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Tools for evolving civilizations
The first 90 percent of situational awareness is just knowing what the hell's going on.
           -Col. Robert Pike, USAF

May 29 02000
Added a couple lines to the backup script to take care of the project Sextant CVS repositories. Our backup strategy is now officially complete.

May 28 02000
Carl developed a sweet little utility to edit web pages from a browser. (Sorry, it's only running on his personal linux box inside the firewall, not our main internet-accessible server!) If you ask him, I'm sure he'd share the source code.

May 28 02000
Carl and Craig have come up with an APD templating strategy to make it easier for us to assemble and thereafter rearrange elements of the main Sextant discussion forum page. A side effect of this (with a few of its own challenges) - we will be able to allow 'bloggers to easily templatize their own sextant-based discussion forum pages to preserve their internal look and feel.

May 28 02000
We now have online tablespaces / webspaces for Sextant development, staging, and production, all under CVS control. Next I will incorporate them all into our backup strategy and install some utilities to view traffic.

May 27 02000
While messing with CVS for the first time, I wanted to remove something from CVS control. Doesn't really sound like it should be so hard, right? Well, it probably isn't, but I haven't figured that out yet. So if you end up doing it the way I did, and you end up with no cvs repository but annoying /CVS subdirectories throughout the structure you [until so recently] had under CVS control, you can use this utility to remove them.

May 26 02000
So I'm waiting in line today at my local Larry's Market with (among other things), my two 4-packs of Reed's Ginger Brew. I set them on the conveyer and the gentleman behind the counter says [something like], "Reed's? Hey man, I'm from Jamaica, and NOBODY there drinks Reed's. Brewed in the Jamaican style.. PSHHhh! Come with me, I'll show you where we keep the REAL ginger beer."
So here I am now, proud owner of 4 empty bottles which until recently contained Cock'n Bull ginger beer.

May 25 02000
Thanks largely to Craig, the Civilution Weblog is now taking advantage of the clickthrough tracking feature of project Sextant! We are still working on the reports pages to display the data we collect; I will post notification here when that is working. Or you can just browse the weblog, randomly clicking on anything you see.

May 24 02000
Re-discovered the page I mined Intermedia information from (see May 20). Thank you Sean!

May 24 02000
Erik and I spawned a sextant-dev naviserver instance / tablespace / ACS installation, etc to play with. (This way we won't have to hack on stuff on our live server.) We learned in the process about the benefits of internal documentation. I mean other than the billable hours it consumes.

May 24 02000
Got CVS working on my personal development space. Well, getting CVS working is really not hard - it's figuring out what you [are supposed to] do with CVS once it already is working. Good intentions aside, I think I'm going to end up learning CVS arcana as it become necessary...

May 23 02000
CVS is big and scary. Fortunately it seems to be impossible to do anything bad and sticky with CVS, so I guess we won't be needing those backups yet..

May 20 02000
Still can't get ctxsrv to load automatically on boot. I tried (among other things) dropping the line:

ctx0:34:once:/u01/bin/ctxsrv -user ctxsys/ctxsys -log /var/log/ctx.log

into /etc/inittab, right below the line which starts up aolserver.. No luck. Hrmph. The whole linux sysV init b/s has caused me more trouble than the rest of linux's special little "features" combined. I'd take a nice startup folder over this crap any day.

May 20 02000
Oh yeah, full text searching using Net8 and Intermedia is working now too. What?? How could this happen? A couple hours of reading through the Intermedia documentation, then a couple minutes reading a page recommended by Erik. As soon as I find it again, I will thank the author properly.
For some reason, the method of interfacing to Intermedia that I set up was not the one used by the ACS, so thanks to Erik for implementing that part.

May 20 02000
Thanks to Craig's eval recommendation, the automation script for backing up Oracle stuff to tape works now. Use this script to list the contents of a tape.

May 18 02000
Craig and Erik are currently messing with the data model for sextant click-through tracking. Probably had something to do with me whining about the 40GB of redundant data it would be storing in a few months. So to clarify - the service is not yet up, though the server's physical network location is no longer a hinderance to us bringing it up. We will post here (among other places) when the service is accessible.

May 18 02000
The clickthrough services are now live at sextant.civilution.com. This involved moving the server outside our intranet firewall/gateway, which introduced a whole mess 'o trouble. "Just" updating the security on the server so we could feel slightly better about exposing it to the world took many hours, in addition to searching out all instances of its old internal IP and replacing them with "sextant.civilution.com" (then making sure all the processes knew about the changes). And now of course the firewall sits between our terminals and sextant, so it jealously makes its power known in any way it can. I Just reset the tcp connection masquerading timeout to a day, from its previous 15 minutes.

May 16 02000
Carl jets off to Miami with his sweetheart for a week. Which means the weblog is unlikely to be updated until he gets back.

May 7 02000
Tested (unsuccessfully) the restorability of our automated Oracle exports. Removed the DIRECT=Y option from my script and retested (successfully). Also discovered that ROLLBACK is not effective on DROP TABLE commands.

May 6 02000
Automated our database exports to occur at 3am PST. Never could get crontab to function in a reasonable manner, so I had to use ns_schedule_daily (thanks Carl!) If anyone has a lead on why crontab couldn't handle the dinky little backup script I wrote, let me know. It does just fine until it reaches the exec.

May 5 02000
Multiplexed Oracle's archived redo logs and control files onto a separate drive. Stuffed the index datafile onto a separate drive. (Who knew I should have been doing this as user oracle instead of root?) Got to un-wedge Oracle manually for the first time. Thankfully it was only because Oracle couldn't write to its mandatory redo log archive location - a potential disaster which I recognized and documented days ago.

May 3 02000
Completed our first complete consistent online oracle export. Now its time to crash Oracle and make sure it works! (This is the part I like.)

May 1 02000
Trying to figure out a network topology that enables us to leave the external web server inside the firewall, yet have it reachable via a single IP from both the inside and the outside. Our chances don't look good, but the alternative is to be the Civilution Computer Security Consultant. Uh, temporarily, right? Worked for that Civilution SysAdmin job...


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