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26-Nov-2018

Preparations for moving machinery
Now the rack has arrived and constructed, and power lines are (almost) done, it is time to move the server to a temporary location (within the attic – there is no more room elsewhere..) and have it run there, so I have space and time to make space (remove the current cupboard), install the rack and place servers in it: if that is finished the Alpha server will (once more) be shutdown, next installed in lace and restarted.
My aim (!) is to do this exercise next Thursday – so I have a full day, and there is no problem if the activity needs an extension.

It means everything will be black for some time. Or I set up a small machine – emulation, perhaps – to server an “Under Construction” page….We’ll see.

Posted on

07-May-2017

Maintenance report
There isn’t much to mention on maintenance.

PMAS statistics for April
Total messages    :   2796 = 100.0 o/o
DNS Blacklisted   :      0 =    .0 o/o (Files:  0)
Relay attempts    :    209 =   7.4 o/o (Files: 30)
Accepted by PMAS  :   2587 =  92.5 o/o (Files: 30)
  Handled by explicit rule
         Rejected :   1793 =  69.3 o/o (processed),  64.1 o/o (all)
         Accepted :    164 =   6.3 o/o (processed),   5.8 o/o (all)
  Handled by content
        Discarded :    339 =  13.1 o/o (processed),  12.1 o/o (all)
     Quarantained :    274 =  10.5 o/o (processed),   9.7 o/o (all)
        Delivered :     17 =    .6 o/o (processed),    .6 o/o (all)

The number of relay attempts is not that high: the most (100) have been on April 26th, the rest (just a few days) were far less.

New router
I purchased the follow-up mof my Vigor 2920 router: a 2925Vac one. It has bot 2.4 Ghz and 5 GHz wireless, and supports 8.11ac protocol for LAN traffic. I could prepare it yesterday evening using the 2920 as a example (I could have restored the backup of that one) and installed it this evening. Apart from one thing I forgot: specifying which phone is what number, and setting up opened ports – I set them up but probably forgot to save the configuration – changing wnet without a hitch (Of course I had to apply these changes….) and the result in access, especially Wireless, is eminent. And I run the speed test: Up- and download went up to about 85 MB/s – matching the current speed of 100Mb/sec: This router’s firewall has a throughput of 200Mb/s, 4 times the bandwidth of the 2920….

Next month, my Internet speed will increase to 160 Mb/s (with no extra cost) and this router is fit for that (I got the announcement AFTER I received the router 🙂 ) so I’m ready 🙂

PHP 5.4 retest ahead
I planned a test of PHP 5.4 (dnd MariaDB 5.5) tomorrow evening, hopefully I don’t run into problems now, since I changed the system parameters. I may also need to reboot the server to include latest changes, based on AutoGen reporting.
So far the results of the performance look nice. Memory usage goes up to 75%, as before, bot slowly, and sometimes it seems to be eset. Something to investigate.

New version of WASD (and alamode)
New version of the webserver has been downloaded, and the accompanying monitor program. To be installed tomorrow (as well)

Posted on

14-Feb-2017

Second IA64
Got the second Itanium yesterday. This machine misses to airflow-ducts. It that doesn’t disallow starting it up.After connecting a screen to the VGA outlet and a keyboard in the proper USP-port, I did, and spotted something unexpected: the screen stayed blank…
I contacted the seller this morning on the missing air ducts – he’ll send them ASAP, forgot to re-install them – and this behaviour, he told me the VGA port is very likely disabled, I could connect to the (serial) console port and get on from there: You could call it “The old-fashioned way” but it (usually) works. So that’s the next thing to do. I aslo asked what’s installed: nothing, there’s no OS on this system. So this will become a plain OpenVMS box, where the other could be a HP-VM box with OpenVMS as a guest system. Or I switch the disks, since 2 CPU’s and 24Gb memory 9and 450Gb disk space seems to be a more feasible system running multiple openVMS instances (clustered?) as guest systems).
Anyway, I need to consider a re-organization of the floor space (including a (yet to obtain) 19″ rack), power grid and network. Well, that’s for a later date.

Posted on

11-Feb-2017

New hardware
The first of two rx2620 servers has arrived: 1 2-core Itanium-2 CPU (1.6 Ghz), 8Gb memory and 3 73Gb 15K disks. Set up running HP-UX and patched up to date. Not sure at the moment what to do: Keeping HP-UX, use it as a base system and install VMS as guest OS?
It depends on the second system, planned to arrive on Monday. It’s a bigger one: 2 CPU, 24 GB memory and 3 146 Gb disks. But that one is probably empty.
Waiting for the software, and the licenses.

Posted on

04-Feb-2017

Maintenance
It’s been a quiet month:

PMAS statistics for January
Total messages    :   1910 = 100.0 o/o
DNS Blacklisted   :      0 =    .0 o/o (Files:  0)
Relay attempts    :     94 =   4.9 o/o (Files: 31)
Accepted by PMAS  :   1816 =  95.0 o/o (Files: 31)
  Handled by explicit rule
         Rejected :    971 =  53.4 o/o (processed),  50.8 o/o (all)
         Accepted :    150 =   8.2 o/o (processed),   7.8 o/o (all)
  Handled by content
        Discarded :    342 =  18.8 o/o (processed),  17.9 o/o (all)
     Quarantained :    329 =  18.1 o/o (processed),  17.2 o/o (all)
        Delivered :     24 =   1.3 o/o (processed),   1.2 o/o (all)

Most days there has been some attempts to abuse the server for relay each day, but far less than is usual. Most files are well below the rated limit (4 blocks, or 2Kb in size), jus on 09-Jan-2017 and 29-Jan-2017 were larger: 8 blocks (4KB), and 4 blocks (2KB – more than on the others days).

If would be nice if it stays that low, but I guess I’ll see higher levels later this year.

Network outage
Yesterday, when trying to read mail from the server at work, I noted there was no access AT ALL to the site – even VPN into the router failed. Turned out to be a problem with the Internet provider, that lasted until approximately 16:00 – after which all mail that was blocked for that reason, got in again. Not juts Internet. Because TV and telephone use the same connection, these were down too.
Well, it all worked again even since.

New hardware, new software
This year. I intend to add an Itanium server to the data center, so I can get somewhat acquainted to that hardware. Apart from the usual WordPress updates (one coming this weekend) I plan to upgrade the database (from MySQL 5.1 to MariaDb 5.5) and PHP (a big leap to 7.0). This involves all blogs to I need to take care that I don’t break anything, severely (It may required some PHP code changes as I already found out when trying to run 5.4….)
And, if I can get hold of it, newer versions of OpenVMS.

Apart from that, there will be new content in Trips, Tracks and Travels.