[tech] Flame VM (was Re: Reducing entropy on mooneye )

[Andrew Williams]

On 2020-06-08 4:25 PM, Mark Tearle wrote:
> How goes your Zelda addiction?  Any joy with copying things over?  Let me know if you'd like me to just do it instead if you are too busy.

Hi Mark, slowly weaning myself off Zelda.

I've just tarballed /usr/flame/* onto /home/other/flame on mooneye, 
untarred it on maculatus, and it's running now:

telnet maculatus.ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au 4242

It looks like the init script will fire up flame OK on a reboot, but I 
can't try that. If you let me know when you want to swap the DNS over so 
flame.ucc points to maculatus instead of mooneye, I'll kick everyone off 
and copy over just the mudlib once more while the DNS change propagates.

As for the rest of the list:

1) Flame needs to be copied over to the machine into /usr/flame, tested, 
and the DNS updated to point flame at maculatus

The DNS change can happen right now.

2) A cron job needs to be added to drop a backup of flame into 
/home/other/flame (so it gets picked up by the normal UCC backups), and 
any other backups need to be tested and made working

This is pretty low priority - nobody writes code on flame any more, so 
the only files that change are last login times. There's a complete copy 
of the whole directory tree on /home/flame/other now (driver and mudlib, 
110 Mb), and I have another copy on my machine at home.

3) We might need to work out why flame has the same uid as andrew and 
correct this.

Yep, that's weird. Until then, I don't have root access on mooneye or 
maculatus. If I try to 'sudo' (on maculatus or mooneye), whether I'm 
logged in as 'flame' or 'andrew', it asks for the the password for 
'flame', and as far as I know, the flame account doesn't have a 
password. I can use sudo on motsugo, so it must just the UID clash on 
those two machines.

4) Email delivery to flame can probably be made to work again with an 
appropriate bind mount added on the machine (and included in the ansible 
role)

I don't think anyone has used this in 10 years...

5) A decision to decommission the flame-tunnel IP address (all ports to 
4242 on flame) as we have the web to telnet gateway setup

Yep, agreed.

6) I attempted to compile a copy of the driver source that was in the 
flame directory - gcc barfs out of the box due to changes in varargs. 
There looks like there are some modern forks of the code out there, but 
would require further investigation by someone other than me

I'll have a play with new drivers using my copy at home.

7) Fixing up the flame webserver - again someone other than me
8) Setting up a web to gopher gateway to access the flame gopher server
9) Fixing up UCC's finger installation (including finger flame at ucc)

Again, nobody has used any of these in years. The main thing I can see 
being useful is resurrecting the flame FTP server, to make editing code 
possible without using the horrible line editor.

Andrew