Day: August 9, 2007

Cutover complete

The old box is shut down, hopefully never to be turned on again, and the new box is up and running with nearly all the old functionality. It’s very quiet in this office with that old beast off.

As well as the base install, and fixing all the Ubuntu stupidity (and a few bugs in the munin-node scripts), I had to install and configure all the following:

Apache2
Postfix
Postgresql
MovableType
Bind
user accounts
bogofilter
spamassassin
Root cronjobs
ssh tunnel
My cronjobs
trn
/etc/profile
Mutt configuration
munin
squirrelmail
iptables/ssh-black
frm/nfrm
ftp server
NFS export /mp3s

I still need to get nut set up to control the UPS, and hook up a printer and configure it. I’d also like to get Java and eclipse set up so I can do some work on it.

Right now iTunes is cranking away importing the “iTunes Music Library.xml” where I changed the old nfs mount point to the new one. It’s taking a while.

More ubuntu weirdness

  1. Ubuntu is set up to use anacron, but the /etc/crontab is set up to not run the /etc/cron.daily stuff if anacron is installed by surrounding the normal “run-parts /etc/cron.daily” with “test -x /usr/sbin/anacron || ()”. Which is unnecessary because there is already a “0anacron” file in /etc/cron.daily to update the anacron timestamp if it’s being run out of cron instead of anacron. This means that there is no way I can get the /etc/cron.daily stuff to run at night when the system is idle instead of at 7am when I’m reading my morning email. I had to change the runtime in /etc/crontab to 3am, and delete the anacron checking. We’ll see tomorrow if that helps.
  2. Ubuntu installs findutils and slocate. findutils has an /etc/cron.daily job called “find” that runs updatedb. slocate installs its own updatedb and moves the findutils one to updatedb.notslocate. It has an /etc/cron.daily job called “slocate” that also runs updatedb. The slocate deb file moves /etc/cron.daily/find, but instead of doing something useful like moving it where it won’t get executed, or updating it so that it runs the findutils version of updatedb, it just renames it to /etc/cron.daily/find.notslocate. So slocate’s updatedb gets run twice every night. That’s pretty useless.

I’m getting the impression that Ubuntu, in spite of all the hype, is a pretty damn amateurish operation.