And finally it worked.

Yeah, I didn’t know what I was doing, because I don’t really know how Linux works yet. As I understand, by ‘touch’-ing a file that isn’t there, I create an empty file. And placing an empty file that has the same name as the a script that needs to be ‘stop’-ped in the strategic location of /var/loc/subsys/, that is good enough make the ‘stop’ part of my loadbalancer script run, which enables me to freaking-finally pass off lab 1. Who would have thought?

 

And now, moving on to lab 2.

Configuring new load balancer address… done

Tested the start and stop of the load balancer script… done

Find json reader… done: json-py

 

Stuff I don’t know:

• What is the URL that feeds into the load balancer again? I know the endpoint names, but how about the URL and the format? I must be tired because I didn’t get that from reading the Lab 2 specs.
• Also, I’m sure I’ll be able to read the JSON data, but I don’t know exactly how to convert that to XML yet. (It might be painfully evident to the reader right now how recently I have been exposed to Lab 2. Rest assured, that Lab 2 will soon be silenced, meaning completed.)

In conclusion, I will just have to put more time into looking into Lab 2. I’m expecting it to be fairly straight-forward. Unfortunately, time has again run out.

 

Okay, finally the final step in the whole lab 1 thing. (I’m planning on jumping right into lab 2 after this.)

I’m learning some really basic stuff about the whole /etc/init.d/ (or is it or /etc/rc.d/init.d/ ) directory in Linux. Learning that there was such a directory and learning about the scripts in this directory won Linux some major points with Windows-boy here. I assume that any script I put in that directory will be called whenever the linux virtual machine is started or shut down, and the proper parameter will be passed to the script depending on the situation.

Here are some things that might be obvious to those who are more familiar with Linux, but some things that I am mentioning here because I have just learned about them and am still geeking out about how cool it is:

First exposure to bash scripts… ever: okay it was totally taken and adapted from a script I found on the internet, and I also used what other people in the class did as reference material, but I got some exposure to that, and it has some interesting syntax (“esac”, for example).

A bit of confusion: I don’t know whether to put the script into /etc/init.d/ or /etc/rc.d/init.d/ I suppose I’ll put my script in the latter one because that’s what Nate did here. Then I later found that linux does a bit of copying around these directories anyway, and that the scripts magically make it from one directory to another. Perhaps I’ll understand this better as time goes on.

Newline woes: one more thing that Windows-boy forgot here– that I needed to make sure that the script was being saved in Unix format!! I kept on getting the “Bad interpreter” message whenever I tried to execute my script. I’m glad that I realized that I needed to change the file format to Unix before any more time was wasted.

Still not finished!! Astoundingly to me, this lab is still not finished. I had some trouble having it deregister from the load balancer, and then I rememebered that in class I needed to touch file and then delete it or something. As the time allotted to complete this lab has yet again run out, I will have to visit this during the next stab at completing lab 1. Boy, I’m really glad we all blogged our experiences here. It certainly has helped me out, and I hope as I get caught up, that people will perhaps find what I put on here helpful as well.

A major step today.  I finally used mod_python publisher in the implementation of my first lab.  The next step I want done is to register it automatically to some dynamic dns handler, and register it to the load balancer.  Slowly but surely, I am making progress, trying to ignore the fact that time has slipped frustratingly by while I bumbled around in the dark (for example, I finally realized that I should check some error log files to know what is going on).  Well, I suppose if it doesn’t kill me, it’ll only make me stronger.

I’m excited to learn Python. I’m already impressed with certain features of the language such as syntax simplicity, readability, and the dictionary, list and tuple objects. Things seem a bit daunting, however, considering that there is also Cheetah and perhaps even Django to learn, which both also seem to have impressively high potential to be of great utility. Again, I’m still getting familiar with everything in Python-space, but those are the impressions that I get.

Problems Faced:

I was using a Windows version of puttygen to convert the key to be used in logging into my webserver. It wasn’t able to do it right away, but then I followed what a forum said to do: just put a new line at the end of the file. I did so, and the openssl key was able to be generated.

Extremely Rusty on Apache configuration

Miscellaneous errors included not knowing what to type into the httpd.conf file, forgetting that I needed to restart Apache for desired configurations to update.

Oops:

I forgot to change some settings in the http.conf file to help make the URL standardized. I had to get some help here on how to set up the thing. Didn’t realize I was that rusty at http.conf files.

Questions / Some things I’m still not quite clear on:

Okay, okay, now I do see the need for startup and shut down scripts. That will be done as soon as I can get the most basic component of the lab to work, which is to pass parameters into a simple simple web application.

Yes, this is my first post on my first blog ever.  Whazzup?