 OpenSSL/0.9.7d configured — resuming normal operations
[Tue Jan 23 10:01:19 2007] [notice] Apache/1.3.34 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.8.25 OpenSSL/0.9.7d configured — resuming normal operations
[Tue Jan 23 13:25:52 2007] [notice] Apache/1.3.34 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.8.25 OpenSSL/0.9.7d configured — resuming normal operations
[Tue Jan 23 13:32:42 2007] [notice] Apache/1.3.34 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.8.25 OpenSSL/0.9.7d configured — resuming normal operations
[Tue Jan 23 13:34:46 2007] [notice] Apache/1.3.34 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.8.25 OpenSSL/0.9.7d configured — resuming normal operations
[Wed Jan 24 07:30:24 2007] [notice] Apache/1.3.34 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.8.25 OpenSSL/0.9.7d configured — resuming normal operations
Even more interesting was this:
reboot system boot 2.4.9vu Tue Jan 23 13:24 (18:52)
The notification email has gone out to the VU community regarding the web hosting migrations…
Greetings;
ITS is upgrading the web-hosting service that it currently provides on the servers known as helios, web-srv1, and web-srv2. You are receiving this email because you have an active account on one of those servers, and this upgrade will affect you.
ITS is on an aggressive time frame to migrate websites to the new environment. There is a very brief survey at <http://surveyor.owen.edu/survey.asp?s=01028121148114007>. Whether or not you are currently maintaining a site, please fill out this survey as soon as possible. This is very important to ensure the successful migration of all active websites.
Once you fill out the survey, and if you actively manage a website, someone will contact you to schedule a migration date for your site(s).
The new web-hosting service is more secure, robust, and flexible than the old environment. Please note, many sites have already migrated successfully, including the ITS website. We look forward to working with you to help get your web content working in the new environment.
I'm glad that it mentions that sites have been successfully migrated. I've got most of the remaining virtual hosts staged, and I'm waiting for content reviews. I'll just throw a few enticements out there for everyone: faster hardware, updated PHP, updated MySQL, GD, PNG, GIF, and JPG support, easy LDAP integration, VUnetID authentication.
I just rolled out our installation of EditorMonkey for all of our blog users. While this editor is no longer maintained by the author, it is a nice alternative to Dean Lee's FCKEditor plugin . The "send to editor" function works with EditorMonkey. Both editors are now available. Two new themes also join the collection.
Yes, I've added another plugin to my collection. I'm testing a couple of audio players. So I leave you with Senator Ted Stevens' talk on Net Neutrality…
Tomorrow, I'll try to scrape together some tools on my Ubuntu system to put my voice up here for everyone to hear.
Guy setup the Captcha plugin on his blog and noticed a few things about the instructions about that I provided for the team. After the plugin is activated, the Options page generates an error regarding missing TTF files. This can be ignored since the plugin has not been configured yet. So I've updated my previous post.
On a side note, I wrote this post using EditorMonkey, which I've also made available to the AppHosting team. There were a few issues with FCKEditor have not yet been addressed so I'm looking for an alternative.
The blogs for everyone on the App Hosting team have been live for several weeks, and people are starting to notice a few things. Yes, Google is indexing our blogs, and they do show up in the search results. People are reading them. And it's not just people in ITS that are reading our blogs! Several of have received comments from total strangers.
Unfortunately, not all of the comments are wanted. The comment spam is starting to show up. The WP-HashCash plugin has been available for a few weeks now, and activating it has definitely cut back on my comment spam. I've recently added another slightly more intrusive anti-spam plugin for the App Hosting team. The Captcha plugin requires that users enter a five character phrase in order to submit a comment. If everything goes smoothly, I'll roll this out to all of the existing blogs. I just want to get some feedback first.
For my fellow team members, to activate the Captcha plugin, do the following: