Any update on appsy

[Andreas Pour]

Hi,

I guess I should subscribe to the kde-www mailing list :-).  Jason, if this does
not get through please forward to kde-www, thanks.

The outage was prolonged due to a number of hardware failures, the one most
difficult to locate being a faulty memory module which revealed itself only
after running memtest for 14 hours (yuck!).

In addition, since the system was 2 years old and no longer supported, I had to
do a full system OS upgrade.

Over the weekend I finally completed the hardware upgrades, and have managed to
restore
  * the databases
  * the html/php tree
  * the mailing lists
  * the name server
  * the customized shell scripts
  * crontabs

The following remains to be done:
  * finish fixing ownership (all the groups and owners changed)
  * update httpd.conf and friends and SSL certificates
  * update various other configuration files (time sync, ftp, bash, etc.)
  * probably custom-compile PHP, depending on if some used features are missing
(which appears to be the case)
  * probably debug the scripts for some time (I had never been able to upgrade
past an early PHP 4.0 release candidate since the scripts triggered some bug in
PHP which caused the apache process to hang forever - this brings the site down
rather quickly)
  * do a security check
  * test everything a bit

At that point I can bring the sites back up sans a few things such as
searching.  I will work on that once the other sites are back up again.

I anticipate I can get that done before I go to sleep Tuesday night, but the
"debug the scripts" step is a bit unpredictable.  I have spent *many*, *many*
hours in the past trying to debug this - the hardest bug I ever had on the site
b/c the problem occurs when PHP winds down and is somwhere in the apache/PHP
interface - but I am also thinking some changes I made since my last effort at
running PHP > 4.0 may have taken care of the problem.

As to the follow-up mail by Andy, I have no idea where the "August 19, 2001"
date comes from, but if you could update it to "October 9, 2002" that would be
great :-).

Anyway, thanks for the concern and of course I am very sorry about the extended
outage.  Hint if you have wierd problems that occur only rarely but screw things
up:  check your memory with memtest (though this can take forever, after
upgrading the memory I ran the test for 36 hours and then gave up b/c I needed
to get the site up ;-) ).

Ciao,

Dre

> Hi Dre,
> 
> Is there any update on the status of our beloved appsy? There are a lot of 
> people eagerly awaiting it's return.
> 
> Regards,
> - -- 
> Jason Bainbridge
> KDE - Conquer Your Desktop
> The KDE Usability Project - http://usability.kde.org
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