Posts tagged Server

Quoted from http://www.theviperfiles.com/News_and_Announcements_f17/Blog_and_Downtime_t49120.html

Alright, so here’s the basic breakdown:

One of our most powerful firewalls, CSF+LFD, was freaking out and for some reason would pop the CPU usage to 100% and the serverload to 20+

(basic translation of serverload: Linux serverload is x number of processes waiting to get into the CPU per second on average over the past minute, five minutes, or 15 minutes. I’ll be talking about the past minute average, usually. So 20 means that on average, about 20 processes were waiting in queue to get through the CPU every second. Normally, you want to keep that down to under 10, and if you’ve got the cash, you want to get that down to under 5. Until lately, we were under 1, averaging about 0.8)

Now, we were averaging about 0.8 on our server because we’ve got a Pentium-D server with 2GB of RAM, when we probably could’ve survived on a lot less, that is, until I cranked up the server’s security by enabling suPHP and suEXEC, meaning that instead of Apache and PHP running as “nobody”, they run specifically as the website that they’re serving, meaning that if someone hacked Macinyasha.net somehow, they couldn’t backdoor into TVF. All well and great, but that also makes PHP a little more intensive and makes it so we can’t use eAccelerator anymore. Oh well.

But things started getting kinky because the server would peak 100% CPU for seemingly no reason, and would become completely unresponsive. So we’d have to get it rebooted, and of course our datacenter would take like 15 minutes to do that. Then it started doing it more and more often… So I started talking with our datacenter to try and diagnose it. They moved our hard drive into a new server to try and eliminate any hardware issues, but it still happened. So a day later, we figured out it was our firewall, but for some reason, they had changed our root password and messed with CPanel’s license, when we never asked them to.

Now we get to the REAL headache.

The server had been originally purchased through a reseller (Ralph Chaplain, look him up and you’ll see why he went out of business) and then got transferred to us when that reseller closed up shop. The server was then placed in Vipersnipes’ name, and the account used Viper3773’s email. Totally weird. But the problem was, neither Viper3773 nor I knew this, and recently, Vipersnipes quit. (That’s right, Vipersnipes is gone. Look at his account, he’s a member now.) We didn’t know what was going on, our datacenter didn’t know who I was (because obviously Vipersnipes and I have different names, phone numbers, addresses, email addresses, etc.) and once we FINALLY got them to understand everything that was going on, and updated our billing info to reflect me as the “owner” (sorry, but Viper3773 is only 16, and I’m 18, so it has to be my name on the line.) and THEN they were willing to change our root password back and get everything up and working.

Now the downside… Since Vipersnipes was in charge of the billing and didn’t keep anyone else in the loop, our datacenter wasn’t getting fully paid, so we kinda have a big bill with them. Like, enough to buy myself two or three netbooks (that should give you an idea). So we’re on the financial crunch since our main financial admin is now gone, didn’t bring anyone up to speed, and now we’re owing some cash. Aaand the crappy economy gets worse every day.

So, people, please. If you’ve got the money, please donate and help us out! Remember, not only do you help to keep us running, but you also get VIP access on our forum, top-response time for requests (if you think Mr Happy does a lot of work for all the requests in the public section, he’s even faster working for VIPs!) and tons of VIP-only downloads, plus the dozen or so VIP accounts we have! And we’re adding more Rapidshare accounts every month, so that issue of people maxing out the accounts is slowly going bye-bye!

Alright, enough of me blabbing, here’s the summary for you TL;DR’ers:
1) Our firewall was f*cking things up.
2) Datacenter was having a hissy fit over the billing info being messed up.
3) Vipersnipes is gone.
4) We’ve got a considerable bill with the datacenter.
5) We need donators now more than ever!

Wha-bam.

So we got the server back up by disabling one of our firewalls, but now it seems that the *awesome* technician at the datacenter somehow changed our server’s root password AND made CPanel think it’s not licensed, so right now I’m on the phone trying to get that fixed. I put TVF in Offline Mode so that once I do get CPanel back up and running, we can take a backup and then reinstall the server’s OS.

Seems like our datacenter didn’t finish rebuilding our server last night, or they just forgot to turn it on this morning. I’ve emailed them and am waiting for a response…