Those of you who have been following my journal closely know that I’ve been working on a project at work to migrate our main web and Java cluster from SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. Well, we did the cut-over tonight and I’m pleased to note that everything pretty much went according to plan. Netcraft will now tell you that CBC.ca is running Apache 2.2.8 on Red Hat. Continue reading…
Monthly Archives: July 2008
I’ve started investigating higher-order system configuration management tools, in particular, Puppet, in order to help manage CBC‘s web infrastructure. About two years ago, the only player in this space was cfengine, which at the time struck me as quite functional, but also quite arcane. Puppet seems to be much easier to learn. But I’ve come up against a fundamental problem that I’m hoping more experienced Puppet users can help me with. How does one force synchronous updates to Puppet clients? In this entry, I’ll explain my use case, and hopefully get some answers as to whether Puppet is the right tool for the job. Continue reading…
A while ago I wrote a post about how the Windows Media video experience is sub-optimal on non-Windows computers — in particular, Macintoshes — and why I think this will trigger a run towards Flash on-demand and eventually Flash live. Here’s a concrete example: over the last six months to a year, and perhaps longer, we’ve been dealing with a steady stream of user complaints that the nightly newscast of CBC’s The National (insert promotional tagline about “Canada’s most trusted news source, hosted by newly-announced Order of Canada member Peter Mansbridge”) is frequently “out of date”. While I haven’t totally nailed down why this might be the case, I do note that most complainants seem to be using Quicktime to play back the stream, with Flip4Mac (ugh) as the translation layer. I believe that with so many moving parts, something is inevitably going to go wrong. Continue reading…
