More as notes to myself I did find in CherryPy’s documentation how to run CherryPy based apps “behind” apache. Its not the best that I hoped for. But here are the mod_rewrite rules. Some neat tricks that will handle most, if not all, of my concerns. Even an automated way to start the CherryPy app on the web servers. (Which is would be handy in my web server pool.)
CherryPy is the webserver part of TurboGears from the post below.
Had I no friends I think I could write code that might be useful to myself and other people. But alas, I seem to be forced to listen to other folks tell me how bad my ideas are when they do not understand the needs I have. Or, better yet, are just trying to convince me to use their favorite piece of code.
Being the only person that maintains all of Linux at a single university I have a fairly decently sized web site I must maintain. For the last couple years I have been running SnapLook. Its a web templating system written in PHP. I, or other users, can write very simple web pages and the templating system applies a header, footer, css, menus, and navigation. I don’t have to worry about make the web pages I write pretty or getting all the navigation stuff correct.
However, I fear that this code will no longer be maintained. Also, I’m not overly fond of PHP code even if it is well written. I’m a Python person and I have lots of web code written in Python. However, most of them aren’t complex enough to be considered a Web Application or they simply aren’t Web Applications. (Such as XMLRPC APIs or Kickstart generators.) Finally, when I do have code that generates a web page of some sort it can’t be put through the templating system. I want all my web pages to go through the same templating system as much as possible so that they all look alike.
Granted, some of what I maintain does tend toward the web application side of the house. Maybe I should look into TurboGears or some other web application framework. (Although, I’d prefer they run through Apache rather than CherryPy or some other code around Python’s single threaded HTTP server.)
In any case, my reason of frustration today is that I want all my web pages to have the same look and feel and proper navigation. One way to step torward that is to re-implement SnapLook with Python. And using a template of the design of my web site with Kid, SimpleTAL, or some other HTML/XML templating engine.
Why does every one I know think this is a horrible idea?
This week I delt with 2 specific bugs with Red Hat products.
The first is that out of about 1,000 machines I maintain I had about 2% - 3% that experienced some sort of error while applying RHEL 3 Update 6. RPM was somehow interrupted in the middle of the transaction which left the machines with many duplicate RPM packages supposedly installed. For example, some machines had two versions of the pam-devel package installed. The next time up2date was run it experienced multiple dependency errors and could not update the system. Along the lines of each version of pam-devel required the same version of pam. There was only one pam package installed. To make matters more interesting all machines that were affected had the same duplicate packages.
Rather annoying to fix this was. Our solution was to rpm -e –justdb package where package was the higher version of one of the duplicate packages. However, my preferred recommendation was to reinstall the machine.
Problem 2: The Red Hat Network servers expose an XMLRPC API so that one can write scripts to modify machines in RHN or somehow use the information stored there. One of the group names had a “&” character in it. When I listed the groups on the RHN server this character was not properly escaped in the XML stream resulting in XML errors. This has been filed at Bug #170553 in Red Hat’s Bugzilla.
I’m really frustrated at Red Hat. I’m almost at the point of saying “Screw it!” and going in a completely different direction. Any direction. Its not just one or two things that are bothering me, its not a specific person or group. What bothers me so much is the consistent breakage. There’s always something rather important that is completely hosed for 3 to 4 months at a time until the next RHEL Update is released.
For RHEL 4 Update 2 the SELinux policy changed in a way that would not allow OpenAFS to work. Could not mount /afs. I filed a bug and got a very quick response. In fact, the problem had already been fixed. Of course it wont be pushed out until Update 3, but I downloaded the most recent RPMS (no source however) and pushed them out through my RHN Satellite to my clients. Overall, one of the better experiences I’ve had getting things fixed of late.
However, the more this kinda stuff happens the more frustrated I get. If its not SELinux policy, its up2date not handling obsoletes, kernels that can’t serve NFS because of 6 month old bugs, nscd agents that wont expire their caches, RHN Satellite stupidness, missing libraries, or any of a number of things that have prevented me from having a good RHEL 4 rollout.
Okay, so this has been a draft for a few days. I must say that today I have discovered many RHEL 3 Realm Linux clients that have dependency errors keeping them from updating. It looks like that up2date somehow crapped out when working on U 6 leaving many machines with 60 some duplicate packages installed. Like gcc-c++-3.2.3-52 and gcc-c++-3.2.3-53.
Maybe I should keep a list of problems I’m having with Red Hat products. I hate to. Red Hat is one company I want to see succeed and do things right. They have been such a leader in that…until the last couple years. What do I do?