January Maintenance Report

The maintenance went very well I think, but it did take a long time. Triton was back online at around 23.00 on Friday, and Web and Mailservices was not online until Saturday. I’ve been at the computer all waking hours for the last two days, not stepping outside my appartment until today (apparently it started snowing some time during the weekend, who knew…), but it has been a lot of fun! It’s been a long time since sat down to do some serious work on Blinkenshell, it’s mostly been the day-to-day stuff since last spring basically (200 days uptime). I think I’ve missed getting my hands dirty with the details of the Linux kernel configuration options and such 🙂

So, what has actually changed then? I guess most of the stuff is not very visible to the end user. Some programs on Triton are running new versions, there is a new kernel witch has the new reworked OOM-killer which might affect how/which programs gets killed when you run out of memory, but most of the things are behind-the-scene things. I’ve upgraded the hypervisor, the fileserver, I’ve replaced 4 harddrives and a CPU fan. I’ve installed a UPS and changed some logging and monitoring stuff. I’ve upgraded the web and mail servers, including anti-spam settings and some security things. One of the changes I’m personally most excited about is the new server-side mail filtering options via Sieve. You can for example automatically move spam messages to the Junk folder serverside or filter senders to specific folders etc. Previously I’ve had to do this in my Email client, and that is not very neat if you run a lot of different clients (Alpine/textmode, Webmail, standalone client, smartphone etc).

I’ve also cleared out a few bugs, but there’s probably a few new bugs in there somewhere as well. I’ve also updated some wiki pages, and I’ve created Bitcoin wallet if you want to donate something 😉

Yesterday there was some unexpected downtime on Triton during the afternoon, this was because someone actually hijacked the IP-space that Triton and a lot of other servers use. Someone on AS62196 started announcing a /21 prefix containing Tritons public IP, which caused all the traffic to get routed towards Iran. This also happened to Youtube a few years back, but I didn’t think it was anything common to occur. It was sorted in a few hours though 🙂

Okay, I think that’s all for now (well, maybe we’re going to upgrade the IRCd soon also). Thanks for using Blinkenshell, see you on IRC!