I had to reboot the server this morning. One apache process got stuck in “uninterruptible sleep”, which is pretty bad because it’s impossible to kill it without rebooting. This has happened once before, so I’m starting to think we have some odd bug in the kernel that shows up after a month or so of uptime. I recompiled the kernel with the old SLAB allocator again, instead of SLUB (which is maybe not perfectly stable in 2.6.22).

Edit 2008-09-19: It seems there was a bug in Grsec/PaX that could cause this problem.

The downtime was a bit longer than expected because since I couldn’t kill the process, it was impossible to shut down the system properly. Then I wanted to make sure the filesystem was ok before I started up everything again.

I do not think this problem is related to some connectivity issues that have been reported lately. They are more likely related to some problem at my ISP, maybe rebooting some router or similar (the downtime is usually 2-3 min or something, and it’s happened a couple of times during the last few weeks).

It is now possible to create a Blinkenshell E-mail account via the signup program for registered members. The E-mail address will look like this: username (at) blinkenshell.org

The mail is accessible via IMAP and SMTP or via Webmail. The quota is set to 100 MiB at the moment.

It is possible to use this mail account to send mail from your website, for verifying users E-mail address when they sign up etc. Just remember that you have to authenticate with the SMTP server to send mail. (Using this to send spam etc is ofcourse strictly forbidden!)

http://blinkenshell.org/wiki/Info/Email

Today marks the two year anniversary of the domain Blinkenshell.org, which was registered on the 10th of August 2006. I don’t have an exact date for when the signups opened, but this date is a good marker in my opinion

I want to thank everyone who has stuck with us, and helped me build this awesome community!

Not very many free shell providers make it this long, many providers disappear after crackers attacking the service, DoS attacks or general abuse from the members. Blinkenshell has done very well, there has been some issues and some downtime, but we havn’t given up!

Yay for us, and thank you again everyone for being part of this! Go Blinkenshell! \o/

Our IRC channel #blinkenshell reached 100+ nicks yesterday, and blinkenbot reports having seen more than 1900 different nicknames since it started recording statistics 336 days ago. To help prevent any issues with abuse/spam a few changes has been introduced.

Firstly, we now have three new helpops in the channel. They will help keeping things in order, and they can kick and ban people who misbehave. Please welcome the new helpops: djweezy, billnye and InDigo176!

Sencondly, blinkenbot has a new feature which lets blinkenshell members vote to kick people in the channel. You can use the command !votekick <nickname> to vote to kick someone. Three votes are required. The command only works if you are connecting from the shell server titan. Do not abuse this command, abuse will get you kick+banned from the channel!

I believe this will help stopping abuse and/or spam as the channel grows further, it’s very important that it remains a place where you can talk and have fun without being interrputed by spammers etc. Happy hacking!

I have now set up an issue tracker for Blinkenshell. This is a system for handling support issues and similar. Most support stuff is currently taken care of on IRC, and I’d like to keep it that way. It’s usually the fastest and most straight-forward way to solve minor issues. However, from time to time there appears issues which might take a while to resolve. Some bug or unexpected behaviour in some software that can not be resolved right away. In these cases it might be good with a system like this, so we can really follow up and make sure the issue was resolved. When someone reports an issue to me on IRC which I can not fix right away, I sometimes forget about it. Therefore I’d like to try out this system for a while, and see how it works out.

If you need some help with the signup, just ask on IRC. If you wish to have some software upgraded or find a bug in the signup program, report it on the issue tracker.

You can find the issue tracker here: https://marcusson.no-ip.com/roundup/roundup.cgi/blinkenshell/

You need to sign up before you can add new issues. When you have signed up, you can also report new issues by sending an email to support at blinkneshell.org and starting the subject line with: [issue]

I made a little script that extracts some info from the signup database and imports it into userpages on the wiki, so now almost everyone has a userpage on the wiki. Also, it’s possible to log in to the wiki with your signup account’s username and password again (it was disabled for a while after upgrading MoinMoin). Feel free to try it out, log in and edit your userpage!

Go to Wiki login, log in with signup account info, find your userpage (Userpages) and click Edit under Wikipage in the menu (you have to click on the header/arrow to see the Edit link)!

Edit, 26 Apr: Wiki login with signup account should work for real now

Blinkenshells IRCd now scans all connecting clients for open proxies using BOPM. This is to prevent abuse from users connecting via proxys and thereby evading bans etc.

If you’re noticing some strangs messages in your firewall log or similar when connecting to our server, it might be due to BOPM checking for open proxies on your machine.

You can stop reading here if you’re not interested in running BOPM yourself.

If someone else out there is trying to use BOPM and UnrealIRCD (recent version, like 3.2+), I might be able to save you some pain by giving you this regexp to use in the bopm.conf:

connregex = "\\*\\*\\* Notice -- Client connecting: ([^ ]+) \\(([^@]+)@([^\\)]+)\\) \\[([0-9\\.]+)\\].*”;

The regexp given in BOPMs config and the one in their FAQ is not working, I found this one in some forum and modified it a bit for UnrealIRCD and finally got it working.

I got this strange message while trying to use the regexp from the FAQ:

pmatch[4].rm_so is -1 while parsing??? Aborting.

Users have reported some problems upgrading Wordpress from 2.4 -> 2.5 on Blinkenshell. The problem seems to be that the upgrade script requires a lot of memory, more than the limit at Blinkenshell. Normally you can change this in your PHP script yourself, but since we use Suhosin for PHP this setting is locked down. I’ve now reconfigured Suhosin to allow users to set the memory limit up to 16MB (instead of 8MB.) I’ve now myself tried upgrading Wordpress and it seems to have worked.

I followed the basic instructions here: http://codex.wordpress.org/Upgrading_WordPress

However, I had to change WP_MEMORY_LIMIT in wp-settings.php from 32MB to 16MB. Also, I had to redo the fix for canonical redirects (Howto Wordpress.) The problem with canonical redirects might get fixed in 2.6, atleast that’s what the ticket in their bugtracking system said.

As you probably noticed, Titan’s internet connection has been down for almost the entire weekend. After a powerfailure this Saturday some of my ISP’s equipment died, and since they don’t work on weekends we had to wait until today to get this fixed. Sorry, there’s nothing I can do about these kinds of things

Additionally, this afternoon there was Another powerfailure and the server rebooted again.

There was a poweroutage at 04.01AM this morning, it was long enough to force the server to shut down after the UPS ran out of power.

When I woke up I used this opportunity to put some more RAM into the box (because it was down anyways), so it’s now a total of 2GB DDR in there I ran memtest for a little while, and everything looks alright.

The powercompany said they were going to upgrade the powergrid to the server place this year, so hopefully we won’t have to deal with these darn poweroutages anymore after that