Archive for the ‘Server related’ Category

I’m relocating the documentation for KDC products from kdc.ethernia.net/docs/  to: kdc-docs.ethernia.net. You shouldn’t have to do anything special as the old location will redirect to the new one automatically.

I’m currently doing some server updates and separating the two makes things a little easier on me.

Those past two days have been absolute hell, (and are far from over).

Long story short, I lost my server box and I have been scrambling to restore my (horrible) backups on a new machine. I have a “minimal” setup working, and all the KDC related things such as updater & in-world delivery,… should be working properly now.

But please, do message me if you notice a problem.

Story time

Yesterday I received a mail from my ISP informing me that they had blocked my port 25 due to a spam problem. After checking my mail queue it appears to be filled with HUNDRED of delivery error emails failing to deliver to some remote mail server.

Yeah that’s not supposed to happen…

It took me the entire afternoon after troubleshooting every single part of the server (postfix, dovecot, spamassassin, postgrey,… ) to figure out what was actually going on.

I started believing that my mail server had gone rogue as the offending email would reappear on its own even after the mail queue got cleaned out.

I use fetchmail in a cron job to recover mails from some old addresses that I still occasionally use for confirmation emails that come from server that are unable to deal with postgrey.

As it turns out, one specific mail in that mailbox was being consistently rejected by postfix’s policies, generating a new error email every time and sending it back to fetchmail with a “couldn’t deliver” error message, which caused fetchmail to re-attempt delivery of that email every time.

Conclusion

Sure,  it allowed me to review my mail server configuration and to correct a few oddities but what a waste of time.

Such a feeling of “déjà vu” there.

Our server released the “magic smoke” and completely refused to boot during the weekend. Entire machine lost, data unrecoverable. Thankfully I had a partial backup from the day before so not everything was lost.

Saying that, it’s a partial backup, which means that, while the essential systems are restored ( site/vendor system mainly ) there is still a lot of work to do and a lot of data was lost.

I moved all the kdc/ethernia stuff on a brand new server, DNS entries are a little slow to update it seems. If you’re using things like my console or name2key service, there might be slight discrepancies during the next 48 hours.

If you cannot access the documentation link on the left here, the right URL is http://kdc.ethernia.not/docs/ I appear to have a slight caching issue.

Sorry about the 1-2 hours of malfunction of the delivery system, the KDC server update didn’t go as smoothly as I expected. Everything should be fine for 6 more months :).

The server was a little on and off today, sorry about that, I had to roll out an update that was long overdue and it didn’t go quite as planned.

A while ago, when I started this blog i used to rely on a couple of plugins to perform a few basic functions: Visitor statistics, Spell checking and a couple of other things. At some point down the road most of these got merged into “Jetpack”. Jetpack is kind of an official “megaplugin” that gives you access to a bunch of excellent features and let you piggyback on some services provided by WordPress.com. But there is a catch:

It’s extremely slow.

What you’ll actually use is in the glove box.

It might not matter on a professional, high capacity server, but the reality is that this is not what i have access to. I can “barely” run an unmodded Minecraft server. Jetpack introduced a huge latency both for visitors and for me when publishing, yet some of its features (Stats, automatic social media publishing, spell-checking, contact form…) where invaluable to me. Followed several years of damage control, trying to optimize the site’s response time with all kinds of caching and preloading voodoo.

Today somehow was the last straw, I say goodbye to Jetpack and hope that i will never have to come back. Now for those who are curious, here are the plugins i now use in replacement (subject to change), and YES it’s still faster.

• WordPress Contact Form Maker
• Google Analytics Dashboard for WP
• NextScripts: Social Networks Auto-Poster
• TinyMCE Spellcheck

Fuck you jetpack

As it turns out, when you try to use Twitter/Facebook and other social media APIs as an individual, without using any kind of intermediate service/company, the procedure goes from mildly annoying, to utterly impossible: Google for example doesn’t want to hear about you, Facebook and twitter both want your cellphone number, Plurk was by far the most convenient so far… but who use Plurk anyway?

I finished all the textures (excepted one really) for the cuffs yesterday and did some experimentation on specular maps. I also cleaned up the model for upload in SL. I’m spending the day doing system upgrades on my servers and will get back to the cuffs tomorrow.

I spent the better part of yesterday setting up the ethernia.net server for a much-needed reboot (after 6 months uninterrupted), which ment updating everything, compiling a fresh kernel and in general, ensuring that the system would be in a stable state before restarting it.

Which wasn’t the case…

About 3 hours of outage around 2pm GMT+1 while i tried to figure out what had gone wrong (no physical access makes boot failure diagnostics difficult).

Thankfully, everything is now (mostly) back to normal.