Path forward

If January 1st is the day to decide how the next year is going to be, January 2nd is the first day where one gets to put that into practice.

For me, that meant tackling the long-delayed move of various Usenet services I still maintain to a new system: Big Eight control message queuing, control message archiving, news.announce.newgroups's archive, and moderation alias updates. I had most of the software finished and just needed to do the shuffling and moving of things around.

I was expecting it to only take me a few hours, but there was one frustration after another. First, I couldn't get some of the old posts that hadn't been archived properly for news.announce.newgroups to verify properly. The PGPMoose signatures were good; they just weren't verified by the software after being moved. It took me a few hours and a lot of cursing to track this down to a permissions problem (GnuPG wants very badly to be able to write to its home directory). At least I also tracked down a bug in the archive script that caused it to fail for Archive-Name headers with trailing whitespace.

Then, when moving the control message archive over, I ran into my favorite rsync bug, the one where it deadlocks after pushing a few files when you're pushing a large tree. Tried upgrading to the backports.org version of rsync with no luck. I finally just tar'd up the directory and copied that over, something that I should have done much earlier rather than fighting with the stranded rsync processes.

Then there was always one more script, one more bit that had to move....

I think it's finally all set now. Control message processing may be delayed a bit while DNS updates, but I think everything will work, and I'll check the logs over the next few days and be sure.

I was going to do a bunch of other stuff today, but that's all I ended up doing. However, it was collectively about six things off my to-do list, so I'll take that. I've been putting it off for a while due to a subconscious feeling that it was going to be annoying, which turned out to be correct.

Now, I think I'm going off to read for a while to take a break from the computer, and then see if there's anything else I want to do today.

(I also posted another picture to my gallery that wasn't quite good enough to highlight.