Skinny Puppy – The Final Tour

Self confessed criminal
Tore pen in vain
Instant still spellbound
Game stock talk back rock
Re-encounter incident
Subsistence existent
Non committed
Unwitted oblivious
Habitual resistor
Buff the stuff
Roughed up edge
Fluent nudge
Pre-collect ignition
Motivation inexistent

Server Migration

Howdy Folks!

I know it’s been quite awhile since I posted and I apologize for not keeping up with this blog.

Now on to the really big news:

• The server that hosted the majority of our sites is being retired. (Les)
• We were migrating sites to a newer server. (Todd)
• We are now migrating sites to the newest server. (Larry)

What does this mean for you?

1. Your site will load much faster for all visitors.
2. Your site might go down temporarily as we wipe the dust off and move your site.
3. Your email might not deliver immediately when migrate your site. (Bare with us!)
4. The newest server is much more powerful and reliable.
5. The newest server has a diesel generator and battery backup (see more reliable).

We thank you in advance for your patience during the migration of sites.
If you notice your site being down for more than 8 hours please contact me immediately.

Thanks again.
The Lead Admin.

SSH Public Key Authentication

Tonight I disabled password authentication entirely for ssh.
If you haven’t set up public key authentication yet feel free to contact me or possibly read a how-to:

Like this one.

This security setting was a long time coming I’ve gotten rather tired of going through all the “script kiddie” failed login attempts.
I apologize if this makes this a bit more inconvenient for anyone but security does / has to come first after all.

That’s all for now.

SPeeDY (mod_spdy)

So tonight I rebuilt the spdy module and enabled it server wide.

If you happen to be a Google Chrome or Firefox user any SSL enabled sites should feel quite a bit faster on load.

Please let me know immediately if you have loading issues or the server has any hiccups (error 500 or cloudflare placeholder pages) via the regular channels (support site / email)

Thanks and as always enjoy!

09-05-2012: I have disabled spdy for the time being as it was having issues with our php install.

Leap Second Mitigation

So thanks to Slashdot this evening I became aware of a leap second bug in the kernel: Crash Info here.

I have since implemented a newer kernel release (thanks to Debian Backports) we went from 2.6.26-2-amd64 to 3.2.0-0.bpo.2-amd64.
I would declare this currently a testing install (haven’t set this kernel to the default boot kernel yet).

I have also disabled NTP for the time being until tomorrow to make sure we don’t have a kernel panic.

If you notice the server go down at all please rest assured that I’m working on it and will have it back up quickly.
If it doesn’t come up quickly feel free to drop a message on our Facebook page or our Google Plus page

OpenDNS Issue (Gmail.com)

So if anyone has been having issues emailing to gmail users lately I finally found out why.
OpenDNS apparently is having kittens doing proper resolves for any of it.

Now if you’re an OpenDNS user you might say my settings were wrong or something.
Well I reviewed all my settings (disabled all security stuff and filtering) and I would get a bunch of NXDOMAIN(3) errors.

host gmail.com:
gmail.com has address 74.125.228.53
gmail.com has address 74.125.228.54
Host gmail.com not found: 3(NXDOMAIN)

Whereas using he.net’s dns:
host gmail.com:
gmail.com has address 74.125.225.117
gmail.com has address 74.125.225.118
gmail.com has IPv6 address 2607:f8b0:4009:802::1016
gmail.com mail is handled by 10 alt1.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.
gmail.com mail is handled by 20 alt2.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.
gmail.com mail is handled by 30 alt3.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.
gmail.com mail is handled by 40 alt4.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.
gmail.com mail is handled by 5 gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.

Quite a big difference eh?

So for the time being we will stop using OpenDNS as our primary dns provider until the issue is resolved.