The main okcomputer.org website is in the process of being moved to a new server this weekend. Some applications may be off-line for short periods of time. Let me know if you have any questions and thank you for your patience!
Sorry, folks, but the server crashed again late yesterday afternoon. I’m going to have it up and down for the next hour or so.
Apologies for the downtime today. After an almost seamless upgrade to Ubuntu 9.10 the server had two completely unexplained crashes within the first 90 minutes back online. I paid a visit to the colocation facility, but couldn’t find any issues or get the crash to repeat. I used my time there to clean out some old kernel cruft, so maybe that will help. Anyway, I’ll post a real maintenance window before I do the next upgrade.
After over a year since our last fiasco, I have finally gotten around to restoring the okcomputer.org homepage. Rita, I hope you’re happy. Please let me know if you’re having any problems with your favorite okcomputer.org sites and services.
In the meantime, we’ve added a new affiliate site, kip-kids.com, for Keneseth Israel Preschool.
It also appears that all of our application certificates have expired. I’ll update them this weekend.
okcomputer.org will be upgraded from Ubuntu Linux 7.10 to 8.04 Friday morning, May 23, between 10:00AM and Noon EDT. Most services will experience some downtime during that time period. Please let me know if you have any questions.
Update (Fri May 23 2008, 11:46 AM): The server has been upgraded and most services appear to be running well. Service testing will continue throughout the day. Please let me know if you encounter any issues.
I’ve finally built the new server — this time with RAID 1 disk mirroring as promised! Actually, I just rebuilt the old warsaw.okcomputer.org (the server that ran okcomputer.org out of my San Francisco apartment February 2004 – May 2005), this time running Ubuntu Server and making use of that second SATA hard drive that I always intended to integrate. I’m particularly happy with Ubuntu. The install was remarkably smooth, and I’m excited to have the manageability of a Debian derivative combined with the up-to-date software provided by Ubuntu’s six-month release cycle.
Last week I drove the new server over to the colocation facilities at IgLou Internet Services and got it up on the Net. So far I’ve migrated DNS, Gallery and Kid Amnesiac to the new server. A first attempt at migrating Squirrelmail had some bumps, so I’ve backed off for a few days. Mail, user accounts and the remainder of the web site will follow shortly.
The ISP has replaced the server’s harddrive and has reinstalled Debian on it. The old harddrive is still attached, but the filesystem is trashed. I’ve got a bajillion files in the lost+found directory with completely meaningless numerical file names. I’ll see what I can do with this mess, but it’s gonna take some time.
In the meantime, here’s the status of what I’ve restored so far:
Most accounts that appeared to be active at the time of the disk failure have been restored. Home directories and email folders are semi-restored. If you have an okcomputer.org account that you are interested in maintaining, please try to login to serenity.okcomputer.org via SSH (or at least by SquirrelMail) to confirm the status of your password, files and email folders.
All e-mail functionality has been restored, including IMAPS, SMTP and SMTP STARTTLS AUTH. SquirrelMail is tested and functional, as is MUA access using Mozilla Thunderbird.
Also, I’ve started rejecting obvious spam (SpamAssassin score >= 12) at the gateway. I tried this in the past and had some problems with false positives, so I’m being extra careful this time around. Already rejected 412 in the last 48 hours. This isn’t the best set-up, but it’s at least RFC compliant and nothing gets bit-bucketed. If you’re still getting spam in your inbox you can use procmail to filter on the SpamAssassin mark-up, or you can use SpamAssassin or bogofilter on your own. (I’ll try to provide details later.)
I really hope you all didn’t use okcomputer.org as the the only repository for your photographs, but if you did I’ve made some progress recovering the JPEG’s on the old filesystem. Last night (10/22/2007) I recovered 8822 digital photographs (7.3G) and sorted them out into directories based on the model of camera they came from (as taken from the EXIF tags). Photos can be found here for the time being.
The last “back-up” of the OK Computer Photo Gallery occurred in May 2005, right before we relocated to Louisville. I’ve restored the Gallery from this back-up. My apologies for all the lost work, but that’s really the best I think I can do with this application.
Now that it’s the end of the year and I’ve got a bit of time, I’ve started building a new okcomputer.org server with RAID1 disk mirroring. Yes, you heard right — almost a real back-up strategy. I need to do some scouting for a co-location facility, but pretty soon we should be up and running in glorious double-hard-drive stereo.
The okcomputer.org server has suffered a nasty disk failure and is going to be down for a bit. We are currently working as hard as we can to restore as much data as we can and to get services running again. Details to follow.
Many thanks to Tony B for for hosting okcomputer.org web and DNS services while we rebuild.