What would you say?

So, this weekend, I went to a friend's wedding in New Jersey. Saw that white stuff on the ground ("snow"). Jersey is not at all what I thought it'd be: we were in the hinterlands of Jersey. Don't even get me started on the goofy roadway system in Jersey - 40 minutes to get somewhere, 20 minutes to get back. Lovely.

Anyhow, during the course of conversation at the dinner table at reception after the wedding, one of the natural topics is, "What do you do?"

It's not like I didn't know this question was coming. Yes, I'm a Ph.D. student at UC Irvine. These people, not being dullards, then asked "What are you researching?" So, I proceeded to answer along the lines of "everytime you go to a web site - like Amazon, ESPN, etc., the odds are that 60% of the time, the other end will be using software that I helped write." That worked for the most part.

But, how do we explain the concept of open source? "Yah, I work on software and we give it away for free. We're not socialists, I swear!" Which is even more impressive - or not - when you are talking to Economic majors from University of Chicago like I was.

So, in typical open source fashion, I'd love to know how others respond to the question, "What do you do?" Do you even mention open source? Can you make us not sound like a bunch of communist hippies? And as a bonus, how do you make the fact that 60%+ of the world uses this software sound impressive without getting overly technical.

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My lesson to teach the world for today...

If you get the following error in PatchPro for Solaris saying:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: com/sun/database/simpledatabase/NoSuchObjectException

Ensure that the SUNWsdb package is installed properly.

Something like:

• pkgrm SUNWsdb
• cp rp /path/to/theSUNWppro-extracted-dir/SUNWsdb /var/spool/pkg
• pkgadd SUNWsdb

Searches on Google show no correct answers for this. Hopefully, this will pop up sooner or later.

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mail.apache.org is dead; long live mail.apache.org!

Over the weekend, daedalus finally kicked the bucket. It was spontaneously rebooting on us, and the ASF didn't have the capability to reboot it or access its serial console. So, instead of spending a lot of time to fix it (which we don't have anyway and reboots like that typically indicate a hardware failure of some sort!), we decided to promote hermes into production and send daedalus to its final resting place.

We were pushing over 6 million messages a day through a dual PIII/800 with a qmail/ezmlm setup. In addition, before minotaur arrived last year, daedalus was also our primary webserver servicing about an equal number of hits per day. One of daedalus's hard drives had already failed in the last month or so. We've been prepping hermes, a new IBM x345 Series to replace it. But, as it goes, we weren't going to promote it until something like this happened. (Yes, we would like to have been able to do actual load testing and had been discussing it; alas...)

hermes seems to be responding to the load fine. We've added clamav scanning, and may add in SA later. I've got to take hermes down later tonight to disable atime. There will be some growing pains (i.e. we had to kick gump off this morning); but hermes is probably about 4x as powerful as daedalus was - this grants us the necessary headroom to add services like clamav and SA to the mix. This also completes the Collab ISP transition - the ASF is now fully self-hosting via UL and responsible for its own bandwidth.

Kudos to Brian and Noel. Assists to Tris and Fitz for sending daedalus on its way.

RIP daedalus (Nov. 20, 2000-May 9, 2004). She served us mighty well.

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Implementing Trailers in HTTP

Leo seems to be having problems implementing trailers in his NIO Java implementation. I think he overlooked that trailers have to be concluded with a blank CRLF.

3.6.1 in RFC 2616 says:

Chunked-Body   = *chunk
                 last-chunk
                 trailer
                 CRLF

Note that httpd 2.x does allow persistent connections with chunked:

% telnet cvs.apache.org 80
HEAD / HTTP/1.1
Host: cvs.apache.org
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Trailer: Extension-Trailer

4
test
0
Extension-Trailer: foo foo
       foo

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Fri, 02 Apr 2004 19:19:31 GMT
Server: Apache/2.1.0-dev (Unix)...
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1

HEAD / HTTP/1.1
Host: cvs.apache.org

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Fri, 02 Apr 2004 19:21:51 GMT
Server: Apache/2.1.0-dev (Unix)...
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1

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The value of community

In response to Andrew Oliver's recent post, all I ask is, "Why were so many JBoss developers so mad at Marc Fleury and wanted to join Apache?"

'Nuf said. I know which community values its participants more.

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