EYEWI suffered a system drive failure on Saturday morning, and Monday afternoon and evening I replaced the drive and rebuilt the system.

First off, make sure your volume manager really is mirroring all the partitions on the system.

Recovery proceeded fairly straightforwardly. Since only the root partition had actually been mirrored, the system would not boot with the second drive. I used one of the spare drives from ROJ's AMANDA installation to copy the root partition of the surviving drive and to test restoring the /home partition from the dump that happens with every successful NetBackup catalog backup.

I Jumpstarted the system with the surviving drive in its original location (slot 1) and the other of ROJ's spare AMANDA drives in slot 0. After Jumpstart, I restored the /home partition from the catalog tape, moved /home/opt to a temporary location, and installed NetBackup (in order to get the appropriate files in /etc). I moved the new /home/opt out of the way and moved the old /home/opt into position, and NetBackup seemed almost happy.

Details that needed to be corrected: the Dell PowerVault 110T and the Overland tape library had swapped device files - /dev/rmt/0* now points to the tape library wile /dev/rmt/1* points to the 110T. I needed to use the Java GUI on NetBackup to change the device files for the two storage units. I had also originally forgotten to increase the shared memory configuration in /etc/system, and thus backups failed with error code 11 (failed system call).

There are still a few other details to be worked out, but the Jumpstart and /home restore seem to have gotten the bulk of it.

We’re currently testing Sun ONE Calendar on a Sun Fire V210/Solaris 9 system.

So far, things look good. We’re using v 5.1.1, and it integrates well with the directory server (v 5.1). The installation is straightforward.

Additions:

• I’ve enabled another color palette and set it to default to mimic the red and white scheme of Earlham’s colors.

• I found basic PHP source code from Rutgers to access public calendars in a way that can be used in an Apple iCal subscription. I have translated this to perl and put it in the CGI directory of our main web server.

• A number of sites run Calendar Express behind an SSL connection, the one I found that worked was to put in Pound to handle the SSL proxy, to use an HTTPS URL for the ui.base.url value, and to modify the default.html to include JavaScript that puts out a refresh target for non-https connections:

if ((document.URL=='http://calendar.earlham.edu/') && (!location.search)) {
    document.write("<meta http-equiv=\"refresh\" content=\"0; URL=https:/calendar.earlham.edu/\">");
}

• I have a basic perl script that converts Russell Calendar Manager ASCII export data into iCal format for import into Sun ONE. The only thing it does not handle “properly” is multiple attendees to an event: while it lists all attendees as confirmed, it does not enter the event into their calendars (it can’t given the access permissions standard on most people’s calendars).

Today we are rebuilding the PacketShaper for the student network.

Late last fall we rebuilt the main campus PacketShaper. This proved beneficial in conjunction with the upgrade to the device's firmware and allowing it to clear out old information. This week we are rebuilding the student network PacketShaper with the aim of improving shaping performance and management on the student network. The PacketShaper will be in learning mode until the end of the week, identifying the primary application protocols being used on the student Internet connection. During and after this wee will be assigining service levels to these protocols to best allocate the bandwidth.

Monday, January 5, we switched WebMail services to a new server.

This new server is dedicated to running the WebMail interface, taking the load of this off of KE, the e-mail content server. E-mail remains stored on KE, but WebMail access is now handled by BARIS.