System Administration

Looks like the bots have found my web site. I guess I should be grateful that the site is reachable from the other parts of the web and not just floating around in IPFS outer space.

I’ve started to get a number of comments that add absolutely nothing to this blog, and thus will never see the light of day. Before anyone yells “Censorship!”, I did say that the comments will be added manually, meaning that I have to take time out of my day to move the comments over to the site. Anything that isn’t worth even a few seconds of my time is going to the dustbin (rm -f $COMMENT).

You may notice at the bottom of this page is a comment submission form. As of this post, comments are live, using a prototype store and forward relay server. Right now, the only functionality is to accept posts and store them. The forwarding part hasn’t been written. Also, any comments that I receive will have to be manually added by me (and moderated at the same time).

Let me know if it’s working.

I run an instance of Nextcloud for storing files, contacts, calendars and similar things that most other people use Google or Microsoft for. I self-host the server, as should be done to truly own the data, but about a month ago, the official Nextcloud app on my phone stopped working for no discernible reason.

I have got to where fixing that was the next task, so that’s what I tackled today. At first glance, the problem was that I was running an ancient version of Nextcloud (16.0.1.1! Yikes!), so the first order of business was to update to a newer version.

I was reviewing the results of my IPNS Scanner and found that a new blog is listed: ParanoidPenguin.net. In addition to being available on the http(s) web, it is also available on the ipfs web. I don’t know (yet) if the IPFS version is official (the site being a static site generated by hugo makes me think it is likely).

Browsing over the articles, one in particular stood out to me, this one on web server security. I run a web server for me to have access to personal services while away from my home network, and as they are exposed to the internet at large, I decided to point the services the security challenge references. I’m not going to give out either the URL or the test results, but I will say, that if you run a web server, you should also use these services and then secure whatever you can. Unless you have already run these or similar tests, or are obsessive about security, then you will have a list of things to do.

Finished the NAS system maintenance that I’ve been putting off. Removed the faulting hard drive and installed the 8TB into its spot, removed and replaced the thermal paste on the CPU, replaced the CPU cooler (the hold downs broke while it was removed), and buttoned everything back up. After cranking up the CPU load on the system with IPFS Follow Cluster and Folding@Home, the CPU is holding at 35-36°C with 90-95% CPU utilization. I’ll be watching it over the next couple of hours to see if that holds before returning it to the server closet.

I will not be doing the server maintenance that I was planning on doing this weekend, because of poor planning on my part. Can’t find high-percent isopropyl alcohol in the stores in my area, so I’m going to have to wait for the 99% bottle from Amazon (Jeff Bezos, International Man of Monopoly) to arrive. From where I’m sitting I can reach out and grab a bottle of 70% that I bought several years ago, but I don’t really want that 30% water near sensitive electronic components.

I completed getting the fallen branches off the fence line so they are no longer hanging over the property line into the neighbor’s domain. I also unloaded the a full truck bed full of firewood onto the back of my property. Right now, it’s just thrown in a big pile on the ground, but with the amount of work remaining, it will just have to sit there until I can get around to it. The wife has given me a deadline of March of next year to get it all clean up or she will hire somebody to finish it.

All the data on the dying hard drive has been transferred to another drive and power and data lines have been disconnected. The drive hasn’t been physically removed from the system yet because of the effort to remove the drive cage from the chassis. Five other data and power lines will need to be disconnected to extract the failing drive.

I do intend to use it in another computer as the boot drive until it finally dies, but will not keep any important data on the drive as everything will be lost when the drive fails.

One of the six hard drives in my local file server has acted up one too many times and so I’ve made the decision to migrate all the data off it to a new drive. As the system is set up using Logical Volume Management, this is fairly straight forward: add the new drive to the system and the volume group (in this case, an 8TB Seagate), then pvmove everything from the failing drive to the new one, then remove the old drive from the system.