response 75 of 130:

Jan 16 08:09 UTC 1996

It seems clear that we are going to have a different web server and it
will be configured differently. We are going to try to get a better 
match to the rest of the world for URLS. What this means for Grex's web users
in that they will not be able to use full path URLs to get to their documents.
Instead, they must use the ~ form of URL. http://www.cyberspace.org/~yourid

Also the URLs of Grex's documents will be shortened greatly. The
/usr/local/lib/lynx that appears in almost all of them will need to be
removed. I don't think this will be a problem, as I have removed all of the
internal pointers already by using relative path names. This might break some
entries in people's hot lists, though.

response 77 of 130:

Jan 16 13:55 UTC 1996

If I had a penny for every time I had to change a URL in may
oages, I'd have $7.43.

response 79 of 130:

Jan 19 12:01 UTC 1996

("may oages"?  Ugh!  Make that "my pages".)

I've been wondering about that too, and apart from the motd,
I don't think there's any place we can put that kind of
announcement and have any hope of reaching most of the users
who need to see it.  (Obviously the motd message would say
something like:  "Web users, please read /u/robh/webnews for
important info.")

response 81 of 130:

Jan 19 23:10 UTC 1996

Sounds like something for our resident CGI expert.  srw, do
you think we can implement that?

response 83 of 130:

Jan 22 00:47 UTC 1996

Upon further analysis, it looks like the biggest problem is our 
users database in /usr/local/lib/lynx/users.html

All of the pointers use the old fashioned /u/person/www/index.html format,
because that was the only format that worked (for non-members here using lynx
from Grex). Now that we have fixed the bug in the sun-3 kernel blocks, all
users can use the new (proper) from which is the only one that will work when
we go to the sun-4. So it seems to me that the time is right NOW to change
all these pointers to the new form. /~person

I propose to do that right away.

Once these changes are in place for a week, we will be able to see if there
are still a lot of accesses coming in via the old URL format.

response 85 of 130:

Jan 23 09:36 UTC 1996

<grin>  Srw sent that mail an hour or two ago.

response 87 of 130:

Jan 23 15:05 UTC 1996

He sent mail to both, actually.

response 89 of 130:

Jan 25 05:27 UTC 1996

We will see if there are a lot of accesses once we have gathered up some log
info regarding accesses since we changed our own pointers to users pages.
This will give us a better idea if certain users' sites are going to have
problems with this conversion.  Unfortunately there's no way to make this
transition painless, but we can work to spread it out over time a bit.

response 91 of 130:

Mar 12 03:47 UTC 1996

   I am pleased to say that the Sun-4 is now at the Dungeon.

   We aren't readily to move onto it just yet--there are still
some things to do, and then security issues to check.  But its
over in the Dungeon now, and thats good.

   What needs to still be done?  Well,

 - Pine still needs to be compiled, I think.
 - The software that blocks non-members fromm telnetting/FTP out
   needs to be installed (It's written, but has to be installed)
 - Various things need to be beaten on security wise.

   So, there is still some stuff to be done.  Once that stuff is
finished, there will be the actual process to move the 2G disk
over to the Sun-4, which will be involved.  Since /home has been
bitten on so many times these last several months, we want to
make a backup of it, and reformat it before restoring all the
data again.  There are other issues too, such as getting the
sun-4 up to 128M of ram, and installing the ALM serial card.

   *Plan on Grex being down for a weekend when this happens*

   THere are going to be a lot of things that need to happen,
and if we run into problems along the way it might take a day
or so to get them resolved.  So, if we say plan for a weekend
and we get done in one day, everyone will be happy.

response 93 of 130:

Mar 12 13:39 UTC 1996

Re pine: If it isn't already installed on the Sun 4, I'll take care of it.

response 95 of 130:

Mar 12 16:14 UTC 1996

A suggestion:  During the weekend that grex will be down, someone might want
(beforehand) to publish a URL of an alternate site where info about how the
change-over is proceeding (especially if it doesn't proceed 100% smoothly).

response 97 of 130:

Mar 12 17:17 UTC 1996

   The backup is going to not be a big deal, at least in terms og
problems--we aren't going to do a "dump", but rather, one *huge* tar
backup of /home.  This gets around the problems of strangness in the
filesystem to a great extent, or perhaps I should more accurately say
this gets rid of weirdnesses with dump.  A tar file is just one loooong
file, no matter now big it is.  If we had to, if we found problems with
a section of it, we could write code that could wander through it,
skipping bad parts, etc.

   Kevin, you have a wonderful idea.  We'll do that.

response 99 of 130:

Mar 19 01:51 UTC 1996

Yes, this is impressive:
  8:42pm  up 1 day, 21 mins,  54 users,  load average: 3.18, 2.93, 3.16