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The main problem was that our backups of the Mnesia database where outdated, they had to be recovered from the old hdd (the one not broken :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.

by jesse

As SIYB mentioned earlier, jacklab.net has been indeed compromised by some script kiddie(s) who apparently managed to exploit a vulnerability in the cyrus installation. Folks are currently setting up a new box, but I guess it will take some time until the IRCd there is running again.

Also, teranetworks has been moved to another box, an OpenVZ container on wootstube that is. Our teranetworks boxes are now entirely hosted by Hetzner which saves us some money, but has the disadvantage of a closed 6667/tcp port. So, as of now, the teranetworks.de IRC Server is accessible via SSL only (on port 6697), which you should use anyways since our governments increasingly like snooping around nowadays.

If you really have to connect plaintext/unencrypted, there are still siyb.de and localh0rst.de listening on 6667 (see the updated serverlist).

by siyb

We are currently interchanging some major services of teranetworks.de (ircd / mail / dns). Changes may result in strange behaviour or malfunctioning of those services.

As for our IRC network, please use siyb.de or localh0rst.de for now. The other IRC leaf, jacklab.net, provided by GraveDigger, is down until further notice since there have been some issues with the hosting company which we can’t discuss here.

Please understand that these changes are absolutely necessary. We hope to get everything back in order in the next 12 hours. We apologize for any inconvenience caused.

by siyb

/* NO COMMENT */

Ps: Obviously I got rid of the “winterdream” straight away.

by siyb

I am sorry to inform you that our ICQ transport will be offline until further notice. Todays upgrade seems to have b0rked the service so that it’s simply impossible to connect. Please stand by.

UPDATE: The ICQ transport should work again now, the reason for the failure most certainly was pebcak on my part .. sorry for that, please report any problems with the transport.