Utah Open Source Blog

This Sunday I was given a call by our VPS provider.  There was a power outage at the colo where the virtual machine was housed.  I still have a few questions about why it wasn’t on a UPS (or if it was) and why it took so long to get power restored.  I guess I’ll get to those soon enough, but it caused some unintended outages and is probably a good test for all the system stuff we have running.

Specifically, the Utah Open Source Planet failed to update for two days, which, if you are following our feed, is probably why you just saw a bunch of posts come through.  It turns out the software I use, planet, was working fine.  However, it appeared to be the problem due to the misleading errors it was getting.  The error code was:

ERROR:planet:Error 500 while updating feed <url://to.planet/rss.feed>

This error would appear for each of the entries we have in our planet.  However, the error was not the planet’s fault.  At first, I grabbed one of the url’s and tried it in my browser, no problem.  The rss feed would load up just fine.  After a few minutes of digging, I started researching the network.  What I discovered was that I wasn’t able to resolve any hostname.

Because we run our own dns servers, we also point our machines at those servers.  However, when the power went out on Sunday, it appears we didn’t have the dns server set to automatically start on boot.  A quick chkconfig command to fix that and we’re back up.  Thus, the consequence in this case was lack of planet updates for a while.

However, I feel we were lucky (and good).  For the most part, things worked, that’s a good sign, but I think this goes back to one key principle in a system administrator’s repertoire.  Make sure to test your systems to validate that they come back up correctly.  Lucky for us, this was a minor service, but a service nonetheless.  I’m glad that everything else worked and it’s been a good testing day for that reason.

Cheers,

Clint

Over the past few weeks, Utah Open Source (UTOS) has been working hard to provide a new version of the Utah Open Source Planet (UTOSP).  This version is based upon the PlanetPlanet feed aggregator.  The look and feel is modified from templates provided by the Fedora Planet. The Utah Open Source Planet at http://openclue.org, run by Gabe Gunderson, will continue to function for the foreseeable future.

Why the change?

The Utah Open Source Foundation has had in its plans for some time to create a Planet built solely from people providing useful technical experiences.  Many of the blogs on the current UTOSP are political, religious and many other non-technical related topics.

The point here is that many people enjoy blogging about items outside open source and technology. While blogging about whatever you like is a fine thing to do, the new UTOSP will do its best to provide options for those individuals who prefer to just discuss technology. To that end, the new UTOSP will provide multiple options to the choosy reader.  Of course there will be the full planet, with feeds from everyone, as well as a planet just for LUGs and Event announcements.

The Request

We at UTOS will be contacting those on the current planet.  The plan will be to obtain a few feeds from each contributor.  The feeds will be ‘general’ and ‘technology only’ or something along these lines.  The idea is to provide options to our readers by providing them multiple ways to get at the information they’d like to read.  If you are unavailable or unable to provide these alternate feeds, your blog will only appear on the planets for which you do have feeds, currently the ‘general’ planet.

The Future Planet

If the future plans hold, there will be a planet based upon popular categories and tags.  These planets will be static at first, then move to a more dynamic ‘pick & choose’ functionality creating a dynamic page and rss feed associated with an account.

The functional site will, for now, provide simple rss feeds based upon requests made to clints@utos.org. Watch for these changes over the next few weeks and months and feel free to provide feedback as we really would like to hear from you.  Comments here on this post or send an email.  As always, come on by #utos on irc.freenode.net as well.

Cheers,

Clint