Archive for the ‘sandman’ Category

New Year Server Crash

Thursday, January 1st, 2009

My server for some reason unknown to me crashed last night, in the middle of new year festivities. Extracts from my logs show the, hopefully, coincidental timing of it.

Dec 31 23:56:15 sandman rsnapshot[11655]: /usr/bin/rsnapshot -c /etc/rsnapshot.d/mail.cs278.org hourly: completed successfully
Jan 1 01:15:30 sandman syslogd 1.5.0#5: restart.

Happy New Year to all! :D

Into the New Year

Wednesday, January 9th, 2008

So it is the other side of the festive period and I am slightly better for it, financially. Next pay day should be even better, worked over 70 hours plus in 2 1/2 weeks. I bought myself a new phone over Christmas, it is a Nokia 3110c, and I got it for cheap using staff discount – not complaining. I’ve filled it up with a 2GB SanDisk MicroSD card from the ever fantastic SVP and now use it as my music player as well.

I started up a little project after I got a new phone with the basic aim to write a basic webmail client in PHP optimised for portable devices, its untitled so far. But it is very light on resources making use of PHP 5 with the IMAP Extension, and memcached for caching of IMAP data. I will make the source available via Subversion soon enough.

Over the holidays I have just had a made some serious changes to my server configuration, doing away with my reliance on Linux-VServer because it is just not stable enough. One of the instances crashes it generally will not sort itself out in a reasonable time without a reboot of the entire host, what I was trying to avoid. So instead I have moved most stuff back onto sandman proper now, the exceptions are a couple of things which need Debian Testing which still run on a VServer host. I hope to remove the need for these and then remove VServer totally and install OpenVZ which appears to be much more robust.

I am now using Lighttpd to serve the bulk of my web content because it has much lower resource usage than Apache and is fairly extensible and customisable, certainly more so than Apache until I discovered mod_macro. It does have some draw backs to Apache, like I cannot do PAM authentication or run Subversion without piggy backing it through Apache and certain configuration drawbacks. But considering the only VHost that really needs PAM authentication is my Subversion repository and that cannot move away from Apache I think I am okay.

Eek!

Monday, June 25th, 2007

I noticed the e-mail alerts about my backups were a lot smaller than they should be, sure enough there was a problem. Logged into my server, and the prognosis was bad.

chris@sandman:~$ ls /backup/
ls: reading directory /backup/: Input/output error
chris@sandman:~$ sudo umount /backup/
chris@sandman:~$ sudo mount /backup/
mount: /dev/hdb1: can't read superblock
chris@sandman:~$ sudo xfs_check /dev/hdb1
xfs_check: /dev/hdb1 is invalid (cannot read first 512 bytes)

By this time I was very worried, decided rather than mess around anymore I would try a reboot and see what became of that. It would appear either the kernel got confused or the IDE controller decided to sulk. a reboot solved it. :)

MySQL Set Default Character Set and Collation

Thursday, March 22nd, 2007

I am getting fed up with all the databases on my server being set to latin1 with a Swedish collation, I guess I am just being anal, anyhow. I found out how to configure MySQL so that it always uses utf8. Add the following lines to your /etc/mysql/my.cnf under the mysqld section:

init-connect='SET NAMES utf8'
default-character-set=utf8
default-collation=utf8_unicode_ci
character-set-server=utf8

New Server Installation

Monday, February 19th, 2007

Recently I acquired a NSLU2 and have Debianised it, it is now serving inside the airing cupboard at home. I am using it has an SMTP gateway and DNS/DHCP server, I have configured it to forward all mail on to my main mail server (sandman) and dnsmasq is now serving DNS/DHCP rather than the bloated ISC BIND9 and DHCP3 setup I was running before.

My favourite bit is the name for my new server — beast!

I found some really useful pages on the web when I was doing this: