[cobalt-users] Re: Raq550: A quick review - I feel like a crash test dummy

[Chris Adams <cmadams@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Once upon a time, John D. Gorena <Support@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> said:
> 2) About the Symlinks . . .  I was not clear or you misunderstood AND I
> admit my opening sentence in that paragraph was accidently misleading. 
> The subject was really about mail files being in different places
> instead of an easy place to find them all.  But yes, you are correct. 
> Symlinks are the way to get around but I would have to know the site and
> the user name to find it on the raq550.  On the raq4, they are in the
> /home/spool/mail directory.  It is an easy way for me to check their
> file size/dates (using "ls -la") to note who is not checking e-mail so I
> can call my clients and verify that they are not having any problems
> (its a customer service thing but that is another subject).  

I see - I didn't realize you were talking about mail.  Yes, they've put
mail in the home directories on the RaQ550 (again, this is generally a
good thing for performance - having thousands of mail files in a common
directory is a performance bottleneck).

You can always do (something like this should work):

cd /home/sites
ls -l site*/users/*/mbox

> I assume that you use a Raq550?

I've demoed one (but it went back a couple of weeks ago; that's why my
example above is approximate) - we are considering it to replace our
current RaQ1, RaQ2, and RaQ3 mix.

> 3) Sorry, CI was supposed to be CGI.  My spell checker changed it.  Did
> you have to change your CGI files to get them to work?

I only tested a couple of CGIs (but they did some "odd" things), but I
didn't have any problems that I recall.  I did have to do some
significant work to make my customer management scripts work, but they
work much better now; I've got a nice script that uses Net::SSH::Perl to
remotely access the CCE (Cobalt Configuration Engine) and make changes
(so for example I can script changing the admin password across multiple
servers simultaneously).

> 4) Thank you for telling me about .db files in /var/db.  I assume you
> are not having problems with password protecting directories?  What did
> you do your Raq550 or what examples of files can you give to make it
> work?  On the raq4, I could 

We've never tried to use system passwords to password protect
directories.  It only works on a RaQ3/4 (and RaQ2?) because of the hack
for FrontPage users to use system passwords - I don't think that was
ever considered a supported method for general authentication.

In fact, it is generally not a recommended thing for security reasons
(gives someone an easy way to try to crack passwords remotely without
raising any alerts).

I don't think you will be able to do that on the RaQ550 without some
additional software "helper" program.

> 5) When you run "./httpd restart" (from /etc.rc.d/init.d) do you get an
> error message that says "No VirtualHosts"?

I didn't try that.

> 6) Is there a program on the raq550 that fixes user/site problems like
> "meta-verify" does on the raq4?

In general, you shouldn't see the kind of inconsistencies on the RaQ550
because of the new CCE.  The CCE is a scripted database kind of thing,
that enforces consistency when data is changed.  The only thing that
should be able to cause problems is if you try to go behind the CCE's
back and make changes yourself.  If you instead use the CCE methods (see
the Sausalito documentation for the Qube3), there is no need for
anything like meta-verify (I've only needed meta-verify once, when a
customer really messed up a leased RaQ).

The RaQ550 is as different from the RaQ4 as the RaQ2 was from the RaQ1.
In the case of the RaQ1->RaQ2, the changes were for the better, and I
think they are in the case of the RaQ550 as well.
-- 
Chris Adams <cmadams@xxxxxxxxxx>
Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services
I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble.