Rochester Geeks

We successfullly installed a new kernel and the maintenance went exceedingly well.  Total downtime was perhaps 10 minutes (if that).

The machine may be innaccessible for long periods of time on 8/15/2009 while we perform maintanence.  I apologize for the lack of notice but the maintenance can not wait.

This morning we upgraded Roundcube from version 0.2.1 to 0.2.2.  The upgrade appears to have gone smoothly but if you notice anything strange please contact us right away.

Roundcube is one of the two webmail pacakges that we offer (the other being squirrelmail).  Roundcube provides modern web based interface to your email.

This afternoon the server, megatron, was down from approximately 2:00 PM  until nearly 7:00 PM.

We upgraded the operating system kernel and when we rebooted the machine did not come back up.  Ordinarily that wouldn’t be a problem as we have remote serial-console access that would allow us to fix problems like that.  Unfortunately the serial-console server provided by the company we rent our server from (The Planet) was broken.

We opened a trouble ticket and The Planet made it possible for us to get the machine running again.  The serial console server is still broken and I will be opening a trouble ticket shortly to have that matter resolved.

The lesson learned today was to be certain that serial console access works before rebooting the machine.

I apologize for the downtime and we’ll work harder to prevent the same type of situation in the future.

Thank you for your patience.

Greg & The Rochester Geeks

Our self-signed ssl certificate expired today.  Your email client (for example Thunderbird) will warn you about this.

A new certificate has been generated that will not expire again until 5/13/2014.  When your email client prompts you about the certificate choose “accept permanently.”

I’ve noticed, under some conditions, web pages can return an “internal server error.”  I believe this is due to our use of fastcgi.  If a page takes too long to generate the fast cgi master will terminate the process leading to an “internal server error.”  I can reproduce this by loading a huge mailbox in squirrelmail.  Roundcube doesn’t exhibit this problem.  I’ve been looking at adjusting the timeout parameters and I made a few changes today but I don’t see anything promising yet.

I have enabled POP and FTP on the localhost interface.  What this means is that the server can make unencrypted FTP and POP connections to itself.  You still can not make FTP nor POP connections from a remote computer.  These are plain text protocols that expose password information and thus are disabled for remote access.  Locally is OK as password information can’t be leaked using the localhost interface.

These services have been enabled on the localhost interface so that some features of some web apps will work.  For example wordpress allows an email-to-blog gateway that requires POP protocol access.  Joomla allows plugin installation from the web but only with FTP protocol access.

Your domain account will give you access to the FTP features.  Use your normal email account information for the POP server.

I completed the upgrade to Debian 5.0 this morning.  There were a couple if hiccups but nothing major.  I tested as much as I could think to test.  There are probably a few things here and there that aren’t quite right.  If you find anything that is broken or doesn’t seem right please let me know so I can take care of it.

A few months ago Debian released version 5.0.  We are hoping to upgrade to 5.0 on Monday April 20th at or around 6 AM.  I do not expect any major headaches with this upgrade as most of the software that we use has only minor updates.