I decided to do a much delayed upgrade to the website yesterday. It involved:

• Putting the site into maintanance mode
• Backing up the current site
• Backing up the database
• Disabling all the installed modules
• Removing any non-default content in the webserver directory
• Extracting the latest minor revision of the software and testing that
• Extracting the next major version at the latest minor revision and doing the same (if this had been multiple major revisions, this process would repeat until up to the latest major/minor)
• Copying back the couple of directories that had old settings
• Running a database upgrade script (as the database changes every so often)
• Looking for current versions of all the installed modules and installing them again
• Firing it up and hoping nothing changed

Well, things went great until I discovered that the calendar module doesn’t exist in the current major revision (only 12 minor revisions have come out since it was released and the next major is in beta).

Meeting this Thursday at Pythian.

Bruce got interested in the qmail mail system as a result of mentioning the rocks project and has hit a snag during install. Assuming there is no other topic, we can go over the installation og Qmail as per the rocks project documentation during the meeting.

There was no commentary on the previous talk, so I’m going to ignore doing a practical install of djbDNS in favor of the qmail install, possibly more attractive to attendees.

POsted by Bruce:

I’m working on trying to get the qmailrocks project going on a vmware instance of Ubuntu 9.04.

I’ve come across a road block. When I get the part where the command to enter is:

./config-fast your\_fqdn\_hostname**

I entered:

./config-fast post.cyberserfdom.com

This came back with a response of:

-bash: ./config-fast: No such file or directory

I tried:

sh config-fast.sh post.cyberserfdom.com

This came back with a response of:

Your fully qualified host name is post.cyberserfdom.com

Putting post.cyberserfdom.com into control/me

Config-fast.sh: 5: cannot create QMAIL/control/me directory nonexistent

Chmod: cannot access 'Qmail/control/me' no such file or directory

Putting post.cyberserfdom.com into control/defaultdomain

Config-fast.sh: 13: cannot create QMAIL/control/ defaultdomain directory
nonexistent

Chmod: cannot access 'Qmail/control/ defaultdomain' no such file or
directory

Putting post.cyberserfdom.com into control/plusdomain

Config-fast.sh: 20: cannot create QMAIL/control/ plusdomain directory
nonexistent

Chmod: cannot access 'Qmail/control/ plusdomain' no such file or
directory

Putting post.cyberserfdom.com into control/locals

Config-fast.sh: 23: cannot create QMAIL/control/ locals directory
nonexistent

Chmod: cannot access 'Qmail/control/ locals' no such file or directory

Putting post.cyberserfdom.com into control/rcpthosts

Config-fast.sh: 27: cannot create QMAIL/control/ rcpthosts directory
nonexistent

Chmod: cannot access 'Qmail/control/ rcpthosts' no such file or
directory

Now qmail will refuse to accept smtp messages except to post.cyberserfdom.com

I gave a presentation of a DNS rollout I had participated in (well, basically rolled the whole show), but that’s getting picky.

I’m hoping it was somewhat entertaining and that it had some value for those who attended. I’m considering doing a followup where we actually go over the rollout by doing it and testing. I’m not 100% sure how I’ll present it, as some will be slides, some will be practical.

The conference is over, and it’s time to return to the mundane. It was a good time - formal talks, social activity and lots of idea exchanges. Actually a very good time. If I was independently wealthy, I’d probably spend most of my time attending conferences. I hear BSDCan 2010 will be on for next year, so at the very least I have that to look forward to.

I did not attend any of the highly technical presentations, as I’m effectively a BSD newbie (well, I used it for years in the 80’s), but I don’t really have much experience with the modern versions. That is a task for this year. I have the iso images, vmware, enough physical machines to brown out the neighborhood and time to learn.