Month: February 2008

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STS-122 MCC Status Report #01

STS-122
Report #01
Thursday, February 7, 2008 – 4:30 p.m. CST
Mission Control Center, Houston, Texas

HOUSTON — Seven years to the day after the first laboratory was launched to the International Space Station, the Space Shuttle Atlantis roared into space this afternoon with the second, the European Space Agency’s Columbus lab.

Atlantis lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center on mission STS-122 at 1:45 p.m. CST. Aboard the shuttle are Commander Steve Frick, Pilot Alan Poindexter and Mission Specialists Leland Melvin, Rex Walheim, Stanley Love, Hans Schlegel and Leopold Eyharts. Schlegel and Eyharts are European astronauts.

Atlantis is in excellent condition. The shuttle is scheduled to dock with the International Space Station on Saturday. On Friday, the crew will use the shuttle’s robotic arm to inspect Atlantis’ heat shield on the wing leading edges and nose. They also will check the spacesuits that will be used for three spacewalks during the mission.

After Atlantis arrives at the station, Eyharts will become a member of the Expedition 16 crew, joining Commander Peggy Whitson and Flight Engineer Yuri Malenchenko. Flight Engineer Dan Tani, who has been aboard the station since October 2007, will return to Earth on Atlantis.

The launch of Atlantis is the 121st space shuttle launch and the 29th flight of Atlantis. The Columbus module is Europe’s primary contribution to the space station. Columbus will host experiments in life, physical and earth sciences.

The shuttle crew will begin a sleep period at 7:45 p.m. CST and awaken at 3:45 a.m. CST Friday to begin their first full day in space.

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Atlantis finally had a good launch!

Hi folks, unfortunately, I was not able to follow Atlantis launch processing closely since early this year. But now I’d like to at least convey the fact that space shuttle Atlantis finally had a good launch and is on its way to the international space station ISS. Let me quote the NASA homepage for now:

With Atlantis safely attaining orbit, NASA mission managers gave the command to proceed with main engine cutoff, or MECO, and the giant orange tank that provided fuel for the climb into space has been jettisoned. As the tank falls away and descends toward Earth, its onboard cameras record the process.

Atlantis’ next stop: the International Space Station.

Cheers and shouts could be heard throughout the space center as Atlantis, carrying the STS-122 crew and Columbus Laboratory, roared off the launch pad into the mid-afternoon sky to begin the 24th mission to the International Space Station.

NASA astronaut Steve Frick commands a crew of six, including Pilot Alan Poindexter and Mission Specialists Leland Melvin, Rex Walheim, Stanley Love and the European Space Agency’s Hans Schlegel and Leopold Eyharts. This is the first spaceflight for Poindexter, Love and Melvin.

During the 11-day mission, the crew’s prime objective is to attach the European Space Agency’s Columbus Laboratory to the International Space Station, adding to the station’s size and capabilities.

Expedition 16 Flight Engineer Daniel Tani, who arrived at the station aboard Discovery in October, will return to Earth with the Atlantis crew as Eyharts takes his place on the station.

I hope I will soon be able to provide the usual coverage of what’s going on with space launches again. Stay tuned ;)

Rainer

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rsyslog work log 20

OK, I am guilty of lazyness… I worked quite a bit on RELP and by doing so, I always thought “it’s not much for the rsyslog work log, so let’s do it tomorrow” ;) Well, tomorrow is now two weeks old and I think it is a good plan to come back to my habit of posting work logs. This time, of course, a bit more than usual.

Please note that the initial version with relp support, 3.15.0 has been released. I am currently evaluating the next focus feature, which probably is native TLS support. If so, I’ll probably again need to put some work into a utility library, which will not directly be rsyslog related. But I hope I’ll still continue to post something useful here. In the mean time, please be reminded that any implementation reports are still most welcome.

So here we go, the past ca. two-weeks worth of rsyslog work log:
2008-03-19
– added flow control options to other input sources
– worked on librelp
2008-03-20
– bugfix: some minor memory leaks
– bugfix: some slightly invalid memory accesses
– made librelp and rsyslog relp system send the first messages
to the remote peer (but it then discards them ;))
– made debug module free some memory on exit to make memory debugger
happy
2008-03-21
– added capability to receive RELP messages and forward them to the
main message queue to imrelp (not yet fully finished)
– cleanup of omrelp
– prepared omrelp for real “relp action”
2008-03-22
– changed queue’s discard severities default value to 8 (do not discard)
to prevent unintentional message loss
– removed a now-longer needed callback from the output module
interface. Results in reducing code complexity.
– Greatly enhanced rsyslogd’s file write performance by disabling
file syncing capability of output modules by default. This
feature is usually not required, not useful and an extreme performance
hit (both to rsyslogd as well as the system at large). Unfortunately,
most users enable it by default, because it was most intuitive to enable
it in plain old sysklogd syslog.conf format. There is now a new config
setting which must be enabled in order to support syncing. By default it
is off. So even if the old-format config lines request syncing, it is
not done unless explicitely enabled. I am sure this is a very useful
change and not a risk at all. I need to think if I undo it under
compatibility mode, but currently this does not happen (I fear a lot of
lazy users will run rsyslogd in compatibility mode, again bringing up
this performance problem…).
– added $ActionfileEnableSync config directive
– bugfix: internally generated messages had “FROMHOST” property not set
2008-03-25
– bugfix: continue parsing if tag is oversize (discard oversize part) – thanks
to mclaughlin77@gmail.com for the patch
– added $HHOUR and $QHOUR system properties – can be used for half- and
quarter-hour logfile rotation
– bugfix: QHOUR and HHOUR properties were wrongly calculated
2008-03-27
– made relp modules use new relpengine-provided feature selection functions
– bugfix: fixed memory leaks in stream class and imfile
– bugfix: $ModDir did invalid bounds checking, potential overlow in
dbgprintf() – thanks to varmojfekoj for the patch
– changed default for “last message repeated n times”, which is now
off by default
– implemented backward compatibility commandline option parsing
– bugfix: -t and -g legacy options max number of sessions had a wrong
and much too high value
– automatically generated compatibility config lines are now also
logged so that a user can diagnose problems with them
– added compatibility mode for -a, -o and -p options
– MILESTONE: compatibility mode processing finished
2008-03-28
– updated man pages
– changed default file output format to include high-precision timestamps
– added a buid-in template for previous syslogd file format
– added new $ActionFileDefaultTemplate directive
– added support for high-precision timestamps when receiving legacy
syslog messages
– added new $ActionForwardDefaultTemplate directive
– added new $ActionGSSForwardDefaultTemplate directive
– added build-in templates
– fixed small memory leak in tcpclt.c
– bugfix: fixed small memory leak in template regular expressions
– bugfix: regular expressions inside property replacer did not work
properly
2008-03-29
– removed –enable-mudflap, added –enable-valgrind ./configure setting
2008-03-31
– bugfix: tcp receiver could segfault due to uninitialized variable
– docfix: queue doc had a wrong directive name that prevented max worker
threads to be correctly set
– worked a bit on atomic memory operations to support problem-free
threading
– added a –enable/disable-rsyslogd configure option so that
source-based packaging systems can build plugins without the need
to compile rsyslogd
– released 3.13.0-dev0
– begun 3.17.0 [focus: TLS for plain tcp syslog]
2008-04-01
– bugfix: rsyslogd was no longer build by default; man pages are
only installed if corresponding option is selected. Thanks to
Michael Biebl for pointing these problems out.

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Todays’s ryslog worklog…

Today’s rsyslog work log:
2008-02-01
– applied documentation fix by Michael Biebl — many thanks!
– added input-plugin interface specification in form of a (copy) template
input module
– cleaned up some no longer needed files, thanks to Michael Biebl for pointing
this out
– added sample config file to distribution tarball
– bugfix: immark did not have MARK flags set…
– very quickly hacked a rought outline of the file monitor (without any
guarantees)

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rsyslog work log for an important day ;)

Yesterday’s rsyslog work log:
2008-01-31
– added some advanced features usually in demand to sample rsyslog.conf,
but left it commented out
– rename $TimoutWorkerThreadShutdown to $WorkerTimoutThreadShutdown
for consistency reasons
– changed default for action queue size to 1000 elements (more reasonable here)
– fixed bug in sample rsyslog.conf
– fixed wrong action suspend/resume handling
– we have some issue with the mutx in dbgoprint, but that is acceptable for
the time being, I just removed the deadlock codition (debug system only)
– bugfix: dbgoprint mutex – was too simple once I wrote the tracker item ;)
– bugfix: having fun with 32/64 bit portability – after 15 years, I finally
was trapped again ;) — now fixed, sizes > 2GB supported on 32bit platforms