Hello TMLers,
Between Dan Corrin and myself, the TML is up and alive again. And now,
it is less likely to have problems than before.
I'd like to thank Guy Garnett (Derek Wildstar) publicly for his efforts
to keep people connected via TML-Not! His efforts were appreciated.
What had happened, was that in the disk crash and attendant efforts, Dan
didn't get my home directory restored and working. Dan's oversight isn't
any reason to condemn him, as he was under intense employer pressure to
get things working again, and my home directory got lost in the wild hard
disk shuffle.
The TML digester jobs run as userid jamesp at engrg.uwo.ca, so without
the home directory the jobs refused to run. Compounding this is that the
TML digesters were self-rescheduling at jobs, and they had to run
successfully to reschedule themselves. So, the TML digester jobs would
fail to run and never restart.
I discovered all this when I was finally able to telnet over to
engrg.uwo.ca, an arduous task that requires some inconvenience at work
(so I don't do it unless I really have to). Once I had it figured out,
Dan had the problem fixed in the twinkling of an eye. Thank you Dan!
You saved the TML's bacon once again!
The improvement I made is that the TML is run out of a set of crontab
entries. As such, the jobs don't need to run successfully to be
rescheduled, so hopefully the TML will need much less maintenance than
it used to (I can hear Mark Cook sighing with relief, after having
manually restarted the TML for me a dozen times or so over the last six
months).
James