[LON-CAPA-admin] 2 problems at once

[Rob Mock]

In my school I've been running my LonCapa server in my back room through a port set up by our tech guy.  All went well for a couple years, until last spring, when the box stopped working.  The timing roughly coincided with our school's switch to new service providers.  Since that time, we have been given new network settings that do not work.  A windows laptop can find the internet on my port (using DHCP), but machines using their settings do not work.  We're trying to deal with this problem through the tech guy now.

In addition, during startup of the box (both plugged to the network or not), we're getting plenty of errors like "audit (1185989035.330:11): abc; denied {append} for pid=2119 comm="httpd" name="lonnet.log"..."  It stalls out at these errors.

As we're trying to puzzle through this, we are not sure if it's the network settings causing the issues, or have we messed up our LonCapa or Linux installations.  Our tech guy isn't very "cooperative", so we'd like to make sure our box is working so we can better troubleshoot our connectivity problem.

We are tempted to wipe the box clean and start over, but the last time we did this, we angered the LonCapa gods and (in our honor?) they made a new LonCapa.org web page with big red font that says "Never Ever Just Wipe Out a Library Server!".  Our Linux skills are lacking, but in our defense, we set up and have been running fine for a couple years...

Here's the question:  What should we try next, and in what order?  

ps- no, Ed, we don't want to be hosted
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