Category: System Administration

Hope everything else works like it should. 🙂

Hello, we are now in South Africa and has gotten a lovely little boy whom is very well behaved 🙂 I have to work on internet connections not quite like home, but we can manage.

About the SSL cert that is expired. I have tried to get GeoTrust to support us by donating a new cert for some time now with no luck. Sadly they do not reply. Now I have applied for a new cert from xmpp.net and we are just waiting for the approval. As soon as we get this we will insert the new cert. What I was not aware is that iChat does not support expired SSL certs and for now this means iChat does not work on jabber.no. Should be remedied as soon as we get the xmpp.net cert.

Sorry for the problems this is causing.

Yes, I do mean it, finally! 🙂 This is because now I know what has caused the server hangs lately. Smartd reported an “Offline_Uncorrectable” sector and the RAID on IDE disks does not respond nicely to sector errors. Now the sector has been marked dead, and the raid is synced again, plus I know which disk has caused the problems.

I am looking forward to the move of server, cause the other server has SCSI disks and they are more stable. Still there is more to do before I can migrate but it is on my roadmap. At least I feel confident that one more problem has been solved!

I upgraded the kernel when we did the firewall change and it might be that we got a panic tonight because of this. The problem is that the screen was blank so I am uncertain just what happened. In any case I will give this kernel a second shot so we run it tonight aswell.

A warning, this might cause the server to panic again tonight, we will reboot it in the morning, you have been warned. 🙂

We really need to figure this one out!

We had some downtime this morning when we changed firewall. It took a little longer than expected because of problems with a routers arp table located in the ISP’s network. Everything should be ok now 🙂

Because of an error in Ejabberd 1.1.0 that made anonymous TLS enabled even if it was off in the config we upgraded to Ejabberd 1.1.1. This error is not very critical but it is good to be on the version that works like it should.

For more information look here: ejabberd 1.1.1: bugfix release

Finally the upgrade was successful. Thanks goes out to Alexey Shchepin who could read the log files, and for those who does not know, he is also the main developer of ejabberd.

The upgrade problem was related to the fact that we earlier tested out a two node cluster, and now one node has been offline (terminated), thus removed uncleanly. Even if the node was removed it still existed in the database, and needed to be cleaned manually before the upgrade.  I have been looking for information about how to do this for a while because I was aware of the dead node, but did not think that had anything to do with the upgrade. Maybe I should type a quick howto for ejabberd.jabber.ru?

In any case I am happy the upgrade was a success! 🙂

Finally the easter vacation is over and I am back to work. I am now starting to asess the problems we have had this easter and getting these sorted. It is not easy to do work on narrow cellphone lines so I am glad to be back in civilization. These days I am wondering about migrating to another server that is more stable but this is currently running mail on windows so I have to migrate and reinstall it first. This might be the best way to get a better uptime. Sorry for all the problems this easter and I promise that I will do what I can to get these problems fixed!

We need to reboot the firewall and www.jabber.no today because of an important kernel upgrade. There is some vulnerabilities in the kernel that need immediate attention. Will also remove msn-beta today, so all users must convert to the msn.jabber.no transport.

The reboot will be announced for connected users with an administrator message. The reboot will be done this morning / early afternoon CET.