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Entries tagged migration

All the time anywhere

24 November 2007 21:50

Thanks for the comments/mails on my previous post.

I've now started the migration properly.

All code currently held upon cvsrepository.org will be moved to http://repository.steve.org.uk/ - a nice system-agnostic name.

So far I've only setup the pages for two project (my dotfiles and ~/bin) but I'm happy with the process, and the naming scheme appears sane to me now.

Using sub-domains I need only install one CGI which is a big win, and using a simple set of templates + mod_rewrite all projects get the same look and feel.

I've still got to tweak the stylesheet a little, but otherwise I'm happy with things. I can host both public and private repositories, and that all works magically.

Of course the huge win is no longer needing to run a pserver for CVS! All future checkouts will be via HTTP, and the rare few people with commit access will be able to do so over SSH.

Once things have been migrated I'll cause the cvsrepository names to redirect to the new locations, and keep that up until the domain expires as a transition period. (I think +1 year :))

The other job for the weekend is releasing a fixed security update for Samba, to fix the regressions.... That is in hand, but the buildds are being slow. If they're not all done I'll release it anyway today/tomorrow. I'm annoyed that I handled the timing so badly, but I hope that people don't hate me for it.

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to let the insects in

2 December 2007 21:50

My migration to mercurial is now complete. I've completed the last step, which was the migration of all the $foo-commits mailing lists.

It is at times like this that I remember two things:

  • All mailing list software sucks. (here we go again.)
  • All the mailing-list-archive-makers suck.

Right now I'm using ecartis for my mailing lists, primarily because it isn't mailman. (Long story).

For making archives of mbox files I'm using hypermail.

The latter I intend to change as soon as I can find something else to use. It isn't attractive, but it is in the Debian archive and seems reliable.

Since I was changing things around already I've centralised the list-archive making, and started using the haschanged tool to avoid rebuilding the archives i there are no new posts. That works nicely.

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If you were a comic book character, what character would you be?

19 February 2010 21:50

I've been overhauling the way that I am host a number of virtual websites upon my main box. Partly to increase security, and partly for a cleaner separation or roles, ownership, and control. (In general everything on my box is "mine", but some things are "ours"...)

After a fair amount of experimentation I decided that I wasn't willing or able to rewrite all my Apache mod_rewrite rules just yet. So my interim plan was to update each existing virtual host:

  • Add a dedicated user & group to run it under.
  • Launch it via a minimal server listening upon the loopback adapter.
  • Have Apache 2.x proxy through to it.
    • Expanding any mod_rewrite rules prior to the proxying.

To make it clear what the users were for I decided that every hosting-user would have an "s-" prefix. So the virtual host "static.steve.org.uk" was initially going to be served by the s-static user.

The thttpd configuration file would look like this, and would be located in /etc/thttpd/sites/static.steve.org.uk:

host=127.0.0.1
port=1008
dir=/home/www/static.steve.org.uk/htdocs/
chroot
user=s-static
throttles=/etc/thttpd/throttle.conf
logfile=/home/www/static.steve.org.uk/logs/thttpd.log
pidfile=/home/www/static.steve.org.uk/pid/file

(I wrote a trivial script to stop/start all the sites en mass, and removed the default thttpd init script, logrotation job, and similar things.)

How did I decide which port to run this instance under? By taking the UID of the user:

steve@skx:~$ id s-static
uid=1008(s-static) gid=1009(s-static) groups=1009(s-static)

With this in place I could then update the Apache configuration file from serving the site directly to merely proxying to the back-end server:

<VirtualHost *>
    ServerName  static.steve.org.uk

    # Proxy ACL
    <Proxy *>
        Order allow,deny
        Allow from all
    </Proxy>

    # Proxy directives
    ProxyPass          /   http://localhost:1008/
    ProxyPassReverse   /   http://localhost:1008/
    ProxyPreserveHost on
</VirtualHost>

So was that all there is to it? Sadly not. There were a couple of minor issues, some of which were:

cronjobs

I have various cron-jobs in my main steve account which previously updated blog indexes, etc. (I use namazu2 to make my blog searchable.)

I had to change the ownership of the existing indexes, the scripts themselves, and move the cronjob to the new s-blog user.

cross-user dependencies

I run a couple of sites which pull in content from other locations. For example a couple of list summaries, and archives. These are generally fed from a ~/.procmail snippet under my primary login.

Since my primary login no longer owns the web-tree it is no longer able to update things directly. Instead I had to duplicate a couple of subscriptions and move this work under the UID of the site-owner.

I'm no longer running apache

For a day or two I'd forgotten I was using the apache facility to include snippets in my site; such as links to my wishlist.

Since I'm not using Apache in the back-end server-parsed files no longer work. Happily I'm using a simple template-based setup for my main sites, so I updated the template-parser to understand "##include ./path/to/file". For example this source file produces my donation page.

The upshot is my "static" site is even more static, which is a good thing.

uploads are harder

Several of my domains host entirely static content which is generated on my main desktop machine, and then uploaded via rsync post-build.

I had to add some more accounts and configure SSH keys, then update the uploading routines/Makefiles appropriately. Not a major annoyance, but suddenly my sshd_config file has gone from "PermitUser steve,backup" to including many additional accounts.

The single biggest pain was handling my my mercurial repositories - overhauling that took a bit of creativity to ensure that nothing was broken for existing or new checkouts. I wish that a backport of mercurial-server was trivial because I'd love to be using that.

In general though watching the thttpd logs has been sufficient to spot problems. I had to tweak things a little to generate statistics properly, but otherwise all is good.

Why thttpd? Well small, lightweight, and the ability to run CGI scripts. Something missing from nginx for example.

I'm still aiming to remove apache2 from the front-end - it is mostly just a dumb proxy, but it does perform some ACL operations and expand mod_rewrite rules. I could port those to another engine .. but not today.

The most likely candidates are nginx, perlbal, or lighttpd - each of these should be capable of doing simple ACL checks, and performing mod_rewrite-like rules.

ObFilm: Mallrats

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