Server Blog

[asavage]

I mutter it to myself nearly every day: the technology is not reliable; you can't count on it.

It's all FM anyway.

[asavage]

Today , on my phone, I Google searched "Nissan dyndns" as I always do . . . Has the link to the site been removed from Google somehow ?

ISTR that Google is now downgrading sites that do not do SSL (https:// . . . ), and this site currently doesn't do SSL (and won't, until I move it from OS/2 to Ubuntu, someday).

[asavage]

Database problems: mysqld is trapping and complaining, and the phpbb_sessions table was corrupted. I backed it up and blew that table away, then recreated it.

While the mysqld is now not complaining, it's not stable either. I'll put some time into it today, but I expect lots of downtime coming.

[plenzen]

As always Al, thanks for keeping us alive. It's much appreciated.

[waynosworld]

Yes thankyou

[asavage]

I changed Session Length ("Sessions will expire after this time, in seconds.") from 7200 to 3600 (= one hour; used to be two).

That means if you do nothing on the board for one hour, it will log you out.

I periodically have a problem with the phpbb_sessions table getting corrupted (or something: the database server chokes on it) and reading around a bit, it seems that either periodically zeroing it out and/or reducing the sessions length variable might improve this situation.

[plenzen]

Thanks again Al.

[asavage]

Note to self:

truncate nissandiesel_forums.phpbb_sessions;

I have to pick the right database; too many testing and legacy databases hanging around, too easy to pick the wrong one, and wonder why the problem isn't fixed

This version of phpbb (3.0.7pl1 ?) still chokes on the sessions data every so often; it just happened again. Solution is to truncate (zero-out) the sessions data. Since this should be temporary data anyway, I wonder that the phpbb code doesn't do proper housekeeping on this itself.

[asavage]

The MasterSwitch Plus (APC 9225) died while I was in Portland, Ore. this weekend. Funny, of all the IT hardware I have, that was about the last thing I'd expect to fail.

It's bypassed for now, and I'm picking up my spare from my brother tomorrow, and have just made an offer on a backup from an eBay seller.

The APC 9225 lets me remotely power-cycle hardware. Of course it died while I was out of state.

[asavage]

Replacement APC AP9225 MasterSwitch Plus is installed.

[plenzen]

Thanks again Al.

[asavage]

I have moved the webserver (only) to a new hardware platform (HP DC7100 -> HP Z620), new OS (IBM OS/2 / eCommstation 1.2 -> Ubuntu 18.04 LTS) and new phpBB version (3.0.14pl1 -> 3.2.5).

That's a lot of changes. Please post things that aren't working. Things look different, the icons are different, but it mostly works the same as it ever has. If you have "log me in automatically" set, it will probably have to be reset once.

Email is now working again; you should receive emails for Topic Notifications again -- that's been broken for about two years.

Spam countermeasures are now Google reCAPTCHA v2 (2015 version), which gets rid of the silly question-based setup we've limped along with, and replaces it with the "choose all traffic signals" image-based authentication. v3 support in phpBB will probably get rolled out in the next year or two . . .

Since this is new/different hardware, I just bought a backup box off eBay, should be here next week. That's for when a PS dies, MB goes south, etc.: spares.

The forum is currently hosted on RAID 1 SSDs. I have to get the cron backups reconfigured ASAP.

Roughly, this was about two man-weeks, and I don't mean part-time.

[Nissan_Ranger]

Wow! All that work.....

[plenzen]

First off Thank you very much Al for doing this and keeping us alive an breathing.
It means a lot to a lot of us I'm sure. To me it does for sure.

It's kinda nice in here. I especially like that the fridge has beer in it. Honour system yes ?

Gonna have to look around a bit to see how things work and all, but so far it's pretty cool.

I will have to spend some time a bit later to see everything that this will do.


Thanks again

Paul

[asavage]

Tomorrow, I'm going to try to get SSL/TLS working. That will make Google happy, and prevent man-in-the-middle password sniffing.

Cron backups need configuring.

And move the ftp server functions from the old server to the new. That's going to take some work, but the framework is in place now.