APCUG 2008 Leadership Development Conference May 16-18 in West Nyack, NY

dmapub upgrade Sun. Sept. 19, 2004

The dmapub system was down for an extended time Sunday, Sept. 19, 2004 for a major upgrade. We replaced the PC with a newer, faster one.

The replacement motherboard and CPUs were anonymously donated to DMA® last spring. Due to the all volunteer nature of the dmapub administration team, it took a bit longer than originally anticipaged to get the motherboard and other hardware installed and tested in a new case & power supply, install a new operating system and applications, and finally copy configuration info and data from the old dmapub.

As with many projects, this one had a few glitches. Dmapub has been on-line since 8:37 pm Sunday Sept. 19, however it was not accessible by users who dial in directly until late Thursday night. Most login via other methods, or only access dmapub via pop3 or imap to read mail, or via FTP to update web pages, etc. However it is accessible via ssh, and was available for a short while via telnet. For security reasons, we've disabled telnet access. Likewise for security reasons, we no longer allow FTP access, however we do allow SFTP (Secure FTP) access. We have links to several free SSH, SFTP clients, and other utilities at www.gemair.com/intxtras.htm. FileZilla defaults to FTP. To use FileZilla in SFTP mode, select servertype SFTP using SSH2 in its Site Manager. At least some versions of Dreamweaver support SFTP - see snurl.com/9l9v.

The first time you attempt to login to dmapub.dma.org (AKA www.dma.org, www.daytonlanfest.com, etc.) using a ssh client such as PuTTY or an sftp client such as FileZilla, you will see a message asking for confirmation of the server's key fingerprint. Also, if you had used ssh or sftp with any of these names for host 209.115.68.80 before Sept. 19, 2004, you will be warned of a possible security breach and that the fingerprint has changed. The fingerprint of the new server is:

Effective approx. 3:50 pm Saturday, April 8, 2006, our new IP address is 64.56.115.40.

Thanks for your patience and understanding while we work to improve service for all dmapub users, the dma.org, otap.org, & Dayton Perl Mongers web sites, mailing lists, FUD forum, photo SIG gallery, etc.

Known issues, in no particular order:

• Users could not telnet into dmapub - fixed as of about 6 pm Monday, Sept. 20. Please note that we have subsequently disabled telnet access. Please use ssh instead - see link above for ssh clients such as ttssh, etc.
• Users could not FTP into dmapub. We will not be enabling FTP into dmapub for security reasons. Use SFTP (Secure FTP) instead - see link above for SFTP clients such as FileZilla, etc. FileZilla works well, unless your login shell is m.sh (our menu). If you need to use FileZilla, your login shell must be changed to a regular shell, such as /bin/bash.
• Auto-response not working for messages sent to info and certain other aliases - fixed about 1 pm Monday, Sept. 20
• Mailman mail list server not functional - fixed late Tuesday, Sept. 21
• CGI scripts didn't work in personal web pages - fixed about 10 pm Thursday, Sept. 23
• Users could not dial into dmapub - fixed as of about 10 pm Thursday, Sept. 23.
• No zmodem support - fixed installed lrzsz 2:40 am Saturday, Sept. 25
• No trn news reader installed - in the queue of things to be fixed, but since we no longer have a usenet news source... Pine can be used to read usenet news if you have a news source.
• User's CGI scripts not working - fixed Thursday, Sept. 23
• No joe editor installed - fixed Friday, Sept. 24.
• Web page counter not working - fixed Saturday, Sept. 25 - Count.cgi upgraded to 2.5. See full documentation here.
• No mpack/munpack support - fixed installed mpack 1:30 am Tuesday, Oct. 12.
• I'd noticed that some characters (the registered trademark symbol ®, for example) displayed strangely after the upgrade. It turns out that the default language is different on the new system. The LANG environment variable used to be "us_EN", but is now "us_EN.UTF-8". If that causes any problems for you, you may change your environment by adding the following line to your .profile or .bash_profile.

  export LANG="en_US"

• A user reported that the spelling checker in Pine no longer works as expected. To correct this, go to Pine's Main Menu, (type m), then to the Setup Menu (type s), then to the Configuration Menu (type c). Type w and search for speller. You will probably find the following:

  speller                        = <No Value Set>
  

  Then press c and change it to:

  speller                        = aspell --mode=email check 
  

  Now, type e to exit the Configuration Menu and y to save the change you just made. The spelling checker should now be more usefull. In case you didn't know it, you may also configure Pine to automatically spell check your message before sending. By default, it doesn't.

Please report any problems relating to dmapub to <root at dma dot org>.

--
The dmapub system administration team

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