I’ve firewall rules to address recent SYN and UDP floods.  So far they have had the intended effect.

     I’ve installed a new shell server, anduinos.eskimo.com.  This is a debian derived server similar to popOS except the default graphical environment is Gnome configured to look like Windows.  Unfortunately this environment does not seem to work if using vnc or x2go, instead you just get default mate or gnome environments.

     I’ve installed a new application called ‘qman‘ on all the shell servers.  It is an alternative to man for reading manual pages.  Unlike man, it provides an index of sections and then pages within those sections and also provides colored highlighting that makes reading manual pages a bit more pleasant.

     The mail system is currently shutdown to image the servers.  That is to say to take a copy of the virtual machine image while it is down in case it should get corrupted or lost and needs to be restored in the future.  I expect to have the mail sub-system returned to service around 3AM.

     Mariadb, the database that is used to provide SQL service for most web apps requiring it (a handful use postgresql) hung when some internal process failed to remove a lock and everything else piled up behind it.  I could not restart it with either systemd or mysqladmin, and even a regular kill signal did not work, kill -9 eventually did but even the response to that was delayed by several minutes.  There was nothing in either the kernel logs or the mariadb logs that would provide a clue as to why this happened and it is a failure mode I have not seen before.

     Because mariadb was not shut-down properly, database corruption is a possibility.  Accordingly, I am running mariadb-repair –all-databases to check for and repair any inconsistencies. This may slow response slightly for the next hour or so.