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Q: Why did the chicken cross the road? A: He was giving it last rites....and on with the news! Newester news03-Apr-2022Multiple Failures So whats happened in the last 11 months? I was attacked by Schrodingers backup! That's the unknown state of a backup until such time as you want to restore it, and the state of said backup is actually discovered. In this case mostly useless. :/ But I found enough bits in different VM's to cobble it all back together Phase 2 was to acquire a rather antique Shuttle box. It has a mere Core2 Duo but its running 3 BBS nodes and a seperate FrontDoor VM fairly happily. We have been on this setup probably 8 months or more now. I also discovered I need a much smarter or dumber VDSL router with a better or no firewall. Something on the BBS box has blown up across system updates and it causes Fail2Ban functioning at all, it just dies in the bum. At the same time I tried limiting connects to the system to 1 connect per IP. This fell in a heap when I discovered that it was seeing only 1 local IP and stopping pretty much every connect. Not what I had in mind, so thats on the back burner for now too. Newest news03-May-2021It Lives! So its been a while. I've had a few problems.
out. Followed by its actual power consumption. It was consuming some ~220-240 Watts, inflating my power bill considerably. What followed was its retirement, and rotation of other hardware. My normal daily drive a Core2 Quad became, my file server and VirtualBox host. This limited the horsepower available and dropped us back to two nodes. The old NFS server is now hosted on an old Sophos UTM 110 box powered by a power extension from the PC power supply. This actually all cut my power bill by ~30%, to ~$95-100 per month. The subsequently restored backups had problems. Leaving me to refix a lot of previously fixed things, and new problems that for one reason or another wouldn't work in the rejigged system. I've also been a bit over trying to get the message base problems sorted. I The HUDSON msg base has been a problem in that it blows up frequently despite nightly massaging. I've tried moving some to JAM message bases, not natively supported in SuperBBS. But this has last read problems, every message is always new :/ But still working this lot out. Newer news07-Oct-2020Its worse than that.. The machine the BBS is running on decided to have extended time off. First up the CPU stopped spinning and it thermalled out, that left it down for a day as I stuck another fan in there. Day after I get the fan in, I come home, and am told, it went POP and shutdown. Its showing standby power but won't power up. Two power supplies later and an extra day sorting this one out, its up and flying again. New news07-Jul-2020Covid Re-Run and Networking Alright then. There was a major disturbance in the force. What happened was a drive failure. This necessitated copying stuff of existing drives onto other drives across the network. Of course this takes 600 years to accomplish and badly chews the network bandwidth. So having gotten stuff moderately backed up, it was decided new physical network layout was required too. The old layout was basically a flat pack, everything was on the same segment in the same address range. So I've taken the file serving equipment and put it together on the back 9 so to speak, a segment all of their own. So that there are specific points to reach all the shares via one server, and all of the intra server communication has its own full bandwidth segment to copy files around and manage other maintainence. Of course this didn't go according to plan. After part of the background fell over as soon as it was implemented. Requiring most of it needing disassembling in order to rescue stuff. So what we have now is one GIANT storage jbod from all devices, with no redundancy or raid or anything else, and a suitable backup regime for anything considered worth backing up ofcourse. We're also in the middle of lockdown #2 from covid after Victoria had a week and a bit of snow balling infections, and reaching over 100 new cases per day. So we're all back in hibernation for another 6 weeks or so. 03-Apr-2020 The year of COVID-19 Hmm so whats happening. Been having some stability issues. Primarily hardware. The CPU fan has given up the ghost twice, I'm trying to source a replacement for it at the moment. When this occurs the BOX thermals out and shuts down. Not ideal. Also had the message base blow up... I'm only using the period correct HUDSON base, and it has a limitiation of about 6000 messages and 16Mb in size, somewhere we crept over it again and it went kablooie 03-Dec-2019 Updates! The Show status on other lines # from any menu, will now show you what menu anyone on line is on, as well as what game they might be playing or hiding or The Reader in the Message Areas The GOODBYE ansi screen at logoff has been randomised. This means you might still see the same screen a number of times in a row, after all being random its possible although unlikely you could never see an alternate display. There only 5 screens in rotation at the moment. Extras are easy enough to add, if you have something that looks interesting. The server has had a monster upgrade. From the lowly L400 Vertions to an ASUS Sabertooth mobo with an 8 core AMD FX-8150 CPU in it. This has let me expand not running nodes. And improve over all performance. The Top Score Screens are being added where they are generated by games during play or maintainence. Some are uglier than others. But you can see what you're up against in game now. 06-Nov-2019 Power Failure The BBS is powered by a Veriton, a small 400 model, it takes a laptop style power supply that puts out 19v. Well the power supply has died. Which is something of a pain. I don't have another one I can swap in, shame its not an ATX job, I have a box full of those. Going to be a couple of weeks before I can source a replacement due to finanical constraints. In the mean time the BBS is running on 1 node that has been shuffled over to the Sophos box. 21-Sep-2019 Spontaneous Repair Orrighty, I started with the reinstall on sophos because it seemed to have the worst damage. Having reinstalled Ubuntu and got VB up and running, I was a little miffed and disappointed most of the same problems persisted. Back on brightmatter the file server, it turns out, lots of files and directories had somehow gotten wrong owners and permissions. Working my way through those sophos came online and started working. So I skipped the install on veriton the beast that actually runs the bbs and it was back in the black too. Woohoo! The moral of this story is, never install weird software on your fileserver 19-Sep-2019 Spontaneous Combustion Gah there is always something! :( Alright, so I was messing around with Synchronet, hereafter called SynchroMess or SynchroMesh. To act as a gateway for messages to and fro our captive news server. Initial testing looked good, but upon install on sophos half the BBS it decided to corrupt the entire system. I'm unsure if Veriton went out in sympathy or something else has happened there. But I need to reinstall all systems before we can fly again. Right as I'm bang in the middle of moving a house worth of stuff to a new home. We'll fly again as soon as we can please stay tuned, or email if you're worried. 02-Sep-2019 Roadside Breakdown Well its like this... I had the BBS running on a nice little Veriton unfortunately it started spontaneously rebooting. Especially when lots of low grade morons were trying to brute force hack their way into a DOS BBS. I was lucky enough to have a second one laying around here, so I've swapped it in. Looking good so far, keep fingers crossed! 05-Aug-2019 New Users My Apologies to anyone that's tried to log in recently, only to have the BBS fall over with a fatal error. It appears to have been related to a permissions bug after my rebuild. The system was unable to write to files even though it would load and run. So new users got the short shrift. 01-Aug-2019 Time of Troubles We seem to have put our "time of troubles" behind us for the time being. All systems are back online, mail, newsgroups. Our neighbours for FTN networks seem to be having troubles of their own, so no new messages in echo areas. 24-July-2019 While upgrading the server today, I've blown up the BBS please stand by while I resurrect it from the DUST 17/06/19 File Areas Ok, all initial file offerings are now online. Its not massive, but covers a good swathe of 8 and 16bit software. Now on the hunt for additions, looks like the old Caltech archive may be permanently offline. Haven't seen any change since the last time I email regarding its status. I have found a completely seperate archive to poke through though so expect more coming soon. 20/04/19 FSXnet Not so lots of things this time. I'm having to wait for a license for a new version of FrontDoor, you can't use it without one now. But at least they're free. So I'm not really any closer to getting echo transport running. But have signed on for FSXnet which carries usenet. So we can get CSA2 again! Yayyy. Well its like this we can't even get FSX traffic right, let alone CSA2...(sigh). 07/04/19 Stuff Lots of things since I last posted news.
15/03/19 File Transfer Issues At this point file transfer with traditional x/y/z protocols is pretty much broken. Small files will transfer, larger files will fail with CRC errors or checksum failures. What i'm looking for is a protocol implementation that:- - uses FOSSIL I/O - supports binary transfer - escapes ctl codes I haven't been able to find one that supports all these requirements. If you have any suggestions or ideas let me know, I'll look into it. 13/12/18 New Menu Alternative I've been seeing all these modern and up to date BB systems have one monster consolidated menu with all options stuck in it. I don't like it much they look to cramped to my eye, however it finally gave me pause to wonder how it'd work out. It'll essentially be one massive replacement for the Main menu. You'll be able to enable/disable it as you choose though. 01/11/18 Hmmm I broke the login AGAIN! Just take me out the back and shoot me now. In a fit of security conciousness I closed one to many ports, and the WWW login was no longer working... If you find something broken please, Please, PLEASE let me know, the mail link is there on every page! 01/10/18 Sorry! I broke the BBS login system. I was trying to be tricky and removed the password from the bbs account. Which worked great only from telnet not ssh. I've had to put the password back for now... 29/09/18 TLP Optimizations I beaten some more speed/resposiveness out of the BBS, by giving each node its own RAMDRIVE and CACHE. They used to read menus and screens from a joint drive mounted over NFS.. but NFS was pretty slow. Cacheing ought to help the rest of the ancilliary files, and each individual ramdrive will be faster than NFS was. 21/09/18 Power failure kills tlp Overnight we had a bounce in the power here, and for some reason I can't fathom, upon restart the server wasn't serving virtualhosts gack all my behind the scenes stuff point straight out onto the WWW. Well the fix for now, has been to remove the VHOST and make tlp the primary site, probably more secure this way as this can't happen again. But I'll have to move all my local stuff into a new VHOST at some point so I can do maintenance work Old news18/09/18Ok lots of fixes in place.
I'm sure I've missed stuff. Let me know if you find anything needing fixing. 23/08/18 Well we have The Lower Planes up and flying again. For all your Apple 2, and nostalgia needs. Running all original software under M$-DOS 6.1 boxes in VirtualBox. This has been an interesting journey in trolling my memory for the right instructions and finding software to do some stuff I'd never tried before. DOS based NFS and TelnetD based stuff.
Also of note, I did eventually get SSI includes working in Apache. Turns out to be a function of the embedded command correct as much as it is having the mods enabled. 13/10/17 Hmm been a while again.. that long since we had real internet. Anyhoo..got some bash script stuff working, to put the kids on a daily internet budget. Cron runs it every 5 mins, and if we're over it disables the interface. Another job restarts it at midnight each new day. On the flip side, I can't get Server Side includes to work in Apache. So I have more iframes than we really need. 2/9/13 Got all my network interfaces tied together in a bridge. Originally thought this would be enough to avoid using any hubs on the network. BzzzT fail. Now thinking about trying to seperate the visitors from my network, by having eth0 local, eth1 to the net, and wlan0 for all comers (with limitations), would like to do bandwidth limiting on the visitors, they run all sorts of crap that chews network bandwidth shockingly. 10/5/13 More weirdness, the magic twin special this week. First my old wireless router gets up and dies. It loses its settings, goes back to ip 192.168.1.1 then conflicts with the server and kills everything. Followed by the trusty kyocera 3800, which has steadfastly refused in the past to print poscript over ethernet, although it was available via parallel port. Now it refuses to do anything but postscript everwhere resulting in a need to change drivers on all the clients. 19/4/12 Hacked a 9volt regulator onto a AT power connector, and connected the ADSL modem to it. Eliminating the last of the plug packs for the server system. 10/3/12 Just had the damndest thing. Each time the server is rebooted all the hard drives are detected in different order and assigned different labels causing them to mount all over the place. Well we finally got to the bottom of that by mounting devices by UUID rather than /dev/sdc1. The UUID doesn't change regardless of the /dev/label. 23/2/12 Server and network has had an upgrade. I've removed the old wireless router. The card I have in the current server box is running with hostap to be an AP.
29/11/11 Oh look theres another 7 months gone by. Shed is definately all finished and full. Should I start another shed now? No, got plenty of projects stuck away in there. So much time and so little to do as they say. Also got the link to shattered world mud up and flying, with the java telnet client and all. I'm sure like everything else here, no one will use it, but I still like it. 12/4/11 theres another photo of the shedovation, its got a roof now. The whole thing is looking reasonable complete. Oh and if anyone tried to use the d_knight address it should work now. Added some photo's of the Shedovation today. It's looking a bit different to the old leaky thing that was there before. Today we are all where we were uhm a month ago. The server has now been migrated to the eeepc 701sd. All in the name of power saving, the power bill has gotten outrageous. All services have been restored
I've made the theme kinda green, but its a bit all over the place, so I might get around to trying to improve the cohesiveness of the look a bit. At some point, I will be trying to get the wireless on this thing up and flying so's I can remove my current wireless AP. But I need to acquire a minipci card that will support mode:master and has ubuntu drivers. |
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