Peter Woods

Web Architecture: All of the primary web services have been moved to the ESX/Linux environment, and they are also behind the Cisco CSM.  The load balancing functionality is working pretty well; however, having two modifiable copies of the content has introduced some unexpected challenges, particularly with content replication. I have implemented a second version of the content replication script to handle the various one-way and two-way replication requirements that the developers may have.  This version of the script is also slightly faster than the previous one. I have begun the process of requesting/reviewing firewall rules for the non-load balanced services and cleaning them up where possible.

Web Server Maintenance: The additional of the new PASCs have significantly reduced the turnaround time for web related request- particularly for RewriteRules.  I have been also been working on getting some custom error pages created to give better descriptions of the errors that people are encountering.

Test Mailgate Load Balancing: The mailgates have been migrated over to the CSM network for testing.

Samsara Retirement: The retirement date for Samsara has been scheduled for 30 Sep 2007. Five servers have been identified to be migrated to SSH or Kerberos 5 access.  These are: ldapa, ldapb, ldapc, ldap1, and list-srv1. Dates for service shutdown have been set.

Host and Service Monitoring: I have been working with the other App Hosting team members to ensure that keys services are appropriately monitored. I am also working on the rebuilt of the Nagios replacement server.  The new server will be using Fruity to manage the configuration.  Fruity has a dependancy on PHP5, which in turn introduces a need for RHEL5.  I have not built a RHEL5 server yet in your RHN environment.  Unfortunately, our RHN service does not currrently handle RHEL5 so I am doing a lot of the RPM dependancy checking during the install by hand.

VSC VLAN Change (Operational Incident): I became involved in the migration of a VSC server from the old to new COLO network. My primary role was to ensure that connectivity to the server was restored to pre-migration levels. 

Monitor iMac Takeover (Operational Incident): I had to "hack" the iMac that is connected to the display by Conference Rm 238. Luckily, it's relatively easy to reset the administrative password on an iMac with physical access. 

With some assistance from the ITS Network Security team, the MOO is live again. A port was missed in the transition to the load balanced environment.  I also took this opportunity to have some firewall cleanup done to remove the objects from the original non-load-balanced ruleset.

I've set the max cache expiration to one hour on all of the shared web hosting services. The default was one day. This change primarily sets the max length of time that a document will stay in the cache without being checked again.  The default cache time for documents with no caching directive is set to one hour. Just FYI, the server caches using the GreadyDual-Size algorthm (GDSF). When a document is accessed, the caching module will assign a rating based on the populary and size of the document.  Lower rated documents are removed from the cache first.  This is probably more easily explained with an example.    A 20 KB document will be kept in cache until a more popular 20 KB file is accessed or an equally popular larger file is accessed. The caching modules obeys any caching directives included in the file; however, it will now re-verify each file every hour.

With the exception of my occasion Safari on x86 experiment, I use Firefox for most of my web needs.  Unfortunately, there are a couple of site that require IE.  There are currently two applications that I access on a regular basis that are bound to IE: Magic and Sharepoint.  I've found that IE Tab and IE View are good for  minimizing the disruption of switching browsers.  I was hoping that I would be able to get away with just using IE Tab; however, Magic does not like being confined to a tab in Firefox.

Prepare for the Slashdotting …

How many bricks do you see in the picture?

I just updated to Safari 3.0.3 so I'm testing to see if I can make a blog post.

Edit: Looks like one finally made it through. 

It's after 10PM, and I'm checking up on the new load balanced servers.  The response time looks pretty good, but something is wrong.  Yup, the weather icon on the main page must have stopped updating!  Before I start looking to see what broke, I compare it so an outside source.  OK, so it's not wrong.  It's really 94 degrees at 10:30 at night.