Here there will be posts about ranonmand's server, its status and relevant information.
VNC was recently set to only allow connections from the local network. To connect via VNC you will have to do so via the VPN, an SSH tunnel (use Putty, its easy!) or via a VNC client that supports SSH tunneling (there is a variant of TightVNC's client that will do this.)
Cool. Good to know. I haven't had to get in to the server lately, but maybe I should -- fix up that Drupal 7 test site!
Changed the forums email setting to (hopefully) with with the google apps thing. If you aren't getting any emails, then its probably not working. And you probably wont see this without getting an email....
I didn't get email. Or would I only be getting email if I subscribed to this thread?
I am subscribed to EVERYTHING! HAHAHA?
I get email if anything gets posted at all. But that's just me. Email is working. I got several. Though, we are limited to 500 a day.
Interesting restriction. Incoming? Outgoing? Is spam counted?
And yeah, I don't subscribe to threads because I just check it every day :P
Outgoing. All gmail accounts have this restriction. I an using the webmaster account to send out all the forum mail, via the gmail servers.
Ok. Doesn't sound like that will cause any problems...not until Randomland hits the big time and has 7.6 million followers who demand custom email addresses and weekly updates via email that is.
At that point there should be some monies rolling in from 'the internet.' We should then be able to afford to pay for decent hosting, or a static IP and some real bandwidth or get the non free version of the google apps thing. All we really need is better hosting and we would be set.
Hmmmm. Now how to get that internets monies rolling in. I always get stuck on step 3 of my plans....
Step One ( Something productive )
Step Two ( Show it to the internets )
Step Three ( ???????? )
Step Four ( Profit! )
Hahaha! :)
I get stuck on part 1!
Should do this (http://yacy.net)! Though probably not.
That's rather cool. I kinda like the idea of web giants not knowing the history of everything I have searched for. Not because I have anything to hide, but because its creepy that they have it, and because they want it for less then altruistic purposes.
Yep, my sentiments exactly. I'm not sure exactly how it works, but I like the idea a lot. Assuming you can throttle it's bandwidth, this seems like a worthy background task for a randomland server.
I have yet to find a publicly exposed version of this search, which I find odd...
Edit: well, I sort of found some
You may have noticed a new look to randomland's forums.... and perhaps the main site not working.
The forums are now running on SMF 2.0 R5. The theme needs some work, I know. But now we have a mobile theme too!
Comments? Suggestions? Alternative themes to use as a base for ours? Let me know (or go for it. Most of you know the SSH passwords to upload things.)
Hmmm, yeah I did notice. My forum-app integration broke. Looks like I have something to fix.
Is this step 1 of Project: Sevenize Already?
Sure :) Sorry about the forum app breakage. Did the mobile theme work on your phony?
It switched to the mobile theme properly. But the theme lacks a lot of functionality, like highlighting unread topics, jump to last post, etc. It doesn't fit the screen as one would expect a mobile theme to do. I can play with that though. I learned a few tricks while making my gas-log pages. Maybe I'll have time tonight.
As for the desktop-version, I like it.
I agree with the functionality-lacking. There are two other mobile themes. One that looks like iPhone interfaces and one that costs $20. I figured we could mess with this one or use it as a took to figure out how to make a better one. We should still get your tapitalk thing working though.
I just did get the Tapatalk package working again (yay!). It didn't even hurt this time.
Even so, we should make a decent mobile version. It shouldn't be hard; we have the other themes to base the PHP parts off of. Just a little free time, which I understand is available in great quantities during the dark times of day.
Randomland expires in less then 90 days. We can renew for 9 years for $64.40 (7.2 a year) using a coupon for 30% off. Or 4 years for $29 (7.25 a year) or 2 for $15 (or something like that.) What would you alls like to do?
If I knew that the prices would stay the same I would have just did it for two or three years and called it good. Prices probably won't go up much in that time span. Butwhoknowsright?
Doitdude! I'll fork over a few bucks. It's worth it to have our own little slice of internet pie.
I imagine that big companies will continue to offer cooler services which continue to make our HTMLs look stale as day old dog meat. But I don't care. It's our and we can do what we want with it. That's totally worth $60. 9 years is a frighteningly far, yet frighteningly close place in the future. But I don't see myself abandoning the randomnets any time soon. Soletsdoitdude.
Ok. 9 years is a nice way of not losing the name by forgetting to register.
I will throw $30 bucks at it. Thats what... 3.33 a year? :)
Yep, and I'm pretty sure I can spare ~$3.50/year. Heck, I can even spare the $35! Randomland is not my most expensive habit :)
It is done. We will have the name for at least 9 more years. Perhaps drupal 7 will even be somewhat complete by then :)
After the power outage, and then the overheat of the server randomland has seen some down time recently. Sorry 'bout that. BUT! It's running on my recently discarded core2 CPU now and should be slightly spunkier. I was going to sell it, but as we are running a terraria server on it I will keep it on it. More ram and better CPU is a win.
NowI just need a super basic low power video card for it. (And heat! Having my old video card running 24/7 is like having a space heater on!) $16 on amazon looks good for a surplus dell unit.
Also, going to upgrade the linux version to something newer. I am tired of having to spend forty five minutes compiling things from source to get updated software :-P
Any votes on linux flavor? Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian or CentOS/Scientific/RHEL-6
I am a fan of Debian derivatives (Ubuntu server, etc). But that's just because I am accustomed to its setup. I've never had any problems with what we have now, beyond my standard Linux woes. Do you plan on installing X?
Can you vnc in without x ? Command line is fine most of the time, but when managing the locations of lots of files I like a gui. I would probably install the desktop edition and then add what I need.
Get, my spot thing didn't tell me you responded to this thread....anyway. I SSH in 95% of the time. I used VNC a few days ago do download a file from a URL wget (or the command line) wasn't parsing properly. For everything else, command line is more feasible, from off site.
Sent from my SGH-i937 using Board Express
Very true. Most of the time I just open a terminal after VNCing in. Most install instructions I user are for the command line and most things I do are command line based. But having the option to open up a file manager and use the GUI network tools is nice.
ssh is a necessity for managing the server. Easy access from a phone for quick fixes. Using screen lets you have a bunch of terminals to work with (for running non-daemon server like terraria and vertrillo) Combine that with webmin and you are good to go.
VNC is a nice luxury that having lots of extra RAM and CPU make feasible. Now if it just weren't so insecure. The only thing even keeping it halfway secure is desktop locking, which I wish it did as soon as all clients were disconnected.
I like to use the lazy tools once in a while :)
If it used up any meaningful amount of resources I wouldn't include it.
I think Ubuntu is they way I will go. I need to broaden my linux experience. Setting up an install on my laptop + external drive now. Hopefully I can just copy the partitions over to another drive.
Works for me. I know there are a few new flavors out there (now in Mint (http://linuxmint.com)!), but I haven't played with any lately.Edit: grr, stupid apps. Never tack on a signature unless I explicitly tell you to. Grumblesaurdhsjd
Mmmmmm Grumble-Bread :)
We are back! ...Mostly.
Running on Ubuntu 11.10. Apache 2.2.2. PHP 5.3.6. MySql 5.1.58.
I will be setting up the rest of the virtual hosts as time allows today.
Nothing is lost from the old server, if there are any files you want moved over or any setting I have forgotten to port just let me know.
Brad, I am not sure how you SVN server was set up but you will have a sudo enabled account soon, or just tell me what you would like done.
Courtney, the wordpress setting table of your site took forever to import :) Just thought it was interesting. The huge table for the forums went faster.
The forums now have a nice mobile theme for easier phone browsing! It's a smashup of the default theme, some css from the main theme and parts of the curve mobile theme.
Anything need changed on it? Bigger text here? Add avatars to posts? Menus suck?
Server hardware update!
We are now running an Athlon II X3 450 (with the 4th core unlocked) and 8GB DDR3. This was a needed update as the old hardware would not support enough RAM for a decent minecraft server. Multiple game server should run on this machine at the same time without issue now. Site performance might be noticeably faster. Might not.
Sweet!
If you have been having trouble connecting to randomland.net or here, the forums, it is because the zoneedit DNS servers seem to be on the fritz. With only one of them listed as online (and that one was not set with godaddy as one of the server we could be found though) it has been hard to get our name resolved.
I added the third server to our list on godaddy so that one will be looked at in addition to the other two when trying to resolve our IP. I hope this all clears up soon. It had be fiddling with the routers DNS setting and rebooting things (much to Brent's dismay)
We are now on hurricane electrics free dns system after several days of unresolved zone edit issues.
I have been wondering what the problem was. Glad to see it is back up and running for the moment at least!
Yeah, thanks for clearing this up. I wasn't getting my Randomland fix lately. Now I sleep better :)
Turned off user registration. It was getting annoying. I might try to create/setup a better CAPTCHA sometime.
Ok...you're right, it was getting annoying. But every day I could be heard saying, "oooh, look at all of these new Randomland fans!!"
If only our popularity extended beyond the robotic demographic.
Updated the Tapitalk plugin and updated to the latest version of SMF.
Oh cool, thanks. I've been meaning to do the Tapatalk part (well, I haven't thought about it too recently, but yeah, it was on a todo list somewhere up there)
Sorry about the down time, a network cable came unplugged when I was moving some stuff.
I was wondering what happened. I almost even bugged you about it :) All of this reminds me that I need some more outdoor adventures...
Updated tapatalk again.
Server is now visualized... again. But better this time.
Server is running ESXI (VmWares Hypervisor) and is on a virtual machine under that. This should allow multiple production, test and windows boxes to run on the same machine at about 90% performance of being on bare-metal. In theory.
Let me know if anything is broken... also on a new version of apache (2.4.4) that seems to behave *slightly* differently.
If there is anything that is not on the server that should be, please let me know. I will soon delete part of the old server backup. I will be setting the Xjabber server back up, the minecraft server back up and anything else I can think of when I think of it. Perhaps GIT and/Or SVN too, though there are much better alternatives then running our own for those.
I have re-enabled registration! Perhaps more cool, tempo-loving people will show up. But! I need help writing verification questions. Please, admins, write more! Located at admin -> security and moderation -> anti-spam verification questions The more, the better. Have fun but please keep the answers unambiguous as possible.
Power outage for most of the afternoon. Everything is back up. Started a new Terraria server for fresh play with z-man. That is coincidentally the same same as his upcoming album, "Fresh play with z-man".
Your server facility doesn't have generator backup yet? Tsk tsk. You should bring that up in your annual networking and facility services board meeting.
I'm the only one who ever attends those :/ It was decided at the last one that a USP would be cool to have. I wonder how hard it would be to hook up an old car battery to one... that should give a few hours of power.
I was looking at generators on Craigslist the other day. There was a two stroke harbor feight one for $50... kinda tempting. But for camping, not backup :)
I wonder if there is a market for hosted server space in the area. That would be a nice business to run. Just have to keep the lights on and the pipes open.
Ug. So my new hard drive in the server seems to have pooped out. This is a backup from a few days ago on my desktop. Grumblecakes.
I was wondering what happened. That sucks.
Site in back into its normal box. Will be setting up better backups :/ You get lazy when things just 'work' for too long.
I think the problem was caused from a faulty power-connector-adaptor, the kind that goes from MOLEX to SSD-type fittings. It was wiggly. But I'm not sure, really.
I will probably setup a script to throw everything (configs and any custom stuff. But not the www directory, that is too big) at a drop-box account every week and a database backup every day to the same place. As well as a daily and hourly rotating database backup stored locally.
Backups! They are whats happen'n.
Currently automysqlbackup is running. It is keeping 3 days back, 3 weeks back and 1 month back locally. Every night there is a cron job that zips up the etc directory, the password file and the most current set of database backups and sends them to webmasters google drive.
This should work fine for the most part. I would rather have a remote host that I could rsync the files to, to save a hair of bandwidth. As it is there is only about 40mb when zipped.
No files uploaded to the site are backedup at the moment. I will either use my desktop or an external disk of some kind to take care of that. Maybe a big flashdive or usb harddrive.
If anyone has an old SATA harddrive (any size over 30gb will do) I could use that internally in the server.
Update! It seems I need to backup the forums post-attachments. :/
System Accounts!
I have set up an account from bradman and zman (not using those names.)
I can add you to the sudo group once you have changed your passwords.
Cody, I will happily set you up an account if you want to play around at all. Learn some linux and all that.
Good news, everyone!
Our ISP has changed their tiering structure and we now have a much higher bandwidth cap and throughput. So upload away!
Upgraded forum software and tapatalk versions.
Updated tapatalk and forum version again.
There is a problem with a connection-reset error page when posting, but posts are still saved. I will look at this when I have a moment.
Randomland needs resurrecting!
Yes it does! And I need to reinstall the forum software. I just tried to upgrade it and got some errors. Also, the most recent post info is wrong nest to boards, and the undead post indicator seems to not be working... and other problems.
Perhaps I will see how it all runs on my PogoPlug. (Mine is black (http://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv5/pogoplug-v2-pinkgray))
Cool, I looked at those a while back, but sprung for the spendier (Synology) NAS that has internal HDD storage bays. But considering how dead Randomland is (:() I bet it's fine.
And yeah, this forum software is really screwed up. It errors every time I post.
I get a similar, but different error. (The connection was reset)
I will do something about it soon. You should feel free to fiddle with things too :)
The server is now on a different machine and upgraded to SMF 2.1 beta. If anyone has any forum software that they like better I am open to suggestions.
Not running on the PogoPlug yet, I want to put Debian back on it first, rather then Arch like it has now.
Hopefully this works better.
Hey, I can log in again. Cool
Sorry you couldn't logon :) All should be well now. (Want a logon for the P-Plug?)
The forum is now running off of the PogoPlug using lighttpd on Debian for ARM. So far performance is acceptable. I will get around to adding some better storage (Either a bigger USB stick or an old laptop hard drive).
I added a few non-default themes (Not that I like them that much, but there is not much out there for SMF 2.1 ATM) and I fiddled with the "Serenity" theme a bit to make it more readable (I removed the background image of the serenity cast and made it taupe-ish. EDIT - It looks completely different on a monitor not running F.Lux). All the themes should be user selectable. The default is currently Serenity. Knowing me it will be for a long, long time.
The main site needs some TLC... "Cron maintenance tasks: Last run 3 years 21 weeks ago" So sad and neglected. The endless march of Time and all that.
Also, lots of attachments seem to be missing. I hope I have them in an older backup. If any of you have backups that include the attachments directory, please let me know.
The site was broken after a failed upgrade of the SMF forum software. After a full reinstall (re-using the existing database) we are back up. I hope the theme will be back soon. I can't stand all this white.
Also... I seem to not have all the attached images and files from posts anymore. Not many are missing... I think mostly the pictures of the roof-rack I was designing. But if anyone has a backup of the forum with an attachment directory with a files starting with numbers higher than 258_XXXXXX then you have more than I do ATM. I have backups somewhere... if I can find them still.
So dead here...
Man, I know I have this running on a Potato (https://nz3o.wordpress.com/2011/12/18/does-the-pogoplug-have-a-place-in-your-home-network/), but ever since the SMF software upgrade it has been slow as molasses.
Quote from: Nick on Jun 22, 2017, 09:33 AM...it has been slow as molasses.
Well, at least molasses is tasty.
I had a little trouble logging in on the desktop site, which is slightly worse than the slowness. It randomly errored out the first few times. I have no idea why.
Upgraded hardware!
Lenovo M73 tiny (https://www.google.com/search?q=Lenovo+M73+tiny) - CPU G3220T (https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Pentium+G3220T+%40+2.60GHz&id=2189) - 8GB ram. (it's temping to get a low power xeon for it... but that would cost more than the rest of the system - and it's really not needed.)
Idles at a whopping 13w (twice what the pogoplug ate.... but almost 10x the CPU power and 32x the RAM. (It's also the NAS, Plex and Nextcloud server for the house)
Also, thanks to Lets Encrypt, everything is now automatically forwarded to HTTPS. Apparently images are not... I don't know if I care. I might look at it when I have time.
Let me know if you have any issues. Or if you even visit... :)
I visited! Long live the Randomland!
Server was apparently offline for a while.... I doubt anyone noticed.
When I upgraded Debian for the WWW machine it apparently broke PHP. So after reinstalling MySQL, apache2 and PHP it works again!
We need an excuse to use this again.
And whatever happened to building robots?
It's true, I didn't notice, but yay!
If you ever want a useless project, we could try to set up my garage computer as a redundant node. Or something like that. (Mostly I have an old Dell running as a hypervisor in the corner of the garage that I want to justify by making it do as many things as possible)
Sure! That would be fun to learn.
I need to set up alerts as well so I know when things are down. And stop using windows as the host OS for the VMs, it's janky and prone to update without warning.
I also need to update the forum software (Or switch to another set of forum software all together if anyone has a preference). That's what started the whole OS update for the webserver. Making sure I had everything else up to date first.
Moved to a new host machine again. Now we have 4 cores of Intel 4th gen I5 power.
It seemed silly to have a machine for just the Minecraft server. So now everything is on there and the tiny little lenovo can be Corbins desktop.
The DNS update script wasn't working for a while. So no one could get to the site. It's fixed now.
I've been wanting to learn Docker better. So I might re-do the webserver as a bunch of docks(?) on a single machine rather them all the sites under a single Apache install. Put them all in their own little pocket I guess.
Yay, it's back! What machine is the server running on these days?
I got a good deal on a Ryzen 5 3500 6-Core system... so as of yesterday, that. Before then it was on a 4-core 4th gen i5. It runs Minecraft and Plex too.. so it's not completely overkill :P
After looking at the docker option... it seems like too much work for almost zero gain. At least for something already working.
I'm thinking of moving to a dark theme for the forum. Any thoughts? Like this one. http://smftheme.byethost18.com/index.php?theme=5&i=1
Edit. I installed a few themes to test. One is a dark theme and the other has a dark-mode option.
Go here to try them out: https://forum.randomland.net/index.php?action=profile;area=theme