An average guy's IT (mis)adventures

It's been a few days now that I'm experiencing downtimes at night, early mornings.

When I wake up, connect to the VPS and attach to tmux, I am welcomed by these messages in console:

        Message from syslogd@pandora at Nov 3 05:37:13 ...
        kernel:[1586232.350737] Dazed and confused, but trying to continue

        Message from syslogd@pandora at Nov 3 05:37:24 ...
        kernel:[1586235.049143] Uhhuh. NMI received for unknown reason
        30 on CPU 1.

        Message from syslogd@pandora at Nov 3 05:37:24 ...
        kernel:[1586235.049145] Dazed and confused, but trying to continue

        Message from syslogd@pandora at Nov 3 05:37:55 ...
        kernel:[1586273.642163] watchdog: BUG: soft lockup - CPU#2 stuck
        for 27s! [dockerd:526408]

        Message from syslogd@pandora at Nov 3 05:38:00 ...
        kernel:[1586278.545172] watchdog: BUG: soft lockup - CPU#1 stuck
        for 24s! [systemd-journal:257]

        Message from syslogd@pandora at Nov 3 05:38:02 ...
        kernel:[1586281.187611] watchdog: BUG: soft lockup - CPU#3 stuck
        for 35s! [lua5.4:1702]

There's no need to say that when this happens, the server is completely frozen and doesn't respond to anything.

I already contacted support, but they didn't investigate at all, I believe. They manually restarted my VPS once and did some pings and connection tests (VNC, SSH) afterwards.. "everything is working fine!"

This last Saturday I was up when it happened, so I did a mtr from my PC to the VPS's IP and logged it, then I sent another email with the output to support.. Still waiting for them to reply, I guess tomorrow (Monday).

Friends like lorenzo and shai are having difficulties too, with the same provider, so I'm not imagining things.

Well, that's all I got to say, will keep you posted if any news.

Last evening, at around 22:00 CET, Contabo migrated my VPS from old Hub at Nuremberg to the newly built "Hub Europe".

They rebooted it and everything came back up as usual.. I wasn't at home when it happened, didn't even notice anything until I connected and found no tmux session running. Even my phone which was connected to wireguard, quietly continued working and sending notifications 😎

Meanwhile, my friends and I watched "The Creator" on Disney+

Can't really say I do recommend it, but for some casual evening/entertainment, it wasn't half bad.

gemlog

I've been rethinking about the publication license of these blog posts.

Changes I made:

• Some "public" posts were turned to "CC BY-NC-SA"
• Some "all-rights-reserved" posts were turned to "CC BY-NC-SA"

At the moment there are still other public and all-rights-reserved posts.. Most of the public ones are from me, while some are from friends who told me to publish them with such license.

The all-rights-reserved ones are mostly from content I grabbed over the net and published here, where I wasn't able to contact the original authors (so credits are to themselves) and some others are e.g. posts with pictures I took myself.

So.. From now on, all these types of licenses will co-exist and each post will be tagged with the correct/relative one (hopefully).

Disclaimer: If not specified, you can assume it's "CC BY-NC-SA" by Simone "roughnecks" Canaletti

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

Yet another small update about gemini.

You can now browse gemini://woodpeckersnest.space even from regular HTTP, here: https://gemini.woodpeckersnest.space/

I've applied some fixes (like) to HTML and CSS (the latter is pretty much the same used by the @wpn onboarding page, but obviously customized). As for accessibility, I think it should work well for desktop and also mobile browsers; CGIs work as well.

The proxy I used is Loxy. I also already opened an issue on their repo for a problem with query strings, still waiting for someone to reply. Apart from that, everything checks out.

gemlog

I was running 2 separate apps for shell/XMPP account registration at @wpn, so far..

This night I made some changes to the original code (provided by Schimon) and I got just one app with account choice - meaning that you must choose what account type you want in the form. Shell accounts are for friends only, as it's always been.

As a consequence of that, I shut down the old address for XMPP account onboarding and left only the main one, which is:

https://hello.woodpeckersnest.space/

gemlog

I'm always a bit busy when it comes to pandora (the VPS running WPN: woodpeckersnest.space/eu). I like experimenting new things, fixing/improving existing things.. I cannot stay still 😀

After migrating the homepage to homarr - which took really no time for the initial setup, but a lot of work afterward to fix layouts for mobile devices and non-full-hd screens for desktop PCs - I started messing up with a brand new toy: gemini!!

Not even a week since I installed molly-brown, the actual gemini server, to today, I can count lots of improvements..

• Installed terminal gemini browser client amfora for wpn's shell users and also gtl, a tinylog reader, always for the shell.
• Configured a local tinylog which groups together all wpn's capsuleer tinylogs, so it's easy to follow all of the local server users in one single place; the log is generated by gtl itself, refreshed and published every 5 minutes: can't miss a thing!
• Initially configured gemlog mentions starting from a script by @bacardi55, who is the author of many gemini-related things, like the before mentioned gtl software. When I realized it lacked multi-capsules support, I started modifying it and came up with some spaghetti code, which is working surprisingly well and it was deployed earlier today.

gemini@wpn

Onboarding on WPN didn't go as well as I thought, but at least the first user (hey, Mario, I'm looking at you! :) registered and, I believe, everything is working fine for them! On this topic, the onboarding page was migrated from PHP and Email to Python and XMPP, thanks to my friend Schimon! He also kept the UI pretty much intact, so I think most people who looked at it before and after, wouldn't even notice the changes under the hood.

https://hello.woodpeckersnest.space/

Something else I've been doing was setting up: https://invite.woodpeckersnest.space/

which is a landing page to allow people to join an XMPP MUC or add an XMPP contact from a web interface, which will also guide them in choosing a client for their platform. It's rather simple but very useful at the same time.

The chatmail server was upgraded (more or less) at the beginning of August and running smoothly so far; it got some cool new improvements like automatic account deletion after #amount of days from last login and lots of fixes. Total number of registered accounts, so far, is 117.

https://chatmail.woodpeckersnest.space/

Services which I dismissed include:

• Jitsi Meet (wasn't really using it and it was wasting quite a lot of resources just to be running)
• Isso comments service, which powered the old homepage contact section and also a shaarli instance, which is still running but it's more a private thing, rather than a public one.

One more proposition: from now on, I will be publishing these (B)log posts in both protocols, HTTP here as you're reading and gemini on roughnecks' gemlog. I will be probably publishing less often than usual though, at least in this format, and send more status updates through the tinylog on WPN, the microlog at Station and my fediverse account.

In the next days I will be monitoring how everything goes and relax a bit, if I manage.. Today I didn't feel so good after a few stressful days, too much computing and too less sleep hours - it's 01:40 AM right now, so yeah, tomorrow will be another of “those” days, I guess.

gemlog

Good day everyone!

This weekend I've been restructuring "woodpeckersnest's" homepage.

The move was pretty huge since I went from a static #HTML plus some #JS site to homarr; it's taking quite a lot of RAM to run now, but the outcome is nice and I like it better than the old style - on mobile, at least on my crap smartphone, doesn't look very good, it needs quite a lot of pixels to perform alright (I hate phones btw, so it's still good for me).

Everything is WIP, but you can take a look at it anyway: https://woodpeckersnest.space

Please let me know if you find anything broken or not working properly. 😍

P.S. I have also upgraded our DeltaChat "chatmail" instance to latest and greatest 1.4.1 release - Thanks Federico for the hosting and Andrea for translations.

Come join us at https://chatmail.woodpeckersnest.space/

Statistiche

$ uptime
 03:54:18 up 34 days,  8:19,  4 users,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

$ free -m
               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:             877         503         159           8         377         374
Swap:            499          87         412

$ df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev            428M     0  428M   0% /dev
tmpfs            88M  8.4M   80M  10% /run
/dev/vda1       9.7G  2.8G  6.6G  30% /
tmpfs           439M     0  439M   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs           5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock
/dev/vda15      124M   12M  113M  10% /boot/efi
tmpfs            88M     0   88M   0% /run/user/1000

$ ip -s link
2: ens6: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc fq_codel state UP mode DEFAULT group default qlen 1000
    RX:   bytes  packets errors dropped  missed   mcast
     1444308867 14871375      0   32828       0       0
    TX:   bytes  packets errors dropped carrier collsns
    18414348377 21921709      0       0       0       0

$ curl https://chatmail.woodpeckersnest.space/metrics
accounts 83 1719367201634

After some failed attempt at this, I think I found the right way to "mount" a remote WebDAV folder under Windows' Explorer.

Initially my baby steps took me here: https://note.woodpeckersnest.space/share/0TJT81fgI8Jy

After following that tutorial I didn't succeed, so I investigated further. I can say that everythig looks correct until you get to point 9.

The address they tell you have to enter isn't correct in my experience and they aren't even using https for the URL. What worked for me was instead something like:

\\webdav.woodpeckersnest.space@SSL\folder

You have to input the network-path-stile address which is common in Windows, as in: double backslash, FQDN of your WebDAV server, "@SSL" and then the path (folder) where you have access to files in your WebDAV server, with a backslash preceding it.

That's it, a prompt will ask for username and password and then a new Network Path (WebFolder) will be connected in Explorer, just below your local drives.

You can then browse, copy, upload, delete (and so on) whatever content you like.

EDIT: Just found out I couldn't rename files/folders from Windows or Total Commander (Android)

Fixed by setting nginx virtualhost like this:

server {
    listen 443 ssl http2;
    listen [::]:443 ssl http2;
    server_name  webdav.woodpeckersnest.space;


    # HTTPS configuration
    ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/webdav.woodpeckersnest.space/fullchain.pem;
    ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/webdav.woodpeckersnest.space/privkey.pem;

    access_log /var/log/nginx/webdav/access.log;
    error_log /var/log/nginx/webdav/error.log;

  location / {
    set $destination $http_destination;

    if ($destination ~* ^https(.+)$) {
         set $destination http$1;
    }

    proxy_set_header   Destination $destination;
    proxy_set_header   X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
    proxy_set_header   X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
    proxy_set_header   Host $host;
    proxy_pass         http://127.0.0.1:17062/;
    proxy_http_version 1.1;
    proxy_set_header   Upgrade $http_upgrade;
    proxy_set_header   Connection "upgrade";
  }

  client_max_body_size 0;

}

Now I'm quite happy 😀