[Box-Admins] The technical side of the status of things

[Ken Causey]

I'm going to try to summarize as simply as I can the servers statuses, 
the original plan, modifications to the plan, and what has been done.

First our assets:

Hetzner - box2.squeak.org (85.10.195.197) - Our aging outgoing server 
that has been our singular server for many years now and hosted all 
online services.

Stats: ancient version of Debian, full hardware server, 1GB RAM, 150GB HD

Gandi.net - box3.squeak.org (173.246.101.237) - This server was 
originally allocated and setup at the request of Frank for use as a 
continuous integration server and hosts build.squeak.org, a Jenkins 
instance. As far as I am concerned this is still the primary purpose of 
this server. Currently this is also hosting our 'recovered' 
squeaksource.com. David can speak to details about the plan for this.

Stats: current and up to date Debian Squeeze (32bit), virtual server, 
1GB RAM, 60GB HD

Gandi.net - box4.squeak.org (173.246.104.42) - This server is intended 
to be the primary replacement host for box2.squeak.org. I'll speak more 
to the status of this server below.

Stats: current and up to date Debian Wheezy (64bit), virtual server, 4GB 
RAM, 100GB HD

Both Gandi.net virtual servers are provided kindly by Gandi.net at no 
charge and through an agreement and with the assistance of the Software 
Freedom Consortium and Bradley Kuhn.

The plan:

In brief the goal is to replicate all existing services hosted by the 
old server using primarily box4 and secondarily box3. My intention had 
been to setup mailman and mailing list hosting on box3 to reduce the 
load on box4. However this was prior to setting up squeaksource.com on 
box3 and so this is now unlikely without changes.

The intention is to use up to date software and use leaner software when 
possible, for example: nginx for top-level HTTP, qmail for SMTP, djbdns 
for DNS, etc. Both classic Squeak VM and Cog VM would be available. 
Super user access is consistently through sudo which logs actions in 
case of problems. Every individual with access to the server will have 
their own personal account. How to handle access to 'shared' resources 
is still somewhat to be determined.

Status:

On both servers an administrative log is being kept in 
/root/admin-log.txt with a hopefully consistent format and under RCS. 
Those with access should feel free to review these for more detail.

DNS (djbdns) has been setup on both box3 and box4. box4 is the primary 
DNS and box3 the secondary and automatically updates from box4. Repeated 
emails to the holders of squeak.org and squeakfoundation.org to update 
the root servers to point to these have met with total silence. This has 
been frustrating.

Daemontools has been installed and whenever 'service' software needs to 
be maintained and does not come with ready support for init, Daemontools 
can and should be used.

Whenever software needs to be installed which is not readily installable 
via apt-get (or a newer version is desired) checkinstall should be used 
to build and install a debian package so that all installed software can 
be consistently managed.

Classic SqueakVM 4.10.2.2614 was built and a debian package produced and 
installed. Some testing was done but issues may remain and a newer 
version may well be available.  All .sources files were placed in a 
central location so that none should be needed per project. This will 
need to be updated (links?) whenever a new VM version is installed.

NTP server was installed.

Nginx was installed on box4 but little configuration has been done.

I repeatedly tried to build and install Cog but ran into multiple 
problems. Even beyond build problems one issue is that Cog is built to 
name the executable squeak and as such collides with the Classic VM. 
Having both VMs seems necessary given the age of some of the Squeak 
hosted services. Having Cog is desirable for more recent services and 
updates to the old ones.

Note that work on both VMs was some time back and the issues I had would 
need to be revisited and evaluated.

Ken