Recently, I changed NFS mounts from hardmounts to systemd.automount.  I did this so that servers would recover NFS mounts automatically after reboot.

     I did not realize the time that this functionality in systemd did not work in Ubuntu 20.04.  We have this old server in place solely to server RoundCube mail because it is unmaintained software that will not function on newer installations.

     Since this facility did not work, mounts were lost after a reboot and did not automatically recover.  I have changed this one machine to use an older facility that serves a similar functionality but uses a dedicated daemon rather than systemd, autofs.

     I have tested it and it is now working and in place so RoundCube is again functional.

Testies, Testies, 1, 2, 3, Must Be An Oddball.

     Images were broken because I accidentally removed the folder containing them.  It has been restored from backup.

     This post also is a test of WordPress -> ActivityPub federation.

I finally got pixelfed.eskimo.com to properly federate so that it now shares images with the rest of the fediverse allowing  you to see pictures from people you follow on other sites and they your pictures.

     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.

     Mail system is down.  Something very weird happened when I rebooted the server it is hosted on.  It did not find the qemu img for the mail spool at the location specified in the XML file and the location was obviously wrong as the directory did not exist.  Yet, I had rebooted the server many times before.  I found a spool img but it is two weeks old.  The current one seems to have just vanished from the disk.  I have a backup that is from last Friday but that is as current as it gets.  So before I turn mail up I am doing a thorough search for the spool image before I give up and restore from a six day old backup.  This is a behavior I’ve never seen before.  I am doing my best to recover.  My automatic rsync also failed to run since the last backup so I can’t restore from that either.

Mail is down presently as it is being moved from the Iglulik server to inuvik.  The reason I am doing this is the machine is showing some signs of instability so I want to get mail, a critical service OFF of this machine before it crashes and burns.

This was THE only machine that would not boot 6.14.2, could not find the root partition even though 6.14.0 finds it fine.  I do not know what is going on with this as none of the other machines had this issue with 6.14.2.

In addition the USB power is intermittent, not a good sign and it keeps thinking it has lost it’s BIOS configuration though if I just save it again it is still the same so it is actually reading it ok but doesn’t think that it is.  And to add to all of this it has locked up twice recently.  So basically it’s showing signs of being near death and so I’m trying to move everything off before it dies.  Then I will consider what I want to do with this box.  There is plenty of capacity on ice and inuvik to handle the services this machine is presently handling.

    Squirrelmail has been moved to our new web server.  The menu items through our home page and web-apps will work as normal, but the direct URL has changed to https://squirrelmail.eskimo.com/.