The brief web outage today lasting approximately two minutes was to apply a security update to the Apache server bringing it up to 2.4.62 owing to vulnerabilities found in the previous version.
At the same time, I also upgraded the kernel to 6.10.0. The 6.10 kernel has some improvements that speed up encryption.
Some update pushed on Rocky8 and Fedora broke rwho and ruptime on those machines. They will still provide user status to other servers but are no longer pulling other servers for rwhod.
Further, ruptime requires the ‘daemon’ command which is no longer available on these machines.
At some point NIS will disappear from Fedora and when it does we will be forced to retire the machine at that time. Because we don’t know when this will happen we can not predict this date. Therefore we recommend NOT relying on that machine for anything. If you have cron jobs on it, please move them to rocky8 or if you do not need a Redhat environment, one of the other servers.
Testing.
This shows where the Asrock X299 steel legend motherboard failed. The i9-10980 CPU ran for ten hours then hung. I power cycled the machine and smoke came out. Here is where it originated from, the backside of the motherboard under the cooler backplate. The name goes on before the quality goes in.
Piece of Shit
I’m on my 4th MOTHERBOARD with the new server, this one I got running last night, it ran all night but crashed at 10:17AM, not the end of the world as I’d not completely dialed in the operating parameters yet, but I powered it down and back up to reboot since it was hung and a puff of smoke came out and that was that. Some component failed in a spectacular manner.
I have since learned that the Gigabyte board did not boot because it needs a BIOS upgrade for this CPU, so I’m going to re-install it, install the BIOS upgrade and send this Assmoke back to Asrock for repair.
Replaced the Asus Prime X299 IIA board with an Gigabyte X299 Aorus Master, this board won’t even post. Says bad memory, but I put in just two modules and no matter what two I tried it would not work, then I tried some Crucial memory I had on hand, it won’t post either, so there is something not right with the motherboard, and it was the last one they had in stock. So I ordered an Asrock motherboard, maybe third time is a charm. I ordered it two day delivery so should be here Saturday. In the meantime, this server is going to remain out of service.
This means Roundcube, Manjaro, Friendica, Hubzilla, Mastodon, and Yacy will be out of service until I get a functional motherboard. To say this is frustrating is the understatement of the year.
Since elm successfully compiled on Rocky8, I decided to try metamail. It successfully compiled as well and is now installed and linked into elm.
Also, this is a reminder that friendica.eskimo.com, hubzilla.eskimo.com, mastodon.eskimo.com, yacy.eskimo.com, and manjaro.eskimo.com will all be going down for probably around six hours tonight in order to replace the motherboard.
The motherboard that is presently installed has two dead memory slots so a quarter of our system memory is not recognizable on that machine.
Roundcube mail is back. It is in the WebApps->Mail->Roundcube menu or the direct path is https://roundcube.eskimo.com/.
This is running on the new server and will be down between Wednesday evening and possibly Saturday though I may be able to get it back up sooner. I am replacing the motherboard, AGAIN, as the new motherboard is stable BUT has two dead memory slots so the machine is only seeing 192GB of 256GB of installed memory.
None the less, it is now an 18 core machine, 36 threads, at 4.8Ghz all cores.
The way I finally got roundcube working is that I installed Ubuntu 20.04 on a virtual machine on the new server. I have this virtual machine listening to a non-routeable IP address so that it can not be reached directly from the outside world to provide some degree of security to ancient software. Then I have it proxied through the main web server on the new machine which listens to both a public IP address and a private one that it can use to talk to internal servers. Something about 24.04 breaks roundcube, I know not what.
On the newest server, I have replaced the motherboard (was unstable and would only lock an i9-10900x at 4.0Ghz). Replacing the motherboard got that up to 4.3Ghz but did not fix the stability issue AND introduced a new issue, this new motherboard has two dead DIMMS slots and it appears to be a compatibility issue as many other users with Corsair memory have experienced the same problem.
Replacing the i9-10900x with an i9-10980xe CPU brought the stable clock speed up to 4.8Ghz (with 18 cores) and instead of the additional cores making it run hotter, it actually runs about 30C cooler under full load than the i9-10980xe does. So everything is good except the dead memory slots.
I’ve ordered another motherboard, this one from Gigabyte because Asus customer service has not been helpful. I plan to put the machine back into service with 192GB of RAM while awaiting the delivery of the new motherboard next Wednesday, so it will go into service and then go out again for motherboard replacement.