by siyb

Mount.at is offline … yet again, the reasons are still unknown but we are planning to inspect the server tomorrow, so stay tuned. For now, the Jabber service as well as the IRCd, some websites and gameservers remain unreachable. We apologize :/

By the way, we have a roundrobin in place now. Pointing your IRC client to irc.teranetworks.de should always get you on a working server of our network if you connect via SSL on port 6697.

Update: We just found out that hades is still running, a switch in the data center went dead. According to our source, it will be replaced sometime in the next 24 hours. Stay tuned!

Update #2: Here we are again. Things worked out faster than we thought. \o/

by siyb

We have turned off any logging mechanism recording connection data on our jabber server. teh.geek\o/sphere is about to realize its “We don’t log” policy on all sectors, the jabber server obviously is a part of that. The only things we will still log are messages sent to users which are currently offline, those messages will get deleted as soon as they are delivered.

by siyb

From this day on mount.at uses a separate blog to release network related news, most of which are mirrored to geekosphere.org, our mothership. Topics and posts released on this blog will mostly be linked to the services hosted on hades, the mount.at playground. The current design will be modified in order to reflect the content and purpose of this website in an appropriate manner, the first thing to be enhanced will be the mount.at logo, which hopefully is ready by tonight. Now lets all bow our heads and pray to Murphy so that he shall grant us no downtimes and harddrive crashes as well as unb0rked ram.

by siyb

We decided to open a conference chat on jabber.mount.at to supply our non IRC users with support and information about our project. Feel free to join us for a casual chatter as well as project related issues, you are always welcome. Please acknowledge that our IRC RULES also apply to the provided conference chatroom(s).

The conference chat can be reached by joining the following groupchat:

geekosphere@conference.jabber.mount.at

by siyb

We decided to upgrade the hardware on mount.at today and therefore had to shutdown the server for several hours. Hades is running again now, but not all services are restored to their full extend, the jabber server (jabber.mount.at) has been recovered already and should be usable again. Due to the fact that the bootloader was installed on a hdd that had a total breakdown and I/O errors that prevented a reinstallation of bootloader on the system drive, we had to setup the server again.

The main problem was that our backups of the Mnesia database where outdated, they had to be recovered from the old hdd (the one not broken :>). This procedure turned out to be far more complicated / frustrating than expected. Due to the fact that the control interface ejabberdctl relies on RPC, which require a valid hostname to function properly, the recovery wasn’t as simple as calling the program from the host we connected the old harddrive to. I wrote a small howto for anyone stuck in the same situation:

Solution: chroot

Mounting the harddrive

mkdir /mnt/hdd && mount /dev/sdaX /mnt/hdd

Mounting proc

mount -t proc proc /mnt/hdd/proc/

Change the hostname on the box to the hostname of the machine Mnesia was used on (changing the hostname within the chroot didn’t work), this is necessary because RPC will not work if you do not use the hostname of your old box

$editor /etc/hostname

Chrooting

chroot /mnt/hdd

Starting up the ejabberd daemon and executing backup procedure

/etc/init.d/ejabberd start && ejabberd_ctl backup /tmp/ejabberd.backup

Exit the chroot and copy the backup from /mnt/hdd/tmp/ejabberd.backup to the box you wish to apply it to, use

ejabberd_ctl restore /tmp/ejabberd.backup

to finally restore the backup …

You may need to follow this tutorial when porting the database to a host with a different hostname -> http://www.ejabberd.im/migrate-host

Mount.at will be unavailable for some time tomorrow as well, because the hardware upgrade could not be finished in today’s session, please stand by and sorry for any inconvenience caused.