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Dec 18th 2022 Moved email and webhosting to new server hardware. Nov 1st 2019 Had root ssd drive fail during a power outage. Had to restore system from last nights backup, so any data from about 2am until noon has been lost. June 20th 2017 Upgraded to Debian Stretch... March 14th 2015 Weee, new SSD drive, and fresh install of Debian Jessie AMD64. This will probably break most things for a short while... August 18th 2011 Ran into some weird troubles with the intel atom board I've been using and had a couple kernel panics. Decided to use this as an excuse to upgrade and replaced the core hardware with an Intel Core i5-2400S with 8GB RAM. System should be much faster now, and should hopefully run a little smoother. July 21st 2011 Upgraded from Debian Lenny to Squeeze (5 to 6) and to a newer kernel, I think everything is working alright now... April 20th 2011 Upgraded roundcube webmail to newest version doing a clean install. September 30th 2009 Finally got around to replacing openwebmail with roundcubemail for webmail access. It's much nicer, and I've left a link to openwebmail if there are any problems. Also fixed usage page, and updated phpsysinfo. April 13th 2009 I moved the server over to a whole new system, so it's now running on an Intel Atom platform with just two 1TB drives. This is a rather big difference from the old machine which was an Athlon 3000+ with 2x80gig drives and 5x500gig drives. This setup should be a bit more stable with less drives having the possibility of failing. The new setup also uses only 36-42 watts of power vs 135-150 on the old system, and is much quieter. April 7th 2009 Upgraded debian from etch to lenny, and in doing so moved from apache 1.3 to apache 2. Took a bit of time to reconfigure but it seems to be all up and working now. February 11th 2009 Internet outage this morning from 9:00am until 12:15pm due to some trees being cut down across the street. January 5th 2009 I had some network card troubles that required me to have to reboot the server, and in doing so I also upgraded the kernel to 2.6.28. Looks to have solved my issues for the time being. January 11th 2008 After some ups and downs over the past couple of days the server has been upgraded with a lot more storage, and looks to be running smooth again. June 7th 2007 The server has been having some problems the past couple of days and ended up being offline for a number of hours on each occasion as the machine froze up. After the second time I was able to see that one of the hard drives in the raid 5 array was having issues but seems to be coming back up online after the reboot, only to have the same problem again and then the machine would freeze up. So I've just replaced the drive in question and the raid5 is rebuilding with the new drive in place now. Hopefully this solves the problem and the server stays running again for some time. May 25th 2007 Finally got around to upgrading the server from the old Athlon 1100mhz with 768meg of ram to a newer Athlon 64 3000+ with 2 gig of ram. The upgrade went very smoothly and everything seems to be working quite well. October 25th 2006 I've been having some hardware troubles recently which have been causing a few reboots the past while but I think they are all resolved now. Replaced the UPS the server is on with a bigger one, and replaced a faulty hard drive in the raid5 array. March 5th 2006 Had a hard drive failure on the main root and home directory mirror last night, and it seemed to cause some problems with the server so the mysql server had stopped running. I have removed the bad drive this morning and will need to take it down later to install a replacement drive as well. September 22nd 2005 I was having issues with my internet connection losing sync for about 2 or 3 minutes once or twice a day over the past week or so, and so cogeco has recommened I replace the modem (was using an older one). I've got the new one in there now and it seems to be working well thus far. I think it's increased my upload/download speed a bit as well which is always nice. June 7th 2005 A drive died in the main mirror array that contains the root and home paritions. I haven't gotten around to replacing it just yet, but I should be doing that soon. Do to some other problems I had to change out some hardware and reboot the server this evening. With the boot drive dead booting back up took a while (finding a floppy drive, creating a grub disk and so on) and thus I was offline for about half an hour. April 11th 2005 One of the drives in my raid 5 array died sometime last week and I'm finally getting around to replacing it/moving some drives around. You may notice some ups and downs as I'll need to reboot at least twice this evening. December 12th 2004 My internet connection went offline sometime yesterday evening around 7:30pm and was down until this afternoon when I got home at 2:30pm and was able to reset the modem. Thus I was offline for most of today. November 17th 2004 Everything is back to normal after a day of drive swaping and copying data. One of the drives in the raid5 array died and so I had to replace it. I ended up getting another drive and swapped out the 120 gig drive for a 160 while replacing one of the 60 gig's that died. Slavery was only down for reboots mostly in between swaping hard drives so there wasn't much downtime. I also stuck another 256 meg dimm in there so it's up to 768 megs of ram now aswell. September 9th 2004 Was offline for about 2 or 3 hours this evening when someone knocked the ethernet cable from my server. July 27th 2004 I'm changing around the drive layout in the server in order to setup some software raid, as well as adding a couple of new drives. So as you may have noticed the system might be offline periodicly while I do some drive swapping. July 5th 2004 Well, the move didn't go nearly as well as I had wished. I ended up having to get a new ip due to switching nodes and whatnot and so there has been some dns troubles for the past few days. The only problem left is that the secondary dns servers are still holding the old dns record right now, so half the time slavery will be down depending on which dns server you hit. Should be fixed within the next day or so... July 2nd 2004 Slavery is moving to a new location today so expect some amount of downtime. If everything goes well it should only be offline for about half an hour or so. There will be some further downtime this weekend as I am going to make some hardware changes as well and upgrade the machine if I can find the time to do it. March 30th 2004 I was having some problems with openwebmail after upgrading to the newest version of perl. I have temporarly downgraded which seems to have fixed the problem for now. March 10th 2004 Well, I've moved from DSL to Cable for my internet connection. I've purchased a commercial account and now have a pretty large pipe of bandwidth, so things should be much faster in terms of download speed from the server now. There might be some downtime with the site as well due to DNS propagation and whatnot. I hope to have everything sorted out and working smoothly by the weekend. January 9th 2004 Arg. Working on getting the server back up and running right now. October 14th 2003 I've replaced the NIC card only to find that it wasn't the NIC. Seems to be something to do with an IRQ problem. I've moved pci slots and forced the card to use a different IRQ but it's still having the same troubles. However, the machine isn't crashing anymore and seems to be running stable. I guess I'll just wait and see for now. October 10th 2003 Well, slavery crashed yet again last night. I'm going to go pick up a new nic card for it tonight or sometime this weekend as I think thats the problem. It's getting errors out the ying yang. Also, things have probably been killer slow the past couple of days as well. I've been transfering all kinds of stuff and it's just killing my connection speeds. I should be done within a couple of days :) September 18th 2003 Eek, slavery crashed here last night and so it was down from about 3am until 8:30am. Not sure what happened but it seems like a hardware failure of some sort since I can't find much of anything in the logs regarding it. I'm guessing its that faulty NIC card that is giving me alot of transmission errors. But anyways, thats all thats new really. The DSL has been very stable and reliable since my last update, so I think that changing the rates around has cleared up all those problems from before. July 4th 2003 I finally had someone here talk to bell today and got my sync rate up to 640 kbit/s upstream. My downstream is a little slower but at 1184 kbit/s but that is still plenty for what I need. I'm just happy to have the larger upstream now. June 21th 2003 This is pretty neat... I found a copy of my website from Nov 28th 1999. I've put it online at slavery.cx/old/19991128/ It's only the opening page (I don't think I had content of any kind in those days) but still kind of interesting. Well, I think its interesting at least. Ya.. well I don't care if you don't think its interesting.. this isn't about you anyways. Go on, get out of here! June 20th 2003 So, after even more testing I got bell canada to try and put me at the 1.5 meg and see how that runs, which they did, and it runs great. Perfect sync no packet loss and all is well. So my current speed is 1728 kbit/s down and 384 kbit/s up. But, I was talking to them again after that and asked if I can change my upstream to 640 kbit/s and they said the could try. So they did, and it worked. However they aren't sure about how to bill that and so I'm stuck at 384 until I can get someone to figure out billing for it and then they can move me to 640 up. So that is where things stand now. Thankfully everything is good and stable again, and the upstream isn't too slow. June 18th 2003 Well after some more troubleshooting and so on, we've pretty much figured out that I simply can not get stable 3 meg DSL service where I am. The bumped me back down to the 1 meg and everything is stable as can be so that pretty much says it all. So thankfully things will be good and stable from now on (no more crazy downtime/packet loss) but unfortunatly my upstream is 160 kbit/s compared to the 768 kbit/s I had before. The aparent reason for the unstableness just lately is due to the weather being warmer and the line expanding and whatnot putting me even further out of reach for the 3 meg. So maybe once winter comes I'll move back to the 3 meg again :) June 14th 2003 I'm attempting some major changes on slavery right now and as you can see, alot of things aren't working properly :) Things will be back to normal by the end of today... June 13th 2003 I've been having some strange problems with the DSL line here lately. It seems my connection craps out and goes all insane from about 6pm until 10pm. Also due to the troubles and a problem with the ppp script I use, slavery was offline all of last night until about 8:30am. I'll be working on the problem over the next few days and might have to open a trouble ticket with bell if this keeps up. May 16th 2003 Ack, slavery was down from 12:15pm till 5:30pm today as it looks like the machine crashed. I'm not sure what caused it but I'll have to look into that later to see if I can find anything. I really should swap out that NIC card sometime soon since that may have been the problem. -- Update (11:40pm): I replaced the NIC card finally as it was just acting up here again. Hopefully this will have fixed the problem for good. May 14th 2003 Hmmmm, it looks like the NIC card that handles the DSL connection had some troubles last night and was out from about just after 2am till 8am today. Reloading the kernel module seemed to fix the problem for now, but I really should go pick up a new NIC card sometime soon. May 6th 2003 Did some changes late last night and put slavery into a different machine. She is now running on a Via C3 800mhz cpu with 256 meg of ram. This is actually a downgrade, but it's no longer my desktop either so it's actually got more free resources in the end. March 26th 2003 Well, things have been in a bit of turmoil the past few days here on slavery. The system ended up getting hax0red on the 23rd, and so I ended up reinstalling the system which went very smoothly a couple of nights ago. It seems I was exploited due to my total lack of security and all of the index files for all the sites hosted here were changed to this. Thankfully the hack was pretty easy going and even made backups of all the replaced index files. But, everything is back up and going again now. If your noticing any troubles on the sites let me know, as it's very possible I forgot to setup some things after the reinstall. March 2nd 2003 Last night slavery was down for a few hours for a kernel upgrade and some hardware changes. This was obviously alot longer than I expected it to be, but ahh well, these things happen. Also spamassasin has been upgraded and now has the Bayesian Learner component, meaning it will learn from the spam you get to make things more effective. Also it doesn't modify the subject of the email anymore, but instead adds a header of "X-Spam-Flag: YES" if the message is found to be spam. So if your filtering spam change your filter rule to that in the header and you should be all set. February 26th 2003 Well, I'm recompiling the kernel here on slavery right now. Sometime in the next couple of days I'm going to reboot and put in a new hard drive and start running off the new kernel. Downtime should be minimal, and after it's back up it should fix a few troubles I was having I think. February 20th 2003 The problem with running debian unstable (sid)... Few broken things in distribution right now. Interestingly enough it's pop3, imap, and webmail right now. Everything else mail related is working right now (messages are coming in just fine). It should be all up and working in a short while though. January 6th 2003 Sweet lord! Up and running now on the 3 meg service. I'm not getting any full 3 meg speeds, but alot better than 1 meg none the less. Looking at about 270 kbytes sec down, and 43 kbytes a sec up. Which is a nice improvement over the previous 17 kbytes a sec up. But anyways, things seem to be fine so far and running nice and fast. December 31st 2002 Happy uhhh, New Years Eve? :) Anyways, although I don't qualify for 3 Meg DSL (my location is too far out) I've got someone here to pull some strings, and I'm scheduled for an upgrade to the 3 Meg service on January 6th. If the service works, woohoo! if not, well dang and I go back to 1 Meg. So there could be some downtime depending on how things go. I'm guessing, but if it really doesn't work out I might not be able to get sync and I'll be offline until they switch me back to the 1 Meg, which could be a few days. But if all goes well the only thing you'll notice are faster downloads :) December 5th 2002 There were some issues with mail filters in the webmail client which have now been fixed with the newest version. If you notice any troubles with the new version just send me an email. November 1st 2002 I'm having some problems with my DSL currently (7:00pm). It seems I'm getting pretty serious packet loss and my link keeps flaking out every so often. Not a whole lot I can do to fix anything, so I'll just wait hope that things get better for now. -- Update (10:20pm): Everything seems to be fine now again. Someone told me they were having trouble connecting yesterday evening as well (however I wasn't around to experience it) so that's not good either. I guess I'll just see how things go from here. September 16th 2002 Been having troubles with neomail and perl getting along nicely (thus the webmail not working), and so I've decided to use this time to switch to openwebmail. I have it installed right now at http://slavery.cx/cgi-bin/openwebmail/openwebmail.pl I've been testing it out and it seems to work pretty good. It has *alot* more features than neomail and looks a little more slick. One thing to note is that by default the option "Move old msg to SAVED at logout:" is checked, and means that if you read your mail, and logout, when you come back it will be in the "Saved" folder and not the inbox anymore. You may change this if you like under preferences. (Under "Message Operation") If you have any troubles with it please let me know. September 4th 2002 I've yanked the bandwidth monitor offline since it hasn't been working properly for the past few weeks. Also a few days ago the DSL was offline for about 6 hours due to some very odd network card problem. Seemed like it was dead, but then after some horsing around with the kernel modules it started working again. June 21st 2002 Woo, and update! :) Anyways, I've got webalizer webstats enabled for most of the sites again now. yoursite.com/stats/ should do it. If not just email me and I'll enable the stats for your site. If you want your stats to be private, email me with a login/pass and I'll password protect the stats page. DSL has been very stable, and I did get the secondary DNS server setup quite a while ago. The backup system is in place as well now, and I just need to get it automated at bit more and it'll be totatly set. Also, I have spamassassin running on the system as an opt-in option for email. If you'd like your email filtered let me know. It's a great system and it doesn't actually delete any of the found spam but marks it so that you can filter it. Really slick system and works great. Since June 1st it's caught 279 pieces of spam, missed 2 and caught one valid email for my account. April 26th 2002 Well, the rewire ended up fixing all of my dsl woes. So everything connection wise seems to be stable and working now. I still haven't totally got the backup system in place yet since I'm a lazy prick. I've got a dedicated system setup on the old cable modem here now, and I'll probably try and get that setup for secondary dns sometime soon. Other than that, not much else has changed. April 16th 2002 I've been having alot of trouble with the DSL as of late. I've finished doing a rewire of the house so maybe this will fix up the problem. If not I've got one other thing to test and then I'll be opening a ticket with ma bell to come and check everything out. Also I've been having some DNS issues which I'm working on getting sorted out aswell. At the same time I'm working on getting up a full backup system in place. Should be operational sometime later this week, at which point I'll feel much better :)