8 Weeks without D: Week 6

Days 26-30: 16-20/12/2013

Monday morning

• J back from holidays for a week. He has noticed that a new service is down and he doesn't have access to the machine to restart. Restart machine and add J to access list.
• F arrives in office; Portfolio site down again. Restart system - all good for about 2 minutes and then stylesheets and images stop being served. No useful log messages that I can find. Spend 30 minutes trying to work out what is wrong - no luck. Give up and restart web server in desperation - all good.

8 Weeks without D: Week 5

Days 21-25: 9-11/12/2013

Week of the Plone update: all went well

Also the week I have been diagnosed with hypertension and placed on medication.

Some shibboleth configuration files needed updating.

Don't think I had to restart the portfolio site but can't remember for sure.

8 Weeks without D: Week 4

Days 16-20: 2-6/12/2013

All a blur - no memory of disasters......

8 Weeks with out D: Week 3

Days 11-15: 25-29/11/2013

It's all becoming a blur - days are blending into one another. Must remember to keep better notes....

Finally decided I'd better do some research on the system patching that is coming up. There are 18 sites that need to be patched, consisting of 7 different versions of the software of which only 1 is at a check point version.

At this point I'm just hoping that everything goes smoothly!

Oh - and D is the fire warden for our section of the building and they have decided to have the annual fire drill next week. So I have been nominated replacement fire warden until D returns from leave. Red cap and fluro safety vest look quite fetching.

SSHFS on OS X

A while ago I set up sshfs on my iMac and created an Automator script for easy of use. As I had never used Automator before, I did a bit of web searching for instructions and found this blog to be really useful - thanks bhfsteve!

8 Weeks without D: Week 2

Day 6: Monday 18/11

• Research Centres & Institutes site stopped responding- Nginx webserver returning 504
• User rang my office phone at 1:52pm - unfortunately I was at lunch and then a meeting so I didn't get back tot he office until around 3pm. 
• Checked logs - no indication of what went wrong in the places I looked so did a service restart. System came back up fine and the service was restored.
• Set up nagstamon on my workstation - now seeing alerts and warnings for all systems.

Day 7: Tuesday 19/11

• F arrives at office at 9:15am: RSS feed has stopped showing on the Portfolio site. This feed comes from a main corporate site which underwent a redesign over the weekend.
• Found URL for the feed and checked it - feed is empty.
• Emailed URL of the feed to F who will follow up with relevant unit.
• Noticed Research Portfolios site was returning a 504 (10:30am)
• Again no  indication of cause in the logs
• Restarted service - all good now.

Day 8-10: 20-22/11

• No disasters! 
• All quiet on the western front.

8 weeks without D: Week 1

Okay, so the main developer/sys administrator, D, is away for 8 weeks - and we get to mind the shop without him. He left us lots of instructions and assured us we would be fine. Us - well there are two of us (me and J), except one of us (J) will be also away for four of those weeks. So for four weeks it will just be me...

So I thought I'd keep track of any issues that occurred while D was away so I can report accurately when he returns.

Getting autofs working on a Centos NeCTAR vm

So I have to set up a web server on a NeCTAR vm to allow public access to some research data that is sitting on RDSI storage in the QCIF UQ node. The node support team requested that instead of just NFS mounting the data storage to the vm, it would be preferable to use autofs to mount the filesystem.

I'm not a sys-admin type - mostly my linux environments are all set up for me so this was a bit of an adventure. I had quite a few problems so, with the aim of helping out future non sys-admin types in the same position, I thought I should document what I had to do.

Fix for disappearing records in ReDBox

Post upgrade to 1.6 we have had problems with records "disappearing" when progressing through the workflow. This has happened with records created in the previous version that have been sitting in "Investigation" or "Metadata Review" stages. To fix, edit the .tfpackage file for the appropriate record and add in the following after the metadata array:

    "packageType": "dataset",
    "viewId": "default",
    "known_ids": "<redbox_record_id>"