Updating everything

When it became clear that we weren't going to get snapper migrated onto mithlond, I went to build course sites on snapper and found that we couldn't do it with php 4 anymore. So I built php 5.2.14 and installed it. It broke some things, but surprisingly little. I've now updated eaccelerator too -- no problems. I ran into some problems getting drush working, but figured them out (the wrong libraries were getting loaded). The course sites are up, in php 6, with ldap authentication, and working in a multi-site install. Check.

I had hoped to update all of the labs to 10.6 this summer. I got the BCRC updated to 10.6, but had enough problems with it that I decided to leave the teaching labs at 10.5. Little by little, I'm getting updates built for the intro labs and, today, spent most of the day today in the ISB getting updates built and applying them. Check.

When I built my 10.6 install, I updated radmind and built a bunch of new transcripts. It turns out that the updated radmind makes transcripts that aren't backward compatible. So I've been carefully making sure I get the transcript for the new radmind installed on all the machines before any of the new transcripts that break the old radmind are installed. Check.

And then there's the whole update-macosx-and-break-X11 that's been the pattern for the past year. Now I need to check if updating X11 broke any of the other X11 apps we use. Sigh...

And, on top of everything, are all the frantic people trying to figure out how to use all the updated stuff. Sigh... I just don't have time to do all the stuff I'm trying to do. It's going to be a rough semester.

Little by little some things are coming together. We've got almost everything authenticating against ldap now. There's one small step we have to make for (nearly) everything to be able to authenticate against ldap. I've had several people thank me for the efforts I've made to bring sanity to how authentication was working in the department. And we're finally using a multi-site drupal install for course sites. It's not quite perfect, but close enough to get through the semester and to perfect next time around. And the department site is taking over the roles of a bunch of disparate sites in the past. Things are getting better. But there's so much new we have to do each semester and so much that's still just cobbled together and undocumented.

But I haven't run into any show stoppers yet. Just two more working days before the semester begins. My last big challenge is to get my writing course set up -- while keeping everything else going. It'll happen.