COMPLETED: Scheduled Maintenance On Monday the 9th

[Xepher]

UPDATE: Maintenance is complete. There is a new traffic stats system in place now as well. Links can be found after you log in to user-services.

The server has currently been online for over 300 days in a row, and as that's a bit too long between filesystem checks for my comfort, I'm going to be doing some on my days off here. I'll try and keep it to the morning/late-night hours as much as possible, but things will be up and down a bit while I work on it. Mostly I need to reboot the thing, do some filesystem checks, and possibly defrag some parts of the filesystem. Just wanted to warn everyone in advance that if you have trouble connecting Monday morning or Monday night (into early Tuesday) it's probably this, and it should be back online a bit later. I may try to get a new stats system in place while I'm at it, depending on how long the other stuff takes.

[Xepher]

Okay, most of it is done. I'm still working on a few things though, so there may be a few more interruptions, but they should be much briefer.

[Xepher]

Okay, all finished. I've added redone the stats system as well, so check out the link when you log into user-services.

[Miluette]

I like the new stats.

It's weird when I can access Xepher sites but I can't log into sftp. This is one of those times. D:

[MHPayne]

I also:

Haven't been able to log in to update my pages since Monday night.  This morning, at least, it lets me enter my user name and password before PSFTP closes itself down...

Mike
pandora.xepher.net

[tapewolf]

Yes, this seems to be a general problem.

And ooh, AWstats, how I've missed thee

[Xepher]

Okay, I'll look into that. Wonder what's wrong.

Update: I looked into things and nothing seems wrong with SSH/SFTP that I can find. Are you still having issues? It's possible there were network issues or something while I was away that are gone now, and that this isn't related to any of the maintenance. If you DO have problems still, any specific error messages would be helpful. The logs show several people that logged in for 10 minutes or more recently though, so hopefully it was just transient network problems.

[tapewolf]

No joy.  I'm still getting errors logging in via ssh and WinSCP.

[Xepher]

Noted... thanks for the IM too, I've got a reproducible error now, and I'm working on it.

[Xepher]

Okay, this was a weird one. When I setup the new logging so that awstats would work, it meant an extra file handle open in each user's name so that it can log stuff. This apparently exceeded some limit, and it didn't allow a new ssh process to be started then. If I stopped apache, then the logins worked fine. The limits in question were set to 70 processes each user, and as far as I can tell, no one had more than a dozen. I removed the limits and ssh works normally again though. I'm sure I must've put those there for a reason however, so no one do anything stupid like forkbomb the server, okay? :-P

[MHPayne]

Yay!

I was able to log in and put up Tuesday and Wednesday's pages this morning!  Oddly enough, Statcounter reported that I had the most hits I've ever had at Daily Grind on Tuesday, the first weekday in nearly 4 years that I didn't update the site.  I should skip days more often, I guess... 

Thanks for digging this out, Xepher!

Mike

[Zumi]

O.o i just checked the user statistics for the first time and im in shock at the numebrs O.o

are the numbers true O.o it just doesnt seem right O.o

[Xepher]

Well I'm not making them up randomly, if that's what you're asking. The numbers SHOULD all be accurate from the actual traffic logs, unless there's a glitch or something, but usually that would show up a day with no traffic or tons of traffic. If you have steady traffic, it's probably legit.

[Zumi]

we wernt saying you were making them up lol
we just assumed it was a glitch but it is steady figures like you said lol

naturally we just assumed no-one was reading at all lol