New hardware
The first of two rx2620 servers has arrived: 1 2-core Itanium-2 CPU (1.6 Ghz), 8Gb memory and 3 73Gb 15K disks. Set up running HP-UX and patched up to date. Not sure at the moment what to do: Keeping HP-UX, use it as a base system and install VMS as guest OS?
It depends on the second system, planned to arrive on Monday. It’s a bigger one: 2 CPU, 24 GB memory and 3 146 Gb disks. But that one is probably empty.
Waiting for the software, and the licenses.
04-Feb-2017
Maintenance
It’s been a quiet month:
PMAS statistics for January
Total messages : 1910 = 100.0 o/o
DNS Blacklisted : 0 = .0 o/o (Files: 0)
Relay attempts : 94 = 4.9 o/o (Files: 31)
Accepted by PMAS : 1816 = 95.0 o/o (Files: 31)
Handled by explicit rule
Rejected : 971 = 53.4 o/o (processed), 50.8 o/o (all)
Accepted : 150 = 8.2 o/o (processed), 7.8 o/o (all)
Handled by content
Discarded : 342 = 18.8 o/o (processed), 17.9 o/o (all)
Quarantained : 329 = 18.1 o/o (processed), 17.2 o/o (all)
Delivered : 24 = 1.3 o/o (processed), 1.2 o/o (all)
Most days there has been some attempts to abuse the server for relay each day, but far less than is usual. Most files are well below the rated limit (4 blocks, or 2Kb in size), jus on 09-Jan-2017 and 29-Jan-2017 were larger: 8 blocks (4KB), and 4 blocks (2KB – more than on the others days).
If would be nice if it stays that low, but I guess I’ll see higher levels later this year.
Network outage
Yesterday, when trying to read mail from the server at work, I noted there was no access AT ALL to the site – even VPN into the router failed. Turned out to be a problem with the Internet provider, that lasted until approximately 16:00 – after which all mail that was blocked for that reason, got in again. Not juts Internet. Because TV and telephone use the same connection, these were down too.
Well, it all worked again even since.
New hardware, new software
This year. I intend to add an Itanium server to the data center, so I can get somewhat acquainted to that hardware. Apart from the usual WordPress updates (one coming this weekend) I plan to upgrade the database (from MySQL 5.1 to MariaDb 5.5) and PHP (a big leap to 7.0). This involves all blogs to I need to take care that I don’t break anything, severely (It may required some PHP code changes as I already found out when trying to run 5.4….)
And, if I can get hold of it, newer versions of OpenVMS.
Apart from that, there will be new content in Trips, Tracks and Travels.
09-Nov-2012
Site changes in progress
The current homepage of this site is based on a set of routines I wrote years ago in Fortran77 on Vax, and included a program to test the function of the routines, and by that, it was used as a demonstration on how to use these routines. It uses the functions that VMS offers for memory management, and contained a number of MACRO routines; one in particular: that one is used to figue out which of teh parameters were actually passed: Fortran77 doesn’t really allow optional parameters and there was no other way to find out whether a parameter was actually passed, or not.
The Alpha architecture doesn’t contain the registers used in this macro so a one-to-one port wasn’t possible. Luckily, Fortran95 offers an alternative, and so it was easy to prot these routines to Alpha.
The demo-program was used to create a program that would create the HTML output.
Works great – and fast. But changing layout is quite a menace because the files are in a text library, and I still have to write a text file for the content. I have been looking for a way to change the text using a web-based interface but couldn’t find a good solution.
Then Mark Daniel – thw author of WASD – came with VWCMS – a VmsWasd based Content Management System. I have checked it in the past and it looks nice. It uses a javascript editor, that I cpould include in my program, for editing the main text. But VWCMS evolved, and it became quite feasable to use that. And so I started converting the home page into the format that VWCMS uses.
The basics are now done, and so I wanted to make it public. That means I have to adapt the WASD configuration as well, but how? So I asked, and I got an answer that does exactly what I need. I had to do some more adjustments, to be able to access the sub-sites (on OpenVMS , for instance), but the advantage outwages the extra effort: the configuration now holds clearly all parts that are accessable.
So that works fine, but I’m not completely satisfied with the homepage itself, there is some work to eb done before I can make it public. Until that time, the previous homepage will remain active.
Physical moves
The HSZ50-controller uses a battery to power the write-back cache; so no data is lost when deferred-write is interrupted due to a power outage. But that battery now fails, and write-through is disabled by the controller. And siince I could not actually use the shared-SCSI bus, there is no real need for this controller. For what I’ve heard, it slows down IO anyway: for the hardware, it’s a 10Mb/s connection but the disks are accessed with half the speed. The big advantaghe is that I can access multple cabinets – up to 6, though I have only 4 cables so I can access 4 at most….
So the question is: do I take it out of the chain? To be prepared, I made all disks in one cabinet “Transporable” so that cabinet can be taken out and be accessed directly, after I have created the contents using BACKUP/IMAGE. That is to be tested – I still have a PWS available for testing 🙂
If that works, I may swicth to basic SCSI-2 again….
05-Jul-2012
New hardware
My (about 5 years old Pentium-4 HT) workstation dubbed Aphrodite will get another role: It will replace the machine in the living room. That one is Pentium-4 as well – without HT, and quite problematic at times.
I obtained a state-of-the-art new box: ASUS P9X79 motherboards with Intel i7 processor @ 3.6Mhz, and 8 Gb of memory (expandable to 64Gb). 8 channel audio, as on my previous system. Transferred Video and disks, but not the DVD-drives: These are ATAPI and the new system has (e)SATA only, to I had to obtain that as well.
Suitable for the heavy stuff I intend to run on the beast: Running multiple Alpha emulators side by side, and processing sound, image and, perhaps, video. I could use Linux on the box, but the emulators I can use do either not run on Linux, or not in a way that I intend to use them. For sound- and image processing, I already have Windows-based software I can work with pretty well, and I would need to learn these Linux equivalents as well. In the future I may add Linux as an alternate OS but for the moment, I stick to Win7pro-64.
Some trouble: The front USB bus has a different connector that doesn’t fit anywhere on the motherboard ans yes: I do need them; there is no COM exit, it needs to be added, and the motherboard seems to have a broken DIMM slot so 4 Gb of memory isn’t fitted in it’s preferred position.
These I’ll have to address with the supplier.
But I had to install the OS from scratch since Win7Pro-32 didn’t boot on this box. But installing the OS didn’t work out as good as I expected: I had to clear the whole disk – including the partitions containing data – because the BIOS of the new box couldn’t handle them: this is EFI based….
It was no problem to move them to the other disk – I thought – using a DOS box and XCOPY the contents to a directory on the other disk. But once that was done, I couldn’t find the directories I created. No big deal. Pity – but I do have a backup, and there hasn’t been much changes after that anyway. Of would it be a disk I didn’t expect?
After shutdown and moving the machine to its fibal locatioen, it turned out that a boot after shutdown did almost always fail, and I had to do a repair from the installation disk – which invariably failed because “… the system to be repaired is incompatible…” . But when offered to reboot normally, there seemed to be nothing wrong. Might been caused because I installed in safe mode?
So in the end, I re-initiated the disk, and installed everything again from scratch – but now when booting from the DVD-drive. From that moment on, it all went smoothly. Getting drives and software from in Internet – no problem.
But in accessing any of my own sites, there was. None responded, but services and servers were up and running….
New IP address
First thing to be done is pinging the server by name:
ping www.grootersnet.nl
translated the server to be 85.223.43.24 – what I would expect because that’s what’s in DNS, being the outside address of the router.
But when accessing the router to seee what it says, the WAN connection is now on a different network, as well as the DNS-resolvers of the router. Contacted the ISP site (luckily there was no problem getting out!) and found there had been done some work that morning, and the connection had been down for a few minutes. So I called the help desk, and it was confirmed that the address had indeed changed. but there had been no information on this – which I would expect to be sent IN ADVANCE. Anyway, I had to contact the registrar of my domain to have the DNS references updated. That requires a signed document, which could be sent as an attachment in an email message.
Which I couldn’t use over the Internet….
But there are other addresses I could use: my provider’s, gmail, yahoo, hotmaill….So I created the letter, signed it, scanned it (using the new box – even with it’s problems) into a PDF file and mailed it. Next by the phone, it was handled within minutes, but it took some time before it would be expanded over the Internet.
This morning however, it still didn’t work: Although the new DNS-servers got them (the router configuration shows their addresses) the DNS servers inside the LAN didn’t. So I restarted BIND on the VMS box, and the router, but in some way or another it didn;t help. Looking into the LAN configuration of the router, I found the DNS-server in the LAN was the VMS box…Removed that: and now it’s all working again. But from elsewhere – mail, in particular – it may take some time: I didn’t mention that so that still refers to the old address..Will be changed today as well.
There has been one advantage: No spam either 🙂
Clean-up of DHCP and local DNS
Over the years,. systems have come and gone, and any new node in the LAN get’s an address by the DHCP server; and as long as the MAC address doesn’t change, that address will get the once supplied address. That will add these systems in the local DNS – and they’ll stay there.
But systems come and go, and the obsolete references are not deleted. So I took the possibility to remove all the old entries in both the DHCP and BIND databases.
01-Jan-2011
Maintenance
Though a new year – for which I wish my readers all the best – it’s also the beginning of a new month so I had the system save it’s logfiles. The job also collects the mail statistics for the previous month:
PMAS statistics for December
Total messages : 5390 = 100.0 o/o
DNS Blacklisted : 545 = 10.1 o/o (Files: 31)
Relay attempts : 3926 = 72.8 o/o (Files: 30)
Accepted by PMAS : 919 = 17.0 o/o (Files: 31)
Handled by explicit rule
Rejected : 198 = 21.5 o/o (processed), 3.6 o/o (all)
Accepted : 350 = 38.0 o/o (processed), 6.4 o/o (all)
Handled by content
Discarded : 109 = 11.8 o/o (processed), 2.0 o/o (all)
Quarantained : 235 = 25.5 o/o (processed), 4.3 o/o (all)
Delivered : 27 = 2.9 o/o (processed), .5 o/o (all)
I still have to do the count of the relay attempts by hand:
05-Dec 19
06-Dec 288
07-Dec 813
09-Dec 120
12-Dec 203
13-Dec 202
19-Dec 1225
22-Dec 107
23-Dec 165
27-Dec 768
There may have been a few files less than 4 blocks in size but I consider these of less importance. Futher analysis will have to wait until a later date…
Apart from the usual activity, I consolidated all log files of last year in a single file to be stored on CD or DVD – mainly as a source for this analysis and as test data for the suite that I intend to create for it.
New disks for the workstation
I boaught two new 230Gb disks for the workstation: one internal, and one external – as a backup. Next month it will be filled with restored data – I hope.