[Dxspider-support] Permissions

[Kelly Leavitt]

I don't have access to spin up a new VM. This instance is donated by a local fiber provider free for our club, but on the understanding that I maintain it. I'm just glad I could do the upgrade from the command line.

I started back on ax.25 as KB2SYD-5. I had connections coming in directly on 2m at 1200 baud, through a node located on a nearby mountaintop relayed at 9600 baud on 440 and of course through telnet. I still have all of the equipment. I was actually kb2syd.ampr.org for a while too.

I also started in the Unix family all the way back in 1983. After all of these years, one thing I do know about computers is that I don't know much.

I am glad my issue was something as simple as permissions. There were old subdirectories and files with owner scarc (the sysop name I used to run the cluster under).
Getting everything to owner=sysop, group=sysop and the correct permissions has made it all work great again.

Thank you, Dirk for all the work you do keeping this alive.  A big thank you to all of the other contributors too.

If there is anything I can do to help, please reach out.

73 de Kelly
KE2L
-.- . ..--- .-..

________________________________
From: Dirk Koopman <djk at tobit.co.uk>
Sent: Tuesday, February 7, 2023 9:21 AM
To: Kelly Leavitt <kelly at catcorner.org>; The DXSpider Support list <dxspider-support at tobit.co.uk>
Subject: Re: [Dxspider-support] Permissions

I have a similar problem with a VM based system with severely out of date Ubuntu (16.04) and my solution was different (and not about the fact that the distro was so old it wouldn't upgrade, oh no, not at all, never).

I created a new VM, did the few changes that VMs always need (users/passwords etc), installed the perl packages and then simply rsynced the whole of spider tree across. I then (temporarily) changed the node callsign, ran update_sysop.pl and started it up. And it just worked. When I'm happy I shall change the node callsign, update the dns, stop the old node, rsync the few changes (spots,  logs etc) across, start the new node and the dump the old VM.

People forget that it's pure perl and can run on anything (including bsd,  Window 95 (please don't), 7 (ditto), 10 or 11 given a decent version of perl). The only problem is the (as far as I am concerned) obsolescent C client (for ax25 and other non-IP based connections) - and that can be solved with a decent C compiler which can be obtained for free anyway. 99.5% of sysops will never need to use it. A good 75% of the few people that still do, don't need to. But I cannot (and won't) diss them because they are mostly long time users that started when we were all still using ax25. If it works (and AFAIK it still does) don't "fix" it.

73 de Dirk G1TLH

On 06/02/2023 17:28, Kelly Leavit
My installation was an ongoing update from many years ago. I was alerted by a fellow sysop that I was seriously out of date.

I tried to run the backup/update script (https://github.com/glaukos78/dxspider_installation_v2/tree/devel) and found out even my OS was really out of date.
Updated OS (that alone took two iterations). My site lives on a headless VM server so upgrading the OS was a bit of a challenge but I was able to do it.

I was then able to run the upgrade script as root, but I still got some weird notices about permissions when run.

After a couple of back and forth emails I decided to shut down the site and change ownership of everything in the spider directory to sysop.

I changed into the install directory and did
sudo find . -exec chown sysop {} \;

The I restarted the service. Everything seems to be much more stable now.

I think I'm going to do a clean install on a new instance to verify what the permissions on everything should be and clean up the mess I have.

73 de Kelly, KE2L

________________________________
From: Dxspider-support <dxspider-support-bounces at tobit.co.uk><mailto:dxspider-support-bounces at tobit.co.uk> on behalf of Dirk Koopman via Dxspider-support <dxspider-support at tobit.co.uk><mailto:dxspider-support at tobit.co.uk>
Sent: Monday, February 6, 2023 10:11 AM
To: Dxspider-Support <dxspider-support at dxcluster.org><mailto:dxspider-support at dxcluster.org>
Cc: Dirk Koopman <djk at tobit.co.uk><mailto:djk at tobit.co.uk>
Subject: [Dxspider-support] Permissions

There are some recent reports about permissions being changed after updates.

I should like to see some concrete evidence of the sort of these permission changes, in order to determine where the problem is. But I will make one observation: users *must* be the sysop user when doing an update. Doing an update as root may (or more likely) not give you the (velvety) smooth experience that (I'm sure [honest :-]) that you are used to.

If you do experience "permission problems" please send me examples + how you went about doing the failing update.

73 Dirk G1TLH

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