Web upgraded to Debian Squeeze

Posted on Wednesday 29 June 2011, at 22:07 UTC

Here we are, we did the first step of the upgrade announced here this evening, web servers are now running Debian Squeeze with IA32 emulation.

Next step, which will be a lot harder, is to move to x86_64 and then disable IA32 emulation from the kernel. But first we are going to upgrade all other services, this step can wait.

If anything goes wrong and if you cannot manage to fix your stuff yourself, contact us.

SSH service down - upgrade to Squeeze in progress

Posted on Tuesday 28 June 2011, at 19:14 UTC

The hard drive of the server hosting the SSH service did not spin-up during the reboot following the upgrade to Debian Squeeze.

System is being reinstalled on a new hard drive from the whole system backup.

Edit: Service is back up, now doing the upgrade process again ;-)

Edit: Upgrade done. Hoping the other hosts will get better ;-)

IP addresses of secondary services changed

Posted on Friday 24 June 2011, at 23:02 UTC

In order to provide a better network connectivity to our secondary services we had to change the network subnet of the server hosting those services.

For those with network knowledge who wonder why, all the servers in the former subnet were moved to a new location except a few ones, including ours. So our server default route was far away along a L2 path. Which use to be faulty from time to time. We now moved to a local subnet.

So, the IP address of ns2.tuxfamily.net changed from 213.246.36.37 to 213.246.60.172 and the IP address of mx2.tuxfamily.net changed from 213.246.36.36 to 213.246.60.171

Unless you configured those addresses statically somewhere (i.e. you used the previous IPs in NS or MX records instead of the names), you don't need to worry about. If you don't understand what we are talking about this is probably that you have nothing to do ;-)

Downloads master server down

Posted on Thursday 2 June 2011, at 11:14 UTC

The master server of our downloads service is currently down. Content is still delivered by our slave servers, but the <yourproject>-repository directory you usually browse through FTP, SSH and SFTP is unavailable.

Your website may be impacted if by chance it reads data from your download repository through the /data/repository directory (note this practice should be avoided as much as possible).

The server will be back as soon as possible.

Edit: The server is back, everything is working again.

Planned webservers replacement, upgrade to Debian Squeeze and switch to x86_64 architecture

Posted on Wednesday 1 June 2011, at 17:14 UTC

We received yesterday the hardware bought with the money received from our recent donation campaign. Say hello to our new web cluster based on Core i7 CPU and 24 GiB of DDR3 memory per node.

At the same time we are going to switch from Debian Lenny to Debian Squeeze, please check that your websites work with all the software provided by Debian Squeeze (PHP 5.2.6 to 5.3.6, Perl 5.10, Python 2.4&2.5 to 2.6, and so on).

Also, we were stuck in x86_32 architecture due to hardware limits for a while and this is not the case anymore. So we are going to switch from x86_32 to x86_64, please check that your compiled stuff (if any) work in x86_64 and then prepare you to recompile your stuff after the switch. There will be probably no IA32 emulation available because we don't want to bloat our systems with compat librairies, so please be prepared to deal with it.

And yup, as we are quite excited about putting up the new hardware online, you only have a few days to do those checks :p

As usual, contact us if you need more information.