Cal's work life

Just got back from keele from the JISC innovation forum.

Tomcat version 5.5 doesn't come with the facility to rotate the main log file any more. It assumes that it will be largely empty and applications will handle their own logging properly, which is an over optimistic assumption. As a result have had to add log rotation to tomcat. It seem very strange out of the box to have to go download jars and add config files to tomcat to make this happen, surely it would be easy enough to package the jars up and add a default config file so that rotating the logs was just a case of throwing a config switch. Tomcat is great but compared to httpd need much more tweaking to get it into a stable production configuration.

I have been fine tuning the setup of the HAshib plug-in we use to share session data between the two live shib servers that will become the in service shib servers once we are happy with them. Out of the box we had some issues with session failing to replicate in time between the two services. I have altered time-out settings for replication and the session life time and that seems to have fixed the issues. Will test it for a week to see if anyone finds any problems. Sanjay has had a go at getting some stats/monitorability from the replication facility so we will try that out.

Have spent the last week or so upgrading the shibboleth infrastructure we use. At present it is being tested and we will upgrade the live production servers shortly. The new infrastructure has two live server located in different machine rooms. This should enable us to handle machine room failures much more easily without major service interruption. The HASHIB extension from Georgetown uni has proved very useful for this.

The nice thing about shib is we can run the old service and the new service in parallel, enabling us to test and incrementally swap out services using the old infrastructure. Yet again loose coupling of services proves its worth.

The nice folks at bedework.org sent us two bedework mugs by airmail for deploying their bedework calendaring solution. I have to say I'm rather impressed by the gesture. I never realised my threshold on things that impressed me started at porcelain.