Ubuntu 16.04 LTS clearly is not ready for prime time.

     First problem I encountered is that I could no longer login using x2go making graphical administration remotely impossible.

     Second problem is Apache wedged after a few hours of operation and would not restart until I rebooted the machine.  That might be acceptable behavior for Windows servers but not for Linux.

     I’ve reverted our web server back to Ubuntu 15.10 for now using the image I made prior to starting the upgrade process.

     It’s unfortunate because php7 did shave several hundred milliseconds off of the load time for our home page so it really did provide substantial speed improvements.

     I may attempt an install of php7 independent of an entire operating system upgrade.

     I am going to take the Ubuntu server, ubuntu.eskimo.com, down for about 25 minutes to image it prior to starting the upgrade from Ubuntu 15.10 to Ubuntu 16.04LTS.

     The upgrade will take a good part of the day.  The server will be available during the upgrade but there may be a period of time where some functionality is impaired while various package dependencies are broken while part of the old packages and part of the new simultaneously exist.

     After the upgrade completes, assuming it is successful, I will take the server down again for another 25 minutes or so to image it again.

Software added to the ubuntu.eskimo.com shell server:

• Calligra Gemini – Word Processing and Presentation
• Utopia Documents – PDF Reader for Scientific Articles
• Karlyriceeditor – Karoke Lyric Editor
• BaseX XML Database – Visually query and analyze your XML data
• Sparse – Semantic Parser of Source Files
• Squeak – Squeak Smalltalk System
• Bpython – Curses front-end for Python Interpreter

     All the perl modules required for bugzilla to execute on our web site have been installed.

     I filled a report with Apache’s Bugzilla.  They responded that it had been fixed in the main trunk (and 2.4.21 will be fixed) but provided me with the necessary patch to fix 2.4.20, which I applied, and it did fix the server-status scoreboard.  So to the best of my knowledge the web server is now 100% functional again with the most current version available.

     I e-mailed the maintainers of the version of mod_authnz_external for the older Apache 2.0 series and one of them, Sven-Haegar Koch, was kind enough to take a look at the code for the version for 2.4 and provided me a patch.  It wasn’t quite in sync with the code I had but there were only about three lines that needed to be changed so I changed them by hand, recompiled, and it worked!

     So phpMyAdmin, which is protected by this code to limit access to Eskimo North customers, because it had unfortunately become a target for hackers, is now available again.

     Apache 2.4.20 broke the scoreboard.  It’s no longer showing the pages being served.  Gotta love it.  What happened to actually testing something before it’s release?  This is really basic functionality we’re talking about.  It’s like a bunch of Windows engineers quit their job and went to work for the Apache project.

     phpMyAdmin is temporarily unavailable because mod_authnz_external was broken by upgrade to Apache 2.4.20.  There is an unresolved symbol and so the module can not load.

     Apache 2.4.20 made changes to the API that require modules to use ap_get_useragent_host instead of ap_get_remote_host function.  Just changing the function name didn’t suffice, apparently arguments are different but I haven’t figured out where this is documented yet.

    Further complicating matters is the fact that Jon Wolter, the maintainer of this package, died of influenza complications in July of 2015 and as near as I can tell there is no current maintainer.  I have written to the maintainers of the version for 2.0 Apache hoping they can either point me to the new, if there is one, maintainer or help me to make the necessary modifications.

     In the meantime, if you have to manually manipulate your MySQL database, you can do so using the mysql client on our shell servers.

Plugins

     If you’re like me, you don’t want Google tracking everything you do and every place you go.  But, many WordPress themes include Google Fonts by default.

     When you make a call to Google’s font servers, it gets the IP address you are coming from and the referral URL of the website that sent you allowing them to then enter into their database the site you are currently on, the IP you are originating from, and the time that you accessed that site.

     The fix for this problems comes in the form of a plugin entitled, “Remove Google Font References“.  It does exactly that.

     Caching is important for good WordPress performance and there are many options out there with W3 Super Cache and W3 Total Cache being the two most popular.  But both of these cache plugins are a pain in the butt to configure and sometimes cause problems with simply trying to login to your site.

     Comet Cache is the newest incarnation of what used to be Zen Cache but it is a massive improvement.  First, I’ve seen page load times almost drop in half for many pages.  But more than that, Comet Cache does an excellent job of detecting dynamic content and not caching it so it is not necessary to manually enter exclusions in most cases.

     Our web server has fail2ban installed.  Fail2ban watches logs for various bad behaviors and bans offending IP addresses.

     Please install the WP fail2ban plugin onto your WordPress installation.  What this does is log various attempts to abuse WordPress so that fail2ban on our server can then ban the offending IP address.

     XMLRPC is enabled by default in WordPress versions 3.5.  It has a few legitimate uses such as tracebacks and pingbacks, but if you don’t need or are not using this, it is best to disable it because it is frequently abused by hackers.

     After version 3.5 there is no longer an option to disable it but you can do so by installing the plugin Disable XML-RPC.

     With the help of WP Google Maps support folks, I got the User Meeting map fixed. So if you need help finding the user meeting, click on the link!