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

[Mark Tearle]

Hi Andrew

Working through things ....

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


Excellent news.

> 
> 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.

DONE.  DNS change has been done.

I've also done a reboot of maculatus and it appears to come up cleanly.

> 
> 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.
> 

No worries.   I'll leave it up to you to automate, other than to note that this VM is _NOT_
currently in the UCC backups.

> 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.
> 

I've changed flames UID to 4242 to fix this.  Nick looked up the UIDs for yourself and flame historically.  Flame has been 26 and 10026 in previous passwd files.    Your password entry is coming from AD, whereas flame is a local user on the VM.

> 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...
> 

Will leave it broken for the moment.

> 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.

IP and DNS entry have both been decommisioned.
 
> 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.
>

Good news, best of luck :)

 
> 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

Happy to help work through this more (for the FTP server) but probably after the mail server upgrades.


Anyhow, let me know when you've done the final sync from mooneye


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