Re: [tsc-devel] On the server issues

Sydney Dykstra | Mon, 19 Jan 2015 23:07:57 UTC

I’m not sure what the best option is. I would almost say go with Debian
Jessie, because it pretty close to releasing as stable, and Jessie has a
long life ahead of it. Also from my experience is very stable. The one
thing i do notice is that i cannot seem to get crontab to work, but that
may just be me.

Also, if we do that, wont it be hard to transfer everything over? Just
thoughts.

-Sydney


On 01/19/2015 05:50 PM, Quintus wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> as you might have guessed, I don’t have much time right now. I’ve
> skimmed through the IRC logs of the last days and wanted to comment on
> it a bit.
>
> The setup currently runs a standard Apache httpd on Debian wheezy. The
> forum runs on a Thin server that is reverse-proxied behind the httpd,
> and the wiki runs a Python software named Moinmoin via CGI. All the
> other pages are simple, static HTML pages that are either written
> incrementally (like the chatlogs) or on a regular interval via Cron
> (such as the mailinglist archive), or even manually such as the main
> page.
>
> The reason for the current outages is the Moinmoin wiki software. From
> time to time, it gets cought in an infinite loop with 100% CPU usage,
> blocking httpd completely and having heavy impact on the rest of the
> server. The problem in the wiki software seems to have been resolved in
> newer versions of Moinmoin, but Debian’s policy won’t permit to get a
> more recent version into their repositories.
>
> As has been suggested, the problem thus is _not_ memory usage. There’s
> plenty of free memory on the server. It’s just the 100% CPU problem
> caused by the Python processes and thus it’s not really httpd’s
> fault. If we swapped out httpd for nginx, the problem would occur
> likewise.
>
> This leaves us with the option to either upgrade to Debian Jessie,
> upgrade only Moinmoin to a more recent version and afterwards manually
> take care to keep it up-to-date without the package manager, use another
> wiki software, or put proper monitoring in place that automatically
> restarts faulty daemons. I personally favour the last option, as
> monitoring is something that should be good measure for any server. The
> same goes for backups. Once I’m done with my exams, I’m going to do some
> proper server configuration in this regard. Maybe I can even insert
> something in the meanwhile...
>
> A sidenote for anyone having server access: On login, the MOTD is
> printed to the terminal. It contains the names and valid email addresses
> of all people who have full admin access via sudo. In case you urgently
> need an admin email address, that’s where you want to look.
>
> Also, if you didn’t know yet, I offer SSH (and thus SFTP with download
> area!) access to anyone involved in the TSC project. Just drop me an
> email. If you don’t know where to put your large files to distribute
> them, this is for you.
>
> The most reliable way to reach me currently is by email, either directly
> (see From header of this email), or by sending to the mailinglist. I’ll
> see both, even if I don’t reply immediately.
>
> Valete,
> Quintus
>