The DXSpider FAQ Ian Maude, G0VGS, (g0vgs@gb7mbc.net) December 2001 Revision: 1.8 A reference for SysOps of the DXSpider DXCluster program. ______________________________________________________________________ Table of Contents 1. Installation 1.1 Where do I get DXSpider? 1.2 How do I use the patches? 1.3 If I use a tarball to overwrite my installation, what happens to my configuration? 1.4 I am running RedHat 5.2 and I am getting strange errors, what is wrong? 2. Administration 2.1 How can I get Spider to restart automatically if it crashes? 2.2 How can I monitor traffic to and from a node or user? 2.3 My neighbouring node cannot use the RCMD command to me, he just keeps getting the "tut tut" message. 2.4 I do not seem to be sending any bulletin mail to my link partners, what is wrong? 2.5 How can I automatically limit the amount of debug logfiles that are stored? 2.6 I updated my Linux distribution and now Spider cannot read the users file or the dupefile, what is the problem? 2.7 Since I last updated I seem to be getting duplicate spots appearing. 2.8 I have deleted a message but it is still there, why? ______________________________________________________________________ Please mail any FAQs to the maintainer at the address above. 1. Installation 1.1. Where do I get DXSpider? All things Spider can be found at www.dxcluster.org and the actual program and patches can be found in the download area. 1.2. How do I use the patches? Patching is done in the standard linux way ... zcat /tmp/patch-1.40 | patch -p0 assuming the patch version you are using is 1.40 and resides in /tmp! Be aware that each patch assumes the previous patch has been applied. That is to say if you are patching from version 1.38 to 1.40 you would first need to apply patch-1.39 and then patch-1.40. 1.3. If I use a tarball to overwrite my installation, what happens to my configuration? The tarballs are designed to not overwrite your existing configuration and can be used at any time to update your Spider software. All the key files have the suffix .issue (eg. DXVars.pm.issue) at default. 1.4. I am running RedHat 5.2 and I am getting strange errors, what is wrong? The version of Perl that comes with 5.2 seems to be some kind of pre- release and is broken. You can get a new version of perl from www.dxcluster.org or ftp://updates.redhat.com. Don't forget to patch it with the CPAN modules. 2. Administration 2.1. How can I get Spider to restart automatically if it crashes? Put this line into /etc/inittab .. DX:3:respawn:/bin/su -c "/usr/bin/perl -w /spider/perl/cluster.pl" sysop > /dev/tty7 Run telinit q as root. Spider will restart so be aware. However, any time you reboot, cluster.pl will start in tty7 and if it crashes, it should restart ok. 2.2. How can I monitor traffic to and from a node or user? There are 2 ways to achieve this. You can use the tail command like this .. tail -f /spider/data/debug/167.dat |grep G0VGS or in later versions of Spider, there is a command called watchdbg in which case you simply type .. watchdbg G0VGS 2.3. My neighbouring node cannot use the RCMD command to me, he just keeps getting the "tut tut" message. Assuming that the permissions are set correctly (perm level 5 required), it could be that the home_node is set incorrectly. You can reset the home_node using the spoof command like this .. spoof gb7adx set/home gb7adx Assuming that the node_call you are changing is gb7adx. 2.4. I do not seem to be sending any bulletin mail to my link part- ners, what is wrong? There is a file in /spider/msg called forward.pl.issue. Rename this to forward.pl and edit it to meet your requirements. You will need to issue the command load/forward or restart Spider for the changes to take effect. 2.5. How can I automatically limit the amount of debug logfiles that are stored? Use the tmpwatch command. Create a file in /etc/cron.daily/ containing the line ... /usr/sbin/tmpwatch -f 240 /spider/data/debug Remember to make it executable! This will limit your debug data down to the last 10 days 2.6. I updated my Linux distribution and now Spider cannot read the users file or the dupefile, what is the problem? Almost certainly this is a change in the db format of perl. Follow these few steps to correct the problem. o stop the cluster (disable any autostart in inittab) o cd /spider/data o issue the command perl user_asc o restart the cluster That should solve the problem. 2.7. Since I last updated I seem to be getting duplicate spots appearing. What has probably happened is that the dupefile has got corrupted in some way. Simply delete the /spider/data/dupefile and restart the cluster. It may take a little time to become fully functional but should solve your problem. 2.8. I have deleted a message but it is still there, why? This is now the way messages are handled for deletion in Spider. If you look closely you will see a 'D' following the message number. This message is marked for deletion and will be deleted in 2 days if nothing further is done. Optionally you can use the command delete/expunge to delete it immediately.