30-Dec-2006

Updates
have been applied to both the OS and the forum software. Diana (and by that, potentially all machines that will boot from this common systemdisk) will now rin OpenVMS version 8.3. PHPBB2 has been updated to version 2.0.22, as was suggested on the administartion panel. That wasn’t as smooth as expected, you’ll need to follow the manual to the letter, and for each of the forums. For this site, it meant a double update since the databases are different, and these updates require some access into the database (I didn’t look into what has been updated exactly, but that it seems required was evident).
But. as expected, the OpenVMS update was a piece of cake.
DNS problems
It looks as if DNS is not properly re-initiated after a system crash. At least, I found that TCPIP SHOW HOST gave some “zone transfer error” messages that could only be removed by removing some jpournal files (*.DB_JNL) and give the DNS datafiles a new Version entry. A normal shutdown of the system would work,but crashes is quite another story.
I added a new zone: Grootersnet.local, to be used in stead of the currently used intra.grootersnet.nl (no problem showing this: it’s a 192.168.*.* network zo cannot be accessed (except for Diana and I simply trust that OPenVMS box ;))), but I kept this for the moment. I’m thinking of setting up a list of CNAME entries in a grootersnet.nl zone, all refering to www.grootersnet.nl which will reside with my ISP so the basic reference will be correct and beyond my control (The IP-address is owned by my ISP, it was just assigned to me). But that’s still in the bucket.
MySQL games
MySQL seems to play funny tricks as well in case of a crash: each time after a crash, it seems it looses what presentation model has been chosen before on this blog, it will revert to the default skin after a crash. I’m not at all sure whether a normal shudown would work properly – shutting down MySQL in a non-interactive manner is somewhat – let’s call it “obscure”. The fun part however is that PHPBB2 has no such trouble at all. So it might be a WordPress issue after all.