Debian upgrade completed successfully

Posted on 2012-04-21 by garf

Well, it’s 03:00 UTC and I am pleased and relieved to report that the upgrade from Debian “Lenny” to Debian “Squeeze” seems to be successful. We had two periods of downtime of around twenty minutes each.

First one was caused by the latest MySQL not wanting to install properly. Unfortunately my fix on the test server did not work here. But I eventually did get it running, by editing one of its configuration files, uninstalling the old mySQL Server – which seems not to have uninstalled cleanly – and issuing and “apt –configure” command on the new MySQL Server 5.1.

Then we had a further twenty minutes downtime when I rebooted the server. Turns out the server had run continuously for 510 days without a reboot. Try doing that on a Windows machine! 🙂 Anyway, when it rebooted, “fsck” (a Linux disk checking tool) insisted on checking the RAID disks. Eventually they passed OK and the machine booted fine.

I have checked the web and  mail servers and everything seems to be fine. I can send and receive emails – certainly to myself. The web server must be working otherwise I would not be able to post this message! There are other tests I need to conduct. However, I’m exhausted and I intend to catch some sleep now and return to it refreshed in a few hours, so that I can undertake further tests. Meantime the entire server is being “rsync’d” to a remote backup server.

Please note:- this is a very major system upgrade. So if you find that anything is not working as expected for you then please let me know ASAP.

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Major planned server upgrade 2012-04-21 and 2012-04-22

Posted on 2012-04-20 by garf

I have to do a major operating system upgrade to the DEOSS server this weekend. I have already piloted the upgrade on a test server and it worked out OK. Well there was a nasty issue with the MySQL server failing to start, but I found a fix and noted it well!

Whilst I don’t anticipate any major issues on the main server, it is a very complex upgrade and there may be some downtime. So you may find that your email is a little flaky for a day or two or that some web pages are temporarily unavailable. However, I hope to have it all running again smoothly by Monday morning 2012-04-23. I will post in this site blog once the upgrade is successfully completed.

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Server upgrades complete

Posted on 2012-04-12 by garf

A large round of server upgrades announced 2012-03-05 have now been completed successfully. There were no major issue and no server downtime.  The entire DEOSS Community Server is now being mirrored to an off-site remote backup server.

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More server upgrades

Posted on 2012-03-05 by garf

A number of significant server upgrades are currently underway. Whilst this is going to be a relatively long job, we don’t anticipate any significant server downtime. We will post again when the upgrades are complete

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Server software upgrades

Posted on 2011-12-14 by garf

All the main content management systems hosted here on the DEOSS community server have just been upgraded, including all those using Coppermine, eGroupware, Joomla, Moodle, phpBB, Tikiwiki and WordPress.

A significant number of Wordplus plugins such as the contact forms and galleries also required upgrading. Meantime the Moodle sites have also received a fairly major upgrade. We have also done some routine Debian updates over the last few days. Joomla and WordPress contact form users will receive a test email via their various contact forms shortly to verify that their systems are working correctly.

All works were successfully completed without any server downtime. The entire DEOSS Community Server was then RSync’d to a remote backup server early this morning.

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Routine server upgrades

Posted on 2011-10-11 by garf

A number of routine server upgrades have just been completed. This includes critical security updates to Moodle, as well as routine updates to all sites using Coppermine, eGroupware, Joomla,  phpBB, Tikiwiki and WordPress. All third-party WordPress plugins have also been upgraded.

We have also undertaken routine Debian updates. All updates were  completed successfully and there was no server downtime. DEOSS Community Server is now undergoing a full backup to a remote server.

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Server upgrades

Posted on 2011-08-02 by garf

All the main content management systems hosted here on the DEOSS community server have been upgraded, including all those using Coppermine, eGroupware, Joomla, Moodle, phpBB, Tikiwiki and WordPress. A significant number of Wordplus plugins such as the contact forms and galleries also required upgrading. WordPress contact form users will receive a test email via their contact forms shortly to verify that their systems are working correctly.

We have also done routine Debian updates over the last few days. All this work has now been successfully completed with no server downtime.

The entire server is currently being RSync’d to a remote backup server.

On a slightly sour note, the experimental eyeOS system on GarfNet has been indefinitely suspended. This is due to a long term bug in eyeOS that remains unfixed. This bug causes a very nasty PHP error, that prevents eyeOS from working. We have no date for resuming theeyeOS service – nor can we say whether it will even be resumed at all. All other services are unaffected.

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Routine Server upgrades

Posted on 2011-07-10 by garf

A number of routine server upgrades have just been completed. This includes updates to all sites using Coppermine, eGroupware, Joomla, Moodle, phpBB, Tikiwiki and WordPress. All outstanding WordPress plugins have also been upgraded.

We have also undertaken routine Debian updates. All was completed successfully and there was no server downtime. DEOSS Community Server is now undergoing a full backup to a remote server.

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Email woes

Posted on 2011-05-11 by garf

Two rather irritating issues have upset our usually fairly smooth email service lately:-

  1. SSL certificates expired on 2011-05-03. Naturally we updated these ASAP. However some users may have experienced some bizarre error messages whilst collecting your mail.
  2. At approximately 2011-05-11 14:45 UTC we undertook a routine upgrade of our PostFix mail server. Unfortunately this broke our configuration files. Consequently we were unable to receive incoming mail from non-DEOSS domains for several hours. The problem was eventually fixed around 20:00 and mail is now starting to pour in again. We apologise for the temporary break in service, but as far as we are aware, no email was actually lost. It was just a little late in arriving.

After extensive testing, it seems that normal service has been resumed.

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Moodle security update

Posted on 2011-05-10 by garf

Following a fairly persuasively-worded, round-robin security warning from Moodle developer earlier today, Martin Dougiamas, all our Moodle installations have just been upgraded. All seems to have gone smoothly and there was no server downtime.

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