Victorian Bushfires

Aus­trali­ans learned so much from the Ash Wed­nes­day bush­fires (I was liv­ing in Mel­bourne at the time and still vis­it as often as I can); there was a sense that although every­one knew bush­fires are capri­cious and dan­ger­ous, that there were things to do to mit­ig­ate them. That all changed this week.

The com­bin­a­tion of years of inad­equate rain­fall, record high tem­per­at­ures, and arson meant there was no escape, no hope for those caught in the bush­fire’s path. There are thou­sands of people out there fight­ing for people and anim­als, hop­ing and pray­ing for the rain that is the only solu­tion. The Aus­trali­an Broad­cast­ing Cor­por­a­tion Mel­bourne news site tells the story. 

I can­’t find the right words to express my sor­row and sym­path­ies for those who lost fam­ily and friends in this hor­rif­ic way. All I can do is point people who want to help to some of the appro­pri­ate ven­ues. There’s the Aus­trali­an Red Cross, the Aus­trali­an Sal­va­tion Army, and some organ­isa­tions to help with anim­als and wild­life.

Re-routing

One of the things I’ve wanted to do for a while was move the firewall/router and minor web sites served from an old Pen­ti­um 3 in the base­ment to a more mod­ern solu­tion. I’ve blogged some of the jour­ney, start­ing with the motiv­a­tion and mov­ing through the todo list. Yes­ter­day was the day for the big switch.

After a couple of hours twid­dling this and that, get­ting rid of spare cables, and vacu­um­ing the backs of com­puters that sel­dom get this treat­ment, we now have a hard­ware firewall/router and some minor web sites powered by a Sun Ultra 20 OpenSol­ar­is, rather than rely­ing on an old Pen­ti­um 3 doing all of that. It’s amaz­ing how much faster the minor sites load on a sys­tem with a decent amount of memory!

In oth­er words, we’ve now gone from 

old firewall + website server
old fire­wall + web­site server
and
wires
wires
to
new website server
new web­site server
(Pho­tos by Tim Bray)

I still have to set up ddcli­ent or some­thing sim­il­ar to inform DynDNS when our IP address changes, and there are some oddit­ies, such as the Sol­ar­is box not broad­cast­ing its host­name to the router which I want to track down. For some reas­on the Sol­ar­is box did­n’t start the Eth­er­net con­nec­tion prop­erly on reboot, but I don’t yet know wheth­er that was a ran­dom occur­rence or some­thing that I have to pay atten­tion to. Still, things are work­ing, at least until our next power out­age. Wheth­er it works past that depends on wheth­er the router moves around the IP addresses it assigns, which would mean the IP-based for­ward­ing not for­ward­ing to the right place. I may end up installing dd wrt or some­thing sim­il­ar on the fire­wall (although it appears the par­tic­u­lar one I have does­n’t sup­port dd wrt itself), but for the time being I’m run­ning the ori­gin­al soft­ware and it seems to do the job.

WordPress and MySQL on OpenSolaris

The next step in the list for mov­ing my minor web­sites to OpenSol­ar­is (see the first post for the motiv­a­tion) was to set up MySQL. After I down­loaded the OpenSol­ar­is Web Stack pack­age, MySQL was installed and run­ning, so it was more a mat­ter of tweak­ing. Little things like copy­ing the /etc/mysql/5.0/my-huge.cnf to /etc/mysql/my.cnf so that the default con­fig­ur­a­tion takes advant­age of the 2 GB of RAM, for example. 

I’ve heard con­flict­ing things about wheth­er one needs a root pass­word for MySQL, giv­en that it uses the Unix root iden­tity by default. After my years in secur­ity and iden­tity I decided to set one any­way, as recom­men­ded by the MySQL post-install­a­tion setup doc­u­ment­a­tion, even if it would be hard for any­one to get into the machine to do any dam­age, since it will be behind a firewall/router.

The next step was to move the Word­Press-based sites. I decided to try the export/import facil­it­ies in Word­Press, since I haven’t tried those out before, and it meant being able to use a new MySQL data­base with no cruft in it. I set up new users for the spe­cif­ic data­bases, copied the files across with rsync, impor­ted the XML file, and voila! It all worked out pretty well, although reset­ting the vari­ous con­fig­ur­a­tion options in Word­Press took a few minutes.

Projects and Resumes

Now is a good time to update my resume (cv), and I’m hav­ing a little dif­fi­culty in fig­ur­ing out the best way to present it. The clas­sic “say what you did for the employ­er” tends to assume that your involve­ment in pro­jects is bounded by your employ­ment, but that’s not always the case. For example, I’ve chaired tech­nic­al com­mit­tees and been involved with con­fer­ence organ­isa­tion for time peri­ods that over­lapped both employ­ers and being self-employed. For example, I chaired the XML Con­fer­ence from 2001 to 2005, work­ing for (in chro­no­lo­gic­al order) SoftQuad Soft­ware, my own con­sult­ing firm, and Sun Microsys­tems. It’s the over­lap­ping time peri­ods that I’m hav­ing dif­fi­culty in fig­ur­ing out how to present. I guess I could go to a pure pro­ject-based resume, except for, some of what I did was on behalf of a par­tic­u­lar employ­er and thus was bounded with­in that time period.

I can­’t ima­gine I’m the only per­son with this issue; any­one con­trib­ut­ing to open source soft­ware over a peri­od of time has it, as well as people who volun­teer at oth­er organ­isa­tions in their spare time. How do oth­ers present what they’ve done in a way that suit­ably high­lights the import­ant stuff?

Rotating Apache Logs on OpenSolaris

Since the Apache access logs grow with time, I like to rotate them once a month or so (for minor sites that don’t get much traffic). On Debi­an, you use logrotate (I’ve writ­ten about set­ting it up here). On OpenSol­ar­is, you use the logadm com­mand, with the actu­al rota­tion being spe­cified in /etc/logadm.conf. When you look at that file, it warns you not to edit it by hand, which I found mildly amus­ing. Since you can make changes via the logadm com­mand itself, I figured I’d try that out. 

For Apache log files in the usu­al place, /var/apache2/2.2/logs/access_log, read­ing the man pages for logadm gives 

logadm -w apache -p 1m -C 24\ 
-t '/var/apache2/2.2/old_logs/access_log.%Y-%m'\
-a '/usr/apache2/2.2/bin/apachectl graceful'\
/var/apache2/2.2/logs/access_log

Test­ing with logadm -p now apache seems to work just fine. I’ll know more about how reli­able it is in a month.

MacBook Migration

My laptop at Sun was a nice little Mac­Book; light­er than the Mac­Book Pro but power­ful enough for my needs. So when I left, I decided I’d buy myself a new Mac­Book, being the path of least res­ist­ance. In the­ory, Apple makes it easy to migrate your inform­a­tion from one Mac­Book to anoth­er. So I stripped the Sun inform­a­tion off the old one, bought my new one, added a couple of gig of RAM, and came home full of anticipation.

The migra­tion was­n’t quite as easy as all that. I installed the Migra­tion Assist­ant on the old laptop, con­nec­ted the new one with an Eth­er­net cable, typed in the num­ber that appears on the new one into the old one, got the mes­sage “Pre­par­ing inform­a­tion…” and waited. 15 or so minutes later, the new one says it’s lost the net­work con­nec­tion and gives me a new num­ber, while the old one pops up the dia­log to type the new num­ber into. I repeated the pro­cess a couple of times, chan­ging vari­ables (con­nect through DHCP rather than dir­ectly) with no suc­cess. So I made an appoint­ment with the Geni­us Bar in the loc­al Apple store and went in there.

The Geni­us bar per­son said that there’s a known issue that’s solved by updat­ing the Migra­tion Assist­ant to the latest ver­sion. She updated the soft­ware, but it did­n’t solve the issue; the same prob­lem crops up. She did offer to move everything by hand by pulling out the old disk but I decided I did­n’t feel like wait­ing that long in the mall. And I remembered that I had a Time Machine backup at home, which should also work to put the inform­a­tion on the disk.

Back at home I backed up to the Time Machine, then star­ted up the install­a­tion pro­ced­ure on the new laptop and chose to install set­tings and files from the Time Machine. Then I waited. Approx­im­ately six hours later (no exag­ger­a­tion; the con­stant mes­sage was “check­ing Time Machine backup”) there was some error say­ing it was­n’t an OS X disk, or some­thing like that. At this stage I gave up and decided to just rsync my user dir­ect­ory includ­ing my applic­a­tions. That worked just fine and was much quick­er (about 15 minutes start to finish).

It turns out that rsync on the Mac is a little con­tro­ver­sial. There’s more in-depth dis­cus­sion in the com­ments to one of Tim’s posts. For my pur­poses, rsync worked well; I did take the ele­ment­ary pre­cau­tion of log­ging out on the tar­get laptop first.