Mucho servaro pokero

Posted by stephen on Monday, 27th March, 2006 @ 18:21

I've been up to my eyeballs in servers lately. Last week was mostly spent inside an SSH session or three to the servers in Scotland Richard had been kind enough to install for me. And incredibly we got all the services of a RegenTV system up and running in about 4 days, albeit in a slightly unrefined state right now (no DHCP and no LDAP directory). Still, pretty impressive we thought.

My little local machine's been reconfigured with a few experimental services. The instant browser VNC service I've talked about before got a nice little improvement and can now poke the pre-launched session with a URL given when the STB requests the page, so we can put links to all kinds of things in the interface now and not have to have a separate bank of browser sessions available for each one.

Unfortunately the Amino VNC client we've got doesn't support VNC displays higher than 99, so I'm going to have to improve things further and make it keep a closer eye on sessions and reallocate the old displays when they're no longer used.

A little further repurposing of the same system provides a Solitaire (plus loads more card games) session to the set top box to keep our clients' customers amused for hours. As instant display of games is less important I can probably refine this to run any game when requested and only spawn the VNC session on request. It'll also need to be enhanced to keep an eye on sessions getting over 99.

My next mission from Richard... get the set top box talking. A quick fiddle with festival's handy text2wave command and a pipe to lame gives me a nice little MP3 of my computer having a chat with me (would you like to play a game??). A quick run through of the Amino documentation and with no real effort on my part the STB is talking to me too! Primary objective complete. Now to refine things a little so any chat's we've already had get cached and don't need to be generated from scratch every time.

But before I get involved with too much with making my little toys 'enterprise class', robust and scalable, etc, which presumably means rewriting everything in C or Java instead of Python, introducing lots of holes and making it all a little less portable, there's more server tweaking to be performed.

This morning the server I share with Cal has been acting like a real dog when it comes to serving web pages. The server itself isn't particularly loaded though. It happens quite a lot to my site and Richard's as we're both running Plone and proxying in Apache 1.3 isn't too efficient for doing that. But this time it was every site, even the entirely static ones.

So a little bit of fiddling and I managed to pin it down to something non-specific running on one of Cal's many sites. It finally gave me the push I needed to migrate to Apache 2. Though as there's so many sites that seems like an awful lot of work, and the main reason for doing it is to make the Plone sites work better.

I decided the easiest thing to do was order a new IP address, tie Apache 1.3 to the original address and install Apache 2 and bind it to the new address, then just copy my configs over and repoint the DNS. Well, that worked pretty well, and not long after the old server started behaving again, strangely enough.

The rest of the day so far has been spent installing a mobile demo server that runs as many of the RegenTV services as possible and can have a set top box hooked into it to make showing of the service nice and easy. I love Ubuntu.