SYSMGR
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Homepage: http://www.grootersnet.nl/sysblog
Posts by SYSMGR
28-Jun-2012
Jun 28th
Samba running wild
Did some work (creating a .CSV file from files retrieved from a site using wget (latest version found on the web:
$ wget "-V"
GNU Wget 1.13.4a built on VMS Alpha V8.3.
23-May-2012
May 23rd
Wiki taken offline
The number of “users” that create an account on the VMS wiki to post spam content, chnages from day to day, but there is hardly a day that there aren’t any. It’s no big deal to spend 15 minutes a day – or twice a day – to disable these accounts and remove spam. But no day should be forgotten, or the data is captured by search engines – with all consequences. And I use the latest version of MoinMoin….
Wordpress – even the older version that I still have to use (no time to update) – offers the ability to disable creation of accounts, and if enabled, the email address needs to be valid. Anyway, each new user can only post comments – if enabled – and that is scanned for abusive content, deleting it when that is found; and there is also me to accept the comment – or refuse it…
Alas, MoinMoin – even this latest version – lacks such facilities, and my knowledge of Python is nill…
There is a way to prevent users to post messages: but that requires an HTTPS connection and setting things up in the configuration; I’ve tried it, but the documentation on the MoinMoin site isn’t conclusive and I ended upo with a wiki that didn;t start at all…
02-May-2012
May 2nd
Maintenance
Nothing strange this time.
PMAS statistics for April
Total messages : 7208 = 100.0 o/o
DNS Blacklisted : 1522 = 21.1 o/o (Files: 30)
Relay attempts : 53 = .7 o/o (Files: 26)
Accepted by PMAS : 5633 = 78.1 o/o (Files: 30)
Handled by explicit rule
Rejected : 4831 = 85.7 o/o (processed), 67.0 o/o (all)
Accepted : 292 = 5.1 o/o (processed), 4.0 o/o (all)
Handled by content
Discarded : 82 = 1.4 o/o (processed), 1.1 o/o (all)
Quarantained : 246 = 4.3 o/o (processed), 3.4 o/o (all)
Delivered : 182 = 3.2 o/o (processed), 2.5 o/o (all)
Apart from this, there have been the usual bogus users that have been removed last month, I’ll clean the wiki cache so I get rid of these disabled accounts.
24-Apr-2012
Apr 24th
Bogus users – again
Today, I removed about 15 bogus accounts. All residing from domains I’ve seen as spam related elsewhere, and mainly from China:
163.com
21cn.com
yeah.com
18-Apr-2012
Apr 18th
Viewing T4 data – on OpenVMS
On a Dutch OpenVMS-SIG meeting last February, there were a number of demos of displaying T4 data other than using TlViz (TimeLine Vizualisation) – which is a Windows application and so requires the files being copied to a location that can be reaced by the program.
But now you can do so on a VMS box using DIX – by Fekko Stubbe, that allows you the same functionality as TlViz does, but on an (XWindows) screen. There are packages for Vax, Alpha and Itanium.
Without the nice features in combining them, there is also a PHP script that I got from one of the ambassadors, it took some tweaking to get it running the way I wanted it, but I’ve got it running from the basic locations: t4$data (for the data) and t4$sys (for the executables). It meant a little adaptation to the PHP-script, and allowing W:E on t4$SYS and the files within, plus setting t4$DATA to be W:RE, all files within W:R, and making that the default protection. By ACL, of course. Acess is limietd to the webserver executor – in my case HTTP$NOBODY, but you may choose to make it generally open…
One more thing that I found: t4$DATA normally contains ALL files that have ever been created. In my case, that includes files dating back to 2006…And since the PHP-code doesn’t scan on date, but on system, it takes a huge amount of time to get the files. And due to the naming convention used, the list is not ordered on date….So it makes sense to cleanup this directory to begin with; next the procedures creating the zip-files (and probably the T4-CSV-files as well) should be adapted to produce a more workable filename – so you’ll get them BY DATE.
13-Apr-2012
Apr 13th
Mail bomber blocked?
For weeks, I’ve been receiving – as shown in operator.log – many, many messages that for some reason were accepted by the spam filter but were caught by the SMTP-client itself. They never made it to the inbox. Quite likely they were passed since the enveloppe_from was from within my own domain, but these headers were al forged: they were not sent from my domain:
03-Apr-2012
Apr 3rd
Disk full
Before I was able to check the results of the montly maintenance job yesterday – done remotely this time – I found out the system didn’t respond at all. I could acess the router and that showed me a number of connections on the different ports, but hardly any traffic. I could start a VPN session to the home network, but all I could do was ping. No other access was possible. Would it again be a problem with the quorum disk, that I had some weeks ago – no way to tell….
This evening, it turned out there was nothing worng with the quorum disk, but the DecWindows sessions that I have opened didn’t show up after I switched on the monitor. I would expect the unlock panel top show up, but it was just the background of the window and the system was not responsive at all.
After having started my other node in the cluster, it happily joined the cluster, and there seemed nothing wrong with the disks. Bot any of them. Now I tried to mount the system disk of the main system – but that failed. Not any disk could be mounted….So the systen ran, but was unable to react.
Not even CTRL-P on the console…So the only option was to use the reset button.
Next, I rebooted. The process continues as usual – until, in the end, the main part is started in batch.
Now the real issue was obvious: the queue manager couldn’t start because free space was exhausted.
The procedure ended normally, but again, the system did not respond to teh keyboard, but now I knew what caused the problem.
So I started the system in MIN mode, but once mre, I couldn’t enter the system because it didn’t respond to the keyboard….
The last resort: Start from CD, choose option 8 to do some DCL, Mounted the system disk to find out what caused it. It must have been files created since yesterday after 18:00 system time, so
$ DIR/SIN=yes/SIZE/unit=byte DKB100:[...]
woud show what caused it.
BINGO. Almost immediately.
03-Apr-2012
Apr 3rd
Disk full
Before I was able to check the results of the montly maintenance job yesterday – done remotely this time – I found out the system didn’t respond at all. I could acess the router and that showed me a number of connections on the different ports, but hardly any traffic. I could start a VPN session to the home network, but all I could do was ping. No other access was possible. Would it again be a problem with the quorum disk, that I had some weeks ago – no way to tell….
This evening, it turned out there was nothing worng with the quorum disk, but the DecWindows sessions that I have opened didn’t show up after I switched on the monitor. I would expect the unlock panel top show up, but it was just the background of the window and the system was not responsive at all.
After having started my other node in the cluster, it happily joined the cluster, and there seemed nothing wrong with the disks. Bot any of them. Now I tried to mount the system disk of the main system – but that failed. Not any disk could be mounted….So the systen ran, but was unable to react.
Not even CTRL-P on the console…So the only option was to use the reset button.
Next, I rebooted. The process continues as usual – until, in the end, the main part is started in batch.
Now the real issue was obvious: the queue manager couldn’t start because free space was exhausted.
The procedure ended normally, but again, the system did not respond to teh keyboard, but now I knew what caused the problem.
So I started the system in MIN mode, but once mre, I couldn’t enter the system because it didn’t respond to the keyboard….
The last resort: Start from CD, choose option 8 to do some DCL, Mounted the system disk to find out what caused it. It must have been files created since yesterday after 18:00 system time, so
$ DIR/SIN=yes/SIZE/unit=byte DKB100:[...]
woud show what caused it.
BINGO. Almost immediately.
28-Mar-2012
Mar 29th
Minor glitches on startup
There were still a few gltches in accessing the vmswiki, but it was fairly easy so find the cause: A wrong logical diskname for the LD-device holding Python and moinmoin (the wiki software) and a typo in defining moin_static – that I define as a searchlist, so I don’t have to move around with files when installing a new moinmoin version….
After that was settled and repaired, the wiki works like before – a slow starter but once started, pretty fast.
Blogs more responsive
The blogs are more responsive as well, and suffer less partial crashes – so far. More important: I have less trouble logging in into the admin pages. I must have cleaned up quite some things in the attempt of updating and reversing the whole activity.
But now I got the answers on what the heck had happened, I coud give it a try once more. In which case I may decide to upgrade WP as well. That normally is easy, no trouble at all, though I’ll have to prepare a thing or two. But every update went nice and smoothly. But I’ll take Mark’s suggestion: have a look first what changed between 5.2 (supplied by HP and ported by Mark Berryman – which is the current version I’m using curently) and 5.3 (as ported by Mark Berryman). Anyway I’ll have to use the version op PHPWASD that comes with this kit…
27-Mar-2012
Mar 27th
Power loss
Shortly after 17:44 local time (the system is set to UTC, no DST, so in nreal time, it’s two hours later) power was llost. The system didn’t restart automaticly since the HSX50 was – once again – too slow. So I had to reboot by hand. By luck, the startup of the web-based stuff didn’t mention the new PHP confuguration so all blogs started as usual.
