Server Weblog

Today saw the completion of our biggest ever server upgrade. This will allow us a lot ore room for expansion, along with faster, smoother sites, and easier day-to-day management. However we are sad to be saying goodbye to our trusty upstream provider Bytemark. We had our first Bytemark server back in 2006 and as a company Bytemark has served us well, ever since.

Bytemark was taken over by Iomark, and is no longer actively supporting the “dedicated host” type machine that we have enjoyed for all these years. However, thanks to a very helpful chap at Iomark, I have been able to secure a deal from one of it’s Iomark “sister companies”, Rapidswitch. This deal allowed us a smooth transition period to a new dedicated Debian Linux host. It enabled us to move all sites and services across from the old Bytemark machine to a new one hosted by our new upstream provider, one-by one, testing each one before moving the next one. In addition to allowing a relatively smooth and orderly transition, this deal has also provided us with a dedicated machine with significantly higher specification than the old one.

Most sites moved across very smoothly with only a few minutes downtime whilst the planet’s DNS system caught up with the various nameserver changes. However, some sites suffered slightly longer delays due to an issue that to be frank, I had not really made sufficient allowance for. The new server runs latest Debian stable c/w latest PHP. The old server was running Debian “old stable” c/w PHP 7.4. This meant that some older WordPress plugins had stopped working because they have not been updated to PHP 8.*. So it was necessary to remove these plugins, and where necessary, find more modern replacements. Anyway, after a little scratching around, all the issues arsing from this nave now been resolved.

The performance of this new Rapidswitch server is quite impressive. And its 64GB RAM should ensure we don’t have any “out of memory” errors any time soon. So all-in-all, despite the upheaval I would say this has been a good move for us, and will certainly leave us better placed to deal with the technological challenges the future will inevitably bring.

I had to take the DEOSS server off-line for a couple of hours this evening for a routine server operating system update. Essentially it involved upgrading its underlying Debian GNU/Linux operating system from version 10 (“buster” aka “old stable”) to version 11 (“bullseye” aka “stable”).

As Debian upgrades go, this proved to be one of my less eventful ones. Pretty much everything upgraded as expected. It also gave me the opportunity to revisit some configuration issues.

So I’m pleased to report that after several reboots and some fairly extensive server-side testing, the e-mail server and the web server both upgraded successfully and appear to be functioning correctly. And there certainly seems to be a significant improvement in web server performance.

This upgrade should also be good news for those with sites needing updated plug-ins. Some plug-ins refused to upgrade on the version of PHP shipped with Debian 10. Debian 11 has a later version of PHP, which allows these plug-ins to update correctly.

I have subsequently visited and logged-in to all sites hosted on this server and successfully updated all plug-ins. Everything appears to be functioning correctly.

However, with an upgrade of this magnitude, there may still be a few configuration issues and tweaks needed over the next few days. So, if you are a DEOSS customer and you are still having any issues, please contact me through the normal channels.

Following our recent (2022-02-13) server upgrade, users were having problems collecting their IMAP /POP3  emails from the server. It turned out to be a relatively minor Dovecot configuration issue – just one line in a config file, in fact!

Anyway, this issue is resolved and the email system is now working as expected.

We’ve just undertaken another major server upgrade. This time it was a full operating system upgrade. This inevitably caused a little unavoidable downtime. The server was offline for about an hour today. But it is up and running again now. We are now running Debian 10, c/w all its associated bits and pieces.

The web-server and its underlying databases appear to be performing correctly. However it seems the upgrade has caused some unforeseen issues with  our email service. We are currently working on these and hope to have them fixed very shortly.

You may have noticed that when you access your site, there is a change in the way the URL looks in the address-bar on your browser? In a long-overdue upgrade, all our customer sites have been upgraded from HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol) to HTTPS (hypertext transfer protocol secure).

What is the difference?

In an ordinary HTTP session, data that flows to/from the server and the user’s computer is sent in plain text, this means that hackers connected in between may be able to see what is being transmitted.

Using HTTPS, the server and the user’s computer agree on a “code” between them, and then they encrypt the data flowing between them using that “code”, so that no one in between can read them. This keeps your information much safer from hackers.

Redirect

Customer sites have been re-configured, so that all requests for the old HTTP pages are redirected to the new HTTPS version instead. This redirection should happen automatically, with no intervention form the user. A few sites required a little page-by-page tweaking, too. But as far as I am aware, all customer sites have now been upgraded successfully.

Internal projects

Our own sites, deoss.net and deoss.com have also been upgraded to https. All our other projects will follow shortly.

More information

The Wikipedia has a very good page that describes HTTPS and its relative advantages:-

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTPS