T.A.W.A.N.

Wobble has been successfully upgraded from etch to lenny. Horrah.

To repeat what’s in the subject, nonado will be down for maintenance
this sunday (2009-12-13). If you don’t care about technical details,
you can stop reading now.

Wobble.nonado.net, the nonado host machine, is running debian etch.
Etch was released in 2007-04. It has since been superceeded by lenny,
released 2009-02. Support for etch will cease in 2010-02. As such,
wobble needs to be upgraded soon. However, as it is the host machine,
this cannot be realistically tested/simulated. As such, unexpected
issues may well pop up and need to be fixed/worked around on the day.
For this reason, i’m designating nonado as being offline for the
entire day. I’m hoping the actual downtime will only be a couple of
hours, but we’ll see.

After a little over 4.5 years, bob.nonado.net has been shutdown, and is due to be reclaimed by the hosting company (bytemark.co.uk) at the end of this month. Bob is dead, long live bob.

So, today’s the big day. Steve and myself are all set up in the Nonado Control Bunker, working away tirelessly on migrating Nonado to the new server. We’ll be posting updates here throughout the day, so that you can keep track of what’s happening, and what’s currently affected. If you need us throughout the day, hop into #support, or if you need to contact us urgently, you can ring Steve on +353-87-286-3014 or myself on +353-87-990-0504.

11:10: We’re now shutting down the SMTP server. This means no outgoing or incoming mail for the next while. A short while after this, we’ll be killing all user processes (sorry!) and taking away write access to /home.

11:45 We’re now killing all processes that are using /home on bob, in preparation for doing the final copy across to hop. This includes apache, so all websites are gone too.

12:25 We noticed that some group ID numbers on bob clashed with groups on the new servers, so we’ve done the following:

• Changed so that users are no longer in a group matching their usernames (e.g., atlas is no longer in the atlas group, that group no longer exists)
• Searched the filesystem for files that had a group ownership of that group (e.g., files owned by atlas:atlas), and changed these to user’s primary group.
• Any files that had a group ownership of that group AND WERE WRITABLE BY THAT GROUP were changed to have the group permission match the others permission (e.g., file owned by atlas:atlas, with permissions of 770 is now atlas:user with permissions of 700)

16:23 It’s all over bar the shouting. All major services have been migrated, dns has been updated accordingly, everything should be back up and running now. Let us know if you find anything that’s broken. One known issue is that hetzner seem to be blocking tcp port 6667 outbound. I’m not sure what we can do about that, but we’ll ask them and see if that can be removed.

Steve & Eoghan

So, the long-discussed migration is now firmly underway. This post is being written on the new server, see how much shinier it seems (despite using the exact same software versions/configs etc)? Bob is dying, long live wobble!

Steve

If you don’t care about blogs.nonado.net you can stop reading now.

There’s been a bunch of updates recently. One theme broke (which I’ve disabled) and signups are currently down and will be until I figure out exactly what changed and fix it – though in the meantime you can email support@nonado.net if you want a new account and I’ll set it up. Just bear in mind that I’m in the US for another week so expect delays. Yes I suck. It can’t be helped.
Otherwise everything seems stable :)

New stuff:
Imports work. If you’re switching from livejournal, blogspot etc, the import utility can import your posts. Some can import the comments too.

I also added a plugin that lets you customise the sidebar with some drag-n-drop widgets. Currently there are widgets for flickr, Last.FM, del.icio.us and more.
As always, if there’s a specific plugin or theme you want added, send a mail to support@nonado.net requesting it.

*Update*: I should probably mention where to find the widgets:
Login to your blog, choose ‘Presentation’ -> ‘Sidebar Widgets’. If the option isn’t there then your theme doesn’t support widgets (which means I haven’t edited the theme to support them. In that case feel free to mail me and I’ll get on it).

– Niall

Title says it all. If you find that search isn’t working on your blog yell and I’ll fix :)

– Niall

I dunno how many of ye are getting it, but i’m getting about 2-3 spam comments per day on random blog posts of mine. Today i just noticed 4-5 spam comments that had managed to slip past the spam filter. Grr. So, i’ve changed the options on my own blog (and on this one) so that first-time commenters require moderation, but anyone who’s already posted doesn’t. It seems a fairly even balance between usability and not getting spam.

– diamond

Seems that the folks over at planetplanet have starting making some updates. OK, the feedparser is really old but it works so I’ve switched over to a nightly snapshot. I also told it to unfuck clean the generated HTML using mxTidy. Validation results here.
I’ll see if I can integrate a more recent feedparser at some stage, but for now all weird crap seems to have stopped.

Also, thanks to Gareth for finally using RSS2.0. No more planet flooding :)

– Niall

Hi,

As ye’ve probably noticed, when someone logs in via cgiirc, you don’t get any useful information other than the nick they choose. If they use a nick you don’t recognise, you haven’t a clue who they are. In an effort to make things more transparent, i’ve made a tiny patch to cgiirc which sets the user’s realname field to be the same as the username they used for http auth.

For example, say i log on to cgiirc, and set my nick to ‘kormat’. When you do /whois, before today you’d see a line something like this:

— [kormat] (www-data@localhost) : CGI:IRC User

Now, you’ll see this:

— [kormat] (www-data@localhost) : diamond

I’ve done a small bit of testing, and it looks like the change shouldn’t cause any issues, but if it does, just let support@ know, ta.

– diamond (or possibly kormat)