[AG-TECH] AG bridge woes

[Todd Zimmerman]

On Sun, 2008-11-02 at 19:15 -0500, Gurcharan S. Khanna wrote:
> all,
> 
> i have to agree with jeremy's point, that to the outside world and the 
> 'powers that be',
> that this kind of behavior makes AG look unstable, unreliable, and 
> dubious to invest in.
> it's certainly something that ought to rise in priority to 'fix' as 
> otherwise it will remain an
> obstacle to wider acceptance and even funding.

As a person that has run a venueserver/bridgeserver since 2002ish, I've
actually found them to be quite stable.  That is not to say that there
haven't been issues, and that I haven't set up typical server
infrastructure (nightly backups of configs etc) - but overall I've had
to spend very little time the management of my servers.

I have instituted the nightly restarts not because they require nightly
restarts - but because they may require to be restarted on a biweekly
basis (perhaps) or more.  To me, putting in a 4 line crontab to run
nightly is a pretty simple way to ease my mind and ensure stability.
With this in place, I typically don't have to spend any time managing my
servers at all... 


> on a related note, i continue to experience venue clients needing to be 
> restarted or venues
> re-entered every day or so. i leave my nodes up and in the venue 24/7 in 
> public places but
> that means as likely as not, the public sees error messages instead of 
> nice video. i too have
> started to re-started the whole machine to make sure it's up and 
> running, but this is surely
> a workaround to a more basic problem that the system is not robust or 
> reliable. it's especially
> difficult since i have 6-7 nodes on campus and am trying to deploy more.
> 

To help determine the cause, we'll need the log files.  We need to
determine exactly what is failing (network connection to the venue?  the
venueserver, the venueclient??)  What is the error message you are
receiving??  

Cheers,

Todd
-- 
Collaboration & Visualization Specialist
UBC Okanagan - http://web.ubc.ca/okanagan
WestGrid - www.westgrid.ca
Ph. 250-807-9979
Todd Zimmerman - todd.zimmerman at ubc.ca