MOO Technical Support Scripts

The complete set of UNIX support scripts is available as a compressed archive. A set of batch files is available for those running a MOO on a Win95 or WinNT system.

UNIX Scripts

Scripts and other files are kept in the following places:
 

chown	in /usr/du/bin
dobackup	in /usr/du/bin (a version that uses compress instead of gzip is available)
runmoo	in /usr/du/bin
statmoo	in /usr/du/bin
watchmoo	in /usr/du/bin
crontab.moo	in /usr/du/moo
statmoo.cgi	in our httpd cgi-directory (set by httpd srm.conf)

 

All DU server maintenance personnel have the du/bin directory added to their PATH list. They can issue "runmoo" to start the MOO. The MOO is halted from inside the MOO itself, using the @shutdown command. Our runmoo command is the equivalent to the "restart" script distributed with the LambdaMOO server.

The watchmoo script is a simple method of watching the MOO's log continuously, which is especially useful when starting or stopping the server.

The nightly archiving system, which stores a copy of the MOO database as well as a copy of all FUP-based external files, must be started separately. The backup process stores all these as a single tar.gz file. See the crontab.moo file, and change the values to point to your MOO database. Note that this is also where to set how many days of backups you want. For instance, you might want a running 7 day backup set, and once a week set aside (by hand) a copy for long-term storage. Once you've customized the dobackup and crontab.moo files appropriately, use "crontab crontab.moo" to schedule the backup process.

Note that you must have access to gzip and tar on your system for the nightly archiving to function.

Although one person can generally maintain the UNIX side of the MOO operation, it is common to have a group of people who do so. To allow a group to all have access to the required files, we suggest the following:
 

1.  Establish a UNIX group to own all MOO-related materials (add a line to the /etc/group file). It might be called "mookeepers" for example. Make sure all maintenance personnel are in the group, either by having their name in the /etc/group file entry, or through their /etc/passwd file entry.
2.  When you create the /usr/moo directory that will hold all MOO-related files, make sure it is, a) owned by the mookeepers group, b) the sticky-bit for the directory is set. This will insure that all files and sub-directories created under this directory are owned by the mookeepers group. If you already created /usr/moo directory (or whatever you called it), change the group ownership of that directory and all its contents (you may need your sysop to do this for you)
3.  If the UNIX accounts for your MOO maintenance staff are ONLY used for MOO maintenance, it is convenient to change their default "umask" setting such that all files they create will be writable by the other maintainers. To do this, add the line "umask 007" to the ".login" script in the home directories of your MOO maintenance staff. This will insure all the files they create are group-writable, and therefore can be edited by other MOO maintenance staff.

The chown script is a convenient tool for allowing a group of maintainers to share files at a site where none of them has root access. When setuid root, it allows them to chown files back and forth, even if the server generally restricts such chown'ing, by limiting such actions to only people within the same group. For instance, all DU maintenance personnel for the DU Main Campus are in the "du" UNIX system group.

The statmoo and statmoo.cgi scripts give a snapshot summary of the MOO server operations. The statmoo.cgi is especially useful for determining if your MOO is using appropriate amounts of server resources. You can see the DU Main Campus MOO's summary generated by statmoo.cgi at:

http://www.du.org/statmoo

Win95/NT Batch Files