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2007

  • 1 min read

Web Services (Mostly) Restored

Most of our web services have been restored.

We had to merge our web and database servers into our new Solaris install by hand, so a small number of Perl/Python/PHP modules and various binaries may have been overlooked and forgotten. If you think we may have missed something, do not hesitate to let staff know! We'll get right on it!

Again, I apologize for the prolonged downtime. We're hoping that this latest version of Solaris will prove to be more reliable than the last, resulting in greater reliability and performance for all OCF web users.

  • 1 min read

Web and Database Server Upgrade

We are currently upgrading the operating system on our web and database host. I don't have an ETA, but we're doing our best to complete the process as quickly as possible. Thanks for your patience!

  • 1 min read

Oops

Some of you may have noticed that we had prolonged downtime on Wednesday, Feb 21. Long story short, I screwed up.

I was trying to fix our continuing file server problems by making changes to our server configuration and applying some Solaris patches. I brought the server and our core services down for a reboot, applied some patches, and booted up the system. Unfortunately, the boot process hung, so I waited a few minutes and tried rebooting. No dice.

After a few cycles of rebooting, monitoring, and various attempts at server black magic, I had pretty much given up when sluo, a former OCF Site Manager signed on and helped bring the server backup.

We're pretty sure a Solaris patch was to blame. The patch had worked on other OCF machines, but apparently our bleeding-edge SunFire T2000 didn't like it.

  • 1 min read

OCF Website Refresh

We are currently rolling out a facelifted look for the OCF pages, with XHTML1.0 Transitional and CSS compliant source code under the hood, starting with the most static pages and working the way towards the more heavily dynamic pages.

We're testing vigorously across the Firefox, Opera, Safari, and IE browsers, but there will be a few bugs along the way. So feel free to send any feedback our way. We're listening. Enjoy!

  • 1 min read

Web Application Testing Machine

Due to popular demand, we've created a Solaris zone on the hardware that hosts our web server so that users can directly test their web applications.

Just login to asteroid.ocf.berkeley.edu and get your web application development going!

  • 1 min read

Unhappy Web Server

As many of you have noticed, our web server has been experiencing lots of uptime issues. We're not exactly sure what's causing the problem, but we think it may be related to NFS and some prior issues we've had with the Solaris install on the machine. For now, it seems that rebooting the web server fixes the problem for a few hours, so, if you notice any issues with our web services, contact staff and we'll do something.

In regards to a long term solution to these problems, we are planning an overhaul of the Solaris install on the machine (read: re-install of the operating system). Unfortunately, this process is complicated by the fact that we have many other services hosted on the machine (in-lab printing, databases, etc), so check here for status updates regarding our repair plans.