Category: Rant

Mum

We spent this past weekend saying goodbye to my mother. My brother has a ton of anger towards her, all justified. I won’t go into why. But it saddens me because he has so much anger towards her that he frequently directs it outwards. Fortunately, not towards me most of the time, because he sure used to direct his anger about both our parents towards me a lot when we were younger.

I’ve had many years of therapy dealing with my anger and sadness towards my parents, and my brother, and my dad’s second wife, and my ex-wife, etc. The good news is that I’m closer to my brother than I’ve ever been in my life.

Saying goodbye to my mother was hard. She was present at some of the happiest moments of my life, and some of the biggest accomplishments in my life. But she also left me bitter and abandoned several times in my life as she went on to other things.

When I heard she was dead, I didn’t cry. I barely felt anything. It had been coming for a while. When I went to British Columbia last week, I didn’t cry. I walked around her property and sat on her front porch and looked at her garden and her bird feeders and cried a bit. When we went down to the ocean to spread her ashes, I tried to think of something to say and nothing could sum up my complicated feelings. But when Brad and James let her ashes go into the ocean, I really did cry hard.

I’m still pretty choked up about it. Goodbye mum, I’ll try and remember the orienteering and skiing and backpacking and canoeing and forget the multiple multi-year periods where you couldn’t be bothered to talk to me.

More medical trauma

Yesterday I got my melanoma excised. Just like last time, the same PA proved unable to bandage me in a way that sticks. I tried to shave around the area so I could bandage it, but the shitty no-name bandaids I bought at CVS still didn’t stick. I think I’ll need to shave with a blade instead of an electric and buy some better bandaids. I took a picture without the bandaid on, and it’s quite spectacular. A Heidelberg fencer would be proud.

Grossness behind the “Read More”

Continue reading “More medical trauma”

Two steps forward, three steps back

Since writing Progress in the new server, I’ve been working on the Mailman3 stuff. First I tried installing it from Debian packages. One of the dependencies was for a proxy server, and since it couldn’t resolve the one using Apache (even though mod_proxy is in the default Apache conf-available) it installed nginx, a whole different web server. Seems like overkill to me. Also, I couldn’t find installation instructions that seemed to correspond with what the package installed. I could find them for Debian 10, but things have changed since then.

So for the last 3 days I’ve been trying to install it the manual way, using pip install in a virtual environment. It’s been going very slowly. I finally got to the point where I could create a mailing list, but when I try to import the Mailman the configuration for that list from the old server using the `import21` command, I get a python error. As near as I can tell, the error message indicates that somebody is using the `with` command with a Path object, but the stack trace is coming from deep within a package that used by another package that used by another package that’s used by Django, so that doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. Surely I’m not the first person to try to import an old configuration?

I’m also seeing weird occasional errors from it trying to access an invalid url, like /api on the proxied server, and I have no idea why that’s happening.

I’m almost at the point where I want to kill this entire “manual” install and try the Debian packages again. Maybe the experience I’ve gained from these days of frustration will help me understand what was going wrong when I tried it that way.

Maybe this time I should document the things I found about how the documentation is wrong, and send them to somebody on the Mailman team?

I knew this wasn’t going to be easy, but I didn’t think it would be this hard.

Progress in the new server

As I wrote about in And for my sins…, I’m moving a bunch of stuff from the linode I set up back when Debian 5.0 was the current over onto a new server which I set up with Debian 13. And so far, it’s gone pretty well.

Moving the “alink” site took a bit of trouble, mostly because I made a mistake as where I put the git repository and so I had to change any URLs from $HOME/alink to $HOME/alink/alink. Unfortunately “alink” involves scraping flight data from another website, and currently the users of that site don’t have any flights on the other website so I can’t make sure the site is working right.

Moving the “navaid.com” site was easier, because it’s mostly written in Perl and nothing changes in Perl these days. The biggest change was that the new version of Debian uses a newer version of PostgreSQL, and a new version of PostGIS.

The next task was setting up email. That was mostly no big deal, except I decided to use rspamd instead of openDKIM to do mail signing. It took a few attempts to get it right, mostly because I wanted to use different signatures for the different domains and subdomains I send email from. I had a bit of a setup glitch because rspamd allows you to sign messages with a ED25519 key, but the tool I use for verifying DKIM signatures doesn’t understand them, so Ihad to switch back to RSA keys. rspamd will provide spam filtering on incoming mail as a bonus but I doubt that will be an issue. I left off all the filtering I used to do in postfix for now, figuring that rspamd will handle it instead.

The latest thing I did was move the news spool over to the new server. I’d anticipated that I’d have to rebuild the history and/or overview databases, because I’m pretty sure I had to last time I moved them. But in actual fact, I just made sure I used the rsync option that respected sparse files, and I didn’t have to rebuild. I did get a few errors about inode discrepancies which I fixed with tdx-util -F. I didn’t bring over my cleanfeed implementation because I hadn’t updated it since 2002 so there’s probably a better version out there.

The last thing I need to do is migrate the Mailman mailing lists over. This is the one I’ve been dreading, so I’ve put it off until last. I’m going to have to do more research on how to do it. But the biggest problem is I don’t want to shut down my mailing lists for too long.

And for my sins…

I have a bunch of stuff running on a Virtual Private Server at a company called Linode. This instance first spooled up with Debian 5 was “stable”, and it’s currently running Debian 10. The only problem is that Debian 10 isn’t supported any more, and Debian 13 is now “stable”. At this point, I have two options:

  • I could upgrade incrementally from 10 to 11, 11 to 12, and 12 to 13, fixing all the problems that occur along the way or
  • I could do what the Linode tech support people have been begging me to do for a number of years, and spool up a new instance of Debian 13, and just transfer things one at a time to it.

I’m currently leaning towards the second option, but for two problems:

  • I would need to migrate my news spool. Last time I did that (I’m guessing sometime around 2010 or so?) I had to rebuild my overview database, which wasn’t a big deal, just that everything was kind of broken until I figured out how to do that. Also this time I’m using a new type of news spool, called a “timeCAF”. Don’t ask me what it means, I don’t recall. Only that the old way was one file for each article in each newsgroup, and this way makes files that contain multiple articles, and may or may not be “sparse” in the Linux definition of that. Which might complicate the move. I can’t seem to find any information on that yet, but I’m still looking.
  • The new Debian stable only has Mailman 3. I am currently running Mailman 2. I found a document about migrating from 2 to 3, but I think you need a computer with both installed, so I’m probably going to have to install the other one from source on one server or the other. My thought is that it’s probably better to upgrade on the old one so I don’t have to bring over any Mailman 2 cruft to the new server.

Other than that, I don’t anticipate any major trauma, just a lot of futzing around. I’ve done these upgrades in the past, and it’s usually been mostly a half a day of finding all the .dpkg-dist, .dpkg-old, and .dpkg-new files and diffing them with the corresponding config file and making whatever changes seem appropriate.