Server Blog

[asavage]

In consultation, I have set up some tests, but I cannot figure out why httpd.pid is disappearing, and that's fouling up the midnight restarting, which is what "clears out" the httpd (actual web serving software: Apache) by stopping/restarting it.

Naturally, in testing, I'm stopping & restarting httpd a lot manually, so yeah, it's going to respond well right now. The goal is to have it do that automatically at midnight, and I'm still battling that piece of the puzzle.

[waynosworld]

Well since I don't understand 90 percent of what you said, all I can say is thankyou, it's working fast right now.

[plenzen]

Indeed it is............speedy I mean and..........

I don't understand 99.9% of what he said.

However

Maybe the midnight thing with going back a day/date change etc and all that is causing it to get Alzheimer's

but
as stated
i know nothing about such things.

Just a thought.

ill go stand over here now

[asavage]

The cable provider's contractor trenched a new coax last week.

Today, the cable provider came out and connected it, bypassing the old, original 1996 buried cable.

Speedtest.net is showing about 62/6 mbs now. The download is about twice what we we getting, and the upload was around 3-4 before, so if this performance is sustained this does represent an upgrade in throughput to/from the house. Whether it is reflected in your user experience is somewhat doubtful, except for graphics-heavy pages (ones that have lots of pics).

[asavage]

I had to go to LA for a couple of days, which is always when trouble occurs . . .

It looks like mysqld used up all the sockets. Looks like a reboot cleared that up.

[asavage]

Well, that was odd.

Port forwarding stopped working. DNS was updated correctly, but incoming traffic failed to get sent from the router to the server. I don't recall having that particular failure mode before.

Power cycling the router and cable modem (just for S-n-Gs) got it working again.

[asavage]

The search index database table was shot, so I rebuilt it. Search should be working again.

[waynosworld]

Thankyou for your hard work keeping this site online.

[plenzen]

Ditto

Thanks Al

[asavage]

I obtained an updated port of MySQL and today I updated the server's version from 5.1.72 to 5.1.73 . I had a testcase that would crash mysqld .72 and the new .73 passed it, so that's a good omen -- and the desired result.

I also updated phpBB3 (the board software) from 3.0.12 to 3.0.13-PL1, and that looks to have worked as well.

There are some email errors in the forum's admin log, and I think I'll experiment with that a bit.

[plenzen]

Not sure why you know all this but thankful you do.

[waynosworld]

I tried uploading a photo in the "upload attachment" today and it failed, so I did it the way I am used to(photo host account), just thought I would let you know, maybe that was a glitch of the update.
Thankyou again Al for keeping this site going. wayne

[asavage]

I tried uploading a photo in the "upload attachment" today and it failed

Yup, it sure did.

phpbb3: attachments board quota exceeded.

phpbb3_attachment_02b.jpg (6.51 KiB) Viewed 12127 times

What happened was that we have 116MiB of attachments, but the board's configuration said it shouldn't exceed 100MiB.

Whether this 100MiB limit was imposed with the upgrade, or it just started actually checking the limit with the upgrade, I don't know. I've bumped that limit to 5GiB, which should buy us some time

I also found that it was only allowing uploads of JPG and ZIP

Screenshot: txt file not allowed for upload.

phpbb3_attachment_01b.jpg (4.11 KiB) Viewed 12127 times

I've changed that to allow a lot more filetypes.

[asavage]

In consultation, I have set up some tests, but I cannot figure out why httpd.pid is disappearing, and that's fouling up the midnight restarting, which is what "clears out" the httpd (actual web serving software: Apache) by stopping/restarting it.

Naturally, in testing, I'm stopping & restarting httpd a lot manually, so yeah, it's going to respond well right now. The goal is to have it do that automatically at midnight, and I'm still battling that piece of the puzzle.

While I haven't figured out why the parent httpd (the one that owns the file httpd.pid) is dying and leaving the child processes around to carry the load -- very odd stuff -- I have had help from Steven Levine and found a way to reliably kill & restart all of them (parent and child processes) at midnight. It's been working the last three days, so this is Good News.

I have a couple of scheduled out-of-town trips in the next three months (Baltimore in April; road trip to/from LA in June), each lasting more than a week, and I'd kind of like to feel like the place could run without my finger on its pulse every day -- you know, like in the old days, seven years ago.

BTW, this forum will be ten years old in November. Start planning your celebrations.

[plenzen]

Will there be balloons and party hats ??

I like party hats........ and piñatas


Thanks for your efforts Al.