[tech] Flame VM (was Re: Reducing entropy on mooneye )

[Mark Tearle]

Hi Andrew

Was planning to do the DNS change and work through the rest of the list on Saturday afternoon / evening.  I'll respond back to this email when I've done that.

Mark

--
Mark Tearle <mtearle at ucc.asn.au>

On Fri, 12 Jun 2020, at 1:12 AM, Andrew Williams wrote:
> On 2020-06-08 4:25 PM, Mark Tearle wrote:
> > How goes your Zelda addiction?  Any joy with copying things over?  Let me know if you'd like me to just do it instead if you are too busy.
> 
> Hi Mark, slowly weaning myself off Zelda.
> 
> I've just tarballed /usr/flame/* onto /home/other/flame on mooneye, 
> untarred it on maculatus, and it's running now:
> 
> telnet maculatus.ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au 4242
> 
> It looks like the init script will fire up flame OK on a reboot, but I 
> can't try that. If you let me know when you want to swap the DNS over so 
> flame.ucc points to maculatus instead of mooneye, I'll kick everyone off 
> and copy over just the mudlib once more while the DNS change propagates.
> 
> As for the rest of the list:
> 
> 1) Flame needs to be copied over to the machine into /usr/flame, tested, 
> and the DNS updated to point flame at maculatus
> 
> The DNS change can happen right now.
> 
> 2) A cron job needs to be added to drop a backup of flame into 
> /home/other/flame (so it gets picked up by the normal UCC backups), and 
> any other backups need to be tested and made working
> 
> This is pretty low priority - nobody writes code on flame any more, so 
> the only files that change are last login times. There's a complete copy 
> of the whole directory tree on /home/flame/other now (driver and mudlib, 
> 110 Mb), and I have another copy on my machine at home.
> 
> 3) We might need to work out why flame has the same uid as andrew and 
> correct this.
> 
> Yep, that's weird. Until then, I don't have root access on mooneye or 
> maculatus. If I try to 'sudo' (on maculatus or mooneye), whether I'm 
> logged in as 'flame' or 'andrew', it asks for the the password for 
> 'flame', and as far as I know, the flame account doesn't have a 
> password. I can use sudo on motsugo, so it must just the UID clash on 
> those two machines.
> 
> 4) Email delivery to flame can probably be made to work again with an 
> appropriate bind mount added on the machine (and included in the ansible 
> role)
> 
> I don't think anyone has used this in 10 years...
> 
> 5) A decision to decommission the flame-tunnel IP address (all ports to 
> 4242 on flame) as we have the web to telnet gateway setup
> 
> Yep, agreed.
> 
> 6) I attempted to compile a copy of the driver source that was in the 
> flame directory - gcc barfs out of the box due to changes in varargs. 
> There looks like there are some modern forks of the code out there, but 
> would require further investigation by someone other than me
> 
> I'll have a play with new drivers using my copy at home.
> 
> 7) Fixing up the flame webserver - again someone other than me
> 8) Setting up a web to gopher gateway to access the flame gopher server
> 9) Fixing up UCC's finger installation (including finger flame at ucc)
> 
> Again, nobody has used any of these in years. The main thing I can see 
> being useful is resurrecting the flame FTP server, to make editing code 
> possible without using the horrible line editor.
> 
> Andrew
>