Monthly Archives: February 2008

System Administration

floradev not accepting connections

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Yesterday we were unable to connect to floradev via ssh or browser.  The VM control panel indicated ther server was running, no apparent alarms/warnings or recent maintenance.  We restarted the server, which seemed to correct the problem.  Today, the same problem.  Restarted the server again and inspected log files.  After about 30 mins while looking through the log files via ssh the connection was dropped, possibly due to inactivity (I was viewing the log with vi rather than tail), but again the server is not accepting new connections.  Yesterday after the reboot, I was interacting with the server regularly and never lost the connection while I was working.  In addition, I closed and reopened the connection multiple times.  This leads me to believe it has something to do with the idle/power-save or some related feature.

The only atypical log entry around the last failure:

feb 29 16:37:02 floratest syslog-ng[3165]: STATS: dropped 0

However, this event is logged regularly.

Another reason I think this related to the power-save is some error messages noted during reboot:

 Feb 29 17:05:35 floratest rcpowersaved: CPU frequency scaling is not supported by your processor.
Feb 29 17:05:35 floratest rcpowersaved: enter ‘CPUFREQD_MODULE=off’ in /etc/sysconfig/powersave/cpufreq to avoid this warning.
Feb 29 17:05:36 floratest rcpowersaved: Cannot load cpufreq governors – No cpufreq driver available
Feb 29 17:05:36 floratest [powersave]: ERROR (CPUFreq_Userspace:42) Could not set userspace governor, seems as if the cpufreq_userspace module is not loaded.
Feb 29 17:05:36 floratest [powersave]: ERROR (read_line:43) Could not open file for reading: ‘/sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_available_frequencies’
Feb 29 17:05:36 floratest [powersave]: ERROR (read_line:43) Could not open file for reading: ‘/sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_min_freq’
Feb 29 17:05:36 floratest [powersave]: ERROR (read_value:82) Could not read value in file /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_min_freq: error: No such file or directory!
Feb 29 17:05:36 floratest [powersave]: ERROR (read_line:43) Could not open file for reading: ‘/sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_max_freq’
Feb 29 17:05:36 floratest [powersave]: ERROR (read_value:82) Could not read value in file /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_max_freq: error: No such file or directory!
Feb 29 17:05:36 floratest [powersave]: WARNING (getMinMaxSpeeds:349) Speedstepping not supported! Was the correct cpufreq module loaded?
Feb 29 17:05:36 floratest [powersave]: WARNING (initFreqsViaTesting:377) Could not read min and max speed
Feb 29 17:05:36 floratest [powersave]: ERROR (PM_Interface:231) Cannot create cpufreq objects

These errors were also reported in a reboot that occurred last night.

This is a link to a post of someone experiencing similar problems, but no solution was posted:

http://groups.google.com/group/alt.os.linux.suse/msg/50d790f2caf4edca

MySQL, PHP

Misconceptions misnumbering

Jill is working on a new topic (

Processes that shape the earth/Plate Tectonics Version II (PT)) which shares a number of misconceptions with another topic (Earth Science: Processes that shape the Earth / Plate Tectonics (EP)).

Problem: She changed the topic of those misconceptions believing it would be available to both topics. Once she realized this was not the case, she changed the topic back, but the numbering was off.

Solution: She provided me a list of which misconceptions were out of sync. Because adding a misconception involves updating multiple tables I actually had to add the misconceptions through the Item interface and then change the numbering on the backend.

Conclusion: The conclusion is that the conclusion is pretty obvious. This functionality needs to be revised. Changing the topic of a misconception has considerable consequences throughout the Items utility, so I think it may be necessary to add an additional step to this process. For example, have the current topic displayed along with a check box and a disabled/hidden topic menu. Then use the checkbox to enable/disable the menu and possibly some kind of textual warning (“Changing this is likely to break something.”).

Another note is that the ‘code’ column denoting the numbering sequence is not a unique column so we could have the numbering be editable on the interface. Although this could have some duplication complications.

I also found it strange that when submitting a new misconception, there is no notification and you are not redirected back to the miscon list. I found out the hard way that once you submit a misconception you are essentially in edit mode (not Add New Miscon anymore) and any changes made are being made to the record you just added. It wasn’t obvious to me the difference between Add and Edit mode.

MySQL, PHP

Updates to field test registrant_list_demo

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As I was meddling with registrant_list_demo.php I found that the demographics were not showing up for any of my test cases.  I was under the mistaken impression this data was obtained from an external server, but it is actually taken from a data dump from the nces stored on our server in a database called ‘demographics’ (go figure).  The demographics data appears to be sorted by zip code.  I am surmising that this data dump is requested from nces after the registration process is complete and an updated list of zip codes has been generated. 

I’m sure Mr. Sweeney can provide details of this request procedure upon his return.  The demographics script is working fine, but the demographics data is most likely out if date.  Cari indicated the demographics data will not be needed for a few weeks.

MySQL, PHP

Updates to field test registrant_list

When I first opened up the register dir I found register.php, review.php and review.v1.php.  Based on script and notes in the script the registration and review registration processes were consolidatedby Mr. Sweeney in register.php, but perhaps at one point they were separate.  review.php and review.v1.php turned out to be the registrant listing scripts. 

This names were confusing so I renamed them to registrant_list.php and registrant_list_demo.php (demographics).

I added a filter (by year) to limit output results.  However it is not technically filtering by year.  There was already a date limit written into the existing query (2007-04-27, I think) which I used as the start range marker for 2007.  The start range for 2008 is 2008-01-01.  The messy part is that everything prior to 2007-04-27 is marked as 2006 in the filter when in fact the records only go back to 2007-04-17.  I expect to be working on this script again in the near future (see “Updates to field test registrant_list_demo”) at which point I will probably change the filter to just ‘Prior’.

System Administration

image upload problem (New Items)

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The researchers reported a problem uploading images while using the Add New Items section of the Items Utility.  

The researchers were unable to access the upload server directory via the fckeditor (from the fck interface, hit image upload icon and then ‘browse’ server… js error, popup interface is non-functional).  Error messages indicated a connector error.  I traced this to a setting in the fckconfig.js.  The fileBrowserLanguage setting was set to asp instead of php.  In addition, I found there were some other mods missing.  Somehow fckconfig.js was reverted back to an earlier/original version.

I found a more recent version on my local machine (last update 5/2007) which seemed to correct the problem.  However, I’m not sure when I downloaded my version (so I don’t know how old it is), and I don’t know if BS has made any revisions since 5/2007. 

This is the version I uploaded: fckconfig