- Added some exclusions to the ht://Dig URL list for Ehzsouth. Excluded
indexing of the scign subdirectory, and also the ARC/INFO files under the
fema directory. This reduced the indexing time from 1:43 to only 28
minutes.
- Put QDDS, cnssm, and recenteqs on Bort to see if they could be made to
work under FreeBSD. QDDS worked right out of the box. cnssm required some
minor adjustments.
- Enabled memory-mapped I/O for the SCSI controller on the USGS Squid
server to make disk I/O more efficient. This was enabled by adding the
option AHC_ALLOW_MEMIO to the kernel configuration and rebuilding the
kernel.
- Found out how to enable HTTP expiration headers to be sent directly from
the web servers for the Simpson map and Shakemap pages. The HTML and
graphics files are now sent out with an expiration header set to five
minutes. This will prevent external proxy servers from caching the files
for long time, as well as help the Squid servers to properly cache these
files for efficiency.
- Made some short scripts to index and link the old commentary and special
reports files under Earthquake Reports on the Trinet web site. The link to
the ftp archives on SCEC was broken. Fixed this link and moved it to the
new 'old reports' pages, which are linked off the main commentary page.
- Installed ht://Dig on flint so that the commentary and other Trinet pages
can be searchable.
- Discovered several typographical errors in the Simpson map pages. Wrote
to Bob Simpson about them so that he can correct them in future
distributions.
- Spring had a problem on Saturday where all its virtual memory was filled
up. This turned out to be caused by the orb2shear processes. Each one of
the ten had a virtual size of nearly 500MB, which soaked up all the memory
and swap space. This is most likely a memory leak in the program.
- The ncweb-south server on Ehzsouth went berserk three times on Sunday,
tying up the CPU every time. It had to be restarted each time.
- Checked the performance of the Eqinfo mailserver with the weekend's
earthquakes. It appears to be sending out the approximately 220 mails to
the 'quake-all' list in about two minutes.
- Got cnssm to work reliably on FreeBSD. The essential problem was that
the BSD sort command worked differently from sort on Solaris, and could not
sort on muliple keys. Installed GNU textutils from the ports collection
and changed cnssm to use 'gsort' and everything worked correctly.
- Removed Big Brother checking for three obsolete processes on Jet. The
processes were: pick_ct ad_demux coaxtoring
- Helped Karen with a board replacement on K2, which is the Data Center's
Enterprise 450 server.
- Added Mary Donev to the 'felt' list on eqinfo.
- Installed Perl 5.005-03 on Iron. Had to reinstall DBI and DBD modules so
that Oracle would work.
- There was a problem with Big Brother where Hotspot and Spring had the
same IP address. Fixed this in the hosts file on Hotspot.
- Upgraded the Simpson map software on Ehzsouth so that it would display
quake add-ons.
- Added NC events to the Terra10 Simpson Map page.
- Set up a CIIM test area for Bob to work with.
- Did some research on mailing list managers and mailers. Installed qmail
and ezmlm for testing.
- There was a problem with the DNS for the Pasadena office web page. Will
Prescott had made an error when he upgraded DNS on the Ehz web servers, and
our name was being resolved with a 60-second time-to-live, which meant that
slow DNS lookups had to be done continually. After speaking with him, he
increased it to 6 hours, which fixed the lag problem.
- Went to West Tech with Bob to look at new server systems with the
intention of purchasing a new machine to act as the Pasadena office web
server. With CIIM going nationwide, we are going to need a server with a
bit more compute power to handle all the CGI processing.
- Converted the mailing lists on Eqinfo to use qmail and ezmlm. This
should improve performance, and the subscription confirmation process is
also easier than it was with Majordomo.
- There was a M3.5 event on Sunday afternoon. This was the first test of
the new ezmlm mailing lists with large mailing. It performed well, sending
256 messages in under one minute. Qmail is set to a maximum concurrency of
50, which it used on this event. The system had resources to spare, so
this could probably be increased in the future to improve throughput.
- Moved the 'felt' list to ezmlm.
- The disk at [0,4] on the Spring AA RAID failed. Replaced it with the
cold spare. Called nStor and got RMA number 22639 for the return. The
disk was shipped back on 7/25.
- Unlocked the 'pinky' account on Iron, and made account 'asya' on Willow.
- Wrote up notes on the installation and configuration of qmail/ezmlm.
- Spring crashed on Monday evening and would not reboot due to file system
damage. Used the remote serial console connection to fix it.
- Set up a script to read the logs and report new subscriptions to the
mailing lists.
- Got a new set of VMS PAKs from Bob Logan at ITS. The first set they sent
out had some licenses missing.
- Raven accidentally deleted some of her sammag files. Restored from
backup.
- Changed the Eqinfo mail statistics graph to read in units of 'messages
per hour'. This gives more accurate statistics for times where the load is
low.
- Bob bought the hardware for the new office web server. Got it assembled
and running FreeBSD 4.1 with a web server and the Simpson Map on Friday,
7/28.
***
- Got the "Map of Recent Earthquakes" software working under the FreeBSD
operating system. The new office web server that will be coming online
later this month will be running this OS. The new server will increase our
web service capacity for the national rollout of the Community Internet
Intensity Map project.
- Installed ht://Dig on Flint to index the Trinet web pages. This is a
full-featured search engine to allow searching the documents stored on the
Trinet web site.
- Built index pages to index the old earthquake commentary and special
reports on the Trinet web site. Commentary and special reports are
normally kept for four months. This change sets up a sub-page with an index
of all the commentary and reports since the Trinet web site went online in
1998.
- Converted the mailing lists on Eqinfo to qmail/ezmlm to improve
performance and ease of use. Qmail is a mail server program, and ezmlm is
a mailing list manager. They are optimized for speed and handling large
mailing lists. The earthquake notification mailing lists currently have
over 500 subscribers.