Quartz administration

This page gives some basic instructions for the administration of Quartz. Quartz is the webserver currently being used to serve almost all of the Scratchpads (and certainly all of the officially provided ones).

VMWare
Quartz is hosted on the NHM's VMWare vSpere 4 cluster. The majority of the time, it is not necessary to access the cluster directly, however, when the machine is completely unresponsive, it may be. In these instances, the easiest thing to do is contact [mailto:itsupport@nhm.ac.uk IT Support] and get them to restart the machine. If all else fails, it is possible to use a Windows machine from within the NHM domain to access vSphere using the vSphere client. This is currently setup on 157.140.127.251 which can be accessed using remote desktop.

If a museum employee, then please contact [mailto:itsupport@nhm.ac.uk IT Support] to request VPN access to the museum, else contact a member of the museum [mailto:scratchpad@nhm.ac.uk Scratchpad Team]

Logging in
Logging in must be done via SSH from within the museum. The museum firewall prevents access from outside the museum's network, although this can be bypassed by using VPN, or by using a permanent SSH tunnel (ask Simon Rycroft)

BASH Scripts
Quartz contains a number of additional BASH scripts designed to make maintaining the server much easier. Some of these are possible security risks, and should only be used if you are confident that your server is fully locked down.

/usr/local/bin/drush
This is a symbolic link to /home/simor/bin/drush_dir/drush - this should probably be moved to somewhere like /usr/local/share. Note, we are not using the Debian packaged version of Drush as it is not kept up-to-date.

/usr/local/bin/mymysql
NOTE, this is a security threat to MySQL, and should not be used on untrusted networks. A similar mymysqldump can also be created.

/usr/local/bin/clearcache
Use of this script should be avoided where possible, especially on production servers. It is however useful for development purposes, although alternatives using Drush exist.

Apache
The Apache install on Quartz is pretty standard, although most of the configuration for the virtual hosts is handled by Aegir.

MySQL
MySQL is the key service running on Quartz - it should be given as much memory as possible. The current configuration is a mildly tweaked standard version, although this is likely to change as the envelope of memory usage is pushed to its limit.

Exim4
Exim4 is currently used as the MTA on Quartz. This is used for both outbound email (which is delivered via the museum's SMTP server), and inbound email (which is delivered directly). The server uses a couple of tricks to ensure that all mail is delivered to one user "scratchpad". The user "scratchpad" has Procmail enabled and setup to pipe all messages through a script for delivery to Drush/Femail. As well as this, [mailto:enquiries@vbrant.eu enquiries@vbrant.eu] is delivered to Vince Smith, Dave Roberts and Gemma Maldar, and [mailto:enquiries@e-monocot.org enquiries@e-monocot.org] is delivered to Vince Smith only.

update-exim4.conf.conf
The following line should be added to ensure that Exim4 will handle mail for all Scratchpad domains. dc_other_hostnames=`/usr/local/bin/scratchpad_domains | sed "s/$/;/"|tr -d "\n"`

conf.d/router/999_exim4-config_scratchpad
The following router file ensures that all messages are delivered to the user "scratchpad".

Aegir
Aegir is the Drupal based system that allows us to administer Drupal sites across multiple servers. The system that we currently have setup allows us to create sites on Quartz, and web-scratchpad-training (the VM that hosts all *.taxon.name sites). The Aegir site is available at http://admin.scratchpads.eu

To request an account on the Aegir site, please contact [mailto:s.rycroft@nhm.ac.uk Simon Rycroft] who will create one for you. This account will enable you to create new sites on already existing platforms/servers. Simon must be contacted to add an additional platform/server to the Aegir install, as this process is not trivial.