Server information

Procione2 (www.raccoons.co.uk) is a lowly 1U box sitting in our data rack at home, under the domain controller.. Connectivity is provided by a demon 15900/1020 business adsl system, with business contention ratios.
A 1000/768 Virgin Media Business Cable line backs this up, vital services like DNS and email are accessable via either line, with fail over for outgoing packets.
Both the main server and the adsl are backed up via 4 1 or 1.5KVA APC UPSen.
Services handled included: email, web, irc and ftp serving.

System spec:
Atom 330, 1.6Ghz duel core with HT
1Gb of DDR2
2x 320Gh SATA2 HDs
2 Realtek Gige NICs - One WAN, One LAN
Headless running (no keyboard or monitor)
1 Current Cost USB/Serial logger for computer room power and temp
Graphs here

thumbnail of raccoons
New Image: Here
Uptime graph for procione (netcraft).
Yet another new Photo!

rack
Procione is the blue edged mini tower.

20120219
Procione finally started to be migrated to Procione2.
DNS and Webhosting moved.
Ircd to go.

20090930
Demon HG's playing up. Major packetlost and latency on server systems - Email/IRC/DNS affected.
Main Web host unaffected.

20090614
Demon HG authentication has been down. I've had a dynamic IP instead of my /28 from around 0300 to 1200.
Should be working again now. All services should be running 100%

20081008
IRC - Host has been disconnecting people for no reason. Procione has ircd again, after a lot of years. irc.raccoons.co.uk points to procione not host now.
Services have been moved to procione, and host and procione are linked as a network.

20080118
Mailoutage = approximatly 5 hours in the early hours of this morning.
Disasterarea (primary mailhost) had a mainboard fault, and refused to come up after a scheduled reboot at 23:30 on 20080117. Remote monitering person (Hi Fated!) let me know at approx 03:30, and the entire machine was stripped and rebuilt.
Plans for new primary mailhost have been brought forward.

20070801
Overhaul of the mailhost. Secure webmail now an option.
Only using a self signed certificate though.

20070624
Another day, another reinstall of host.
It's all up and running now, got hit with being used to host some pishing sites, mostly because the only images for this box by the hosting company are that old...
In the end we (Fated and myself) switched from FC(4) to Debian 3.1, as that was easier to upgrade to something more current.
Everything should be back to normal now.

20070325
Well, Host is back to "normal", will see how it goes, and also if I can upgrade the version of the distro on her before anyting happens again.

20070325
We're not fully up yet, files still to copy into place, accounts to make, and that sort of thing, but ircd is back, with services. I've had to blank the database though.
Also have the cisco doing some firewalling infront of the machine now. There might be some random disconnects as I configure it up.

20070324
Backup hopefully worked. Reuploaded everything, and am hoping we (Fated and myself) can get everything reloaded and setup tomorrow.

20070324
IRCd is down (Host.raccoons and host.snowfields) due to a problem on the host machine. Working in it, backing up to reimage the box...

20061011
Host (webhosting/irc, etc) has been rooted, so was reimaged today. Unfortunatly, I didn't manage to save the IRCd config from the old box, so please email myself for any connection problems.
Everything should be working again though.

20060612
Thanks to work by Fated, shadow (shadow.snowfields.net) and the new irc server is live. Names stay the same, although the new install means new services, so make your usernames again!

20060325
System downtime for new HD will be over the weekend of the 8th and 9th of April.

20050828
New favicon installed for procione.

20040403
User "Blixa" and "Cabbit" (same account) pulled this morning for
numrous breahes of trust over the time of the account.

20040324
Upgrade done, see above. ;)

20040324
Looking at upgrading procione.
There maybe distrubtions in service.

20040319
When rebuilding network systems, and adding new servers into the stack..

Make sure you don't unplug other servers from the UPS!

Unexpected downtime was only 5 mins.


20030217
Systems will be changing around over the next month.
We're working to minimise downtime, although it's possible Procione will get an update and or upgrade at the same time.

20040117
Ah, the fun of DNS
I forgot to update the soa to the new names, and so the DNS may be a little wanky for a while.

20040108
For the last 2 nights BT and demon have been fighting with lon-aj1b, one of the adsl home gateways. Unforunataly, this is where the new line comes out, and the new router doesn't like to reconnect properly after this maintanance it seems.

20040104
DNS has spread faster then hoped, and every seems upto date everywhere.

20040104
Moved Procione and Disasterarea to the new line. DNS is propogating.
Just have to wait for everything to come back inline.

20031231
Slight DNS problems today. The major changes for the DNS went in last night for all the domains, but somehow I managed to break the A record for procione. As almost all the other important records are CNAMEs for this record, I basicly broke the domain.


20031126
Had problems today with bad network cable linking the router to the external network hub.

All services should be working again now.

20030928
It's a good job the IRC server is gone..
Procione ran out of disk space today.
This is now fixed, but services (httpd/etc) will have been flaky from 00:37 to 07:00
20030929
irc.raccoons.co.uk removed.
Irc services removed.
20030928
Status page has changed to have the lastest news at the top.

2003910
Fated and Myself have a new place!
We're going to try to move with minimum disruption to the system however.
Once we have the new line in, we'll shift the DNS, and then move the servers once the DNS has started to propogate. We hope to only be physically down for a day, and logically (DNS wise) down for 2 days.

20030723
The ircd's on procione and penguin are now running at as close to 100% relablity as we can manage. The networks total users appears to grow slowly as we pick up people disheartened with other networks.

20030329
DSL was out for around 2 hours last night.
Had sync, but the router couldn't log in at all. Once it came back, procione and penguin reconnected and synced automatically.
Shame, they had been linked for 31.5 days in total this time.

20030201
Rebuilt procione's ircd today.
Trying to a) fix the split/rejoin problem with penguin, and b) find out why procione won't load m_tburst.so and penguin will. (m_tburst is a module to sync the topics on a rejoin)

20021130
Got to love idiots.
Every few days now, I have to empty darksun (firewall.raccoons.co.uk) and procione's (procione.raccoons.co.uk) ftp incoming (/home/ftp/incoming) directories. Why? Because people keep probing for unprotectd ftps to use as storage for warez. The test is pretty simple, if you cna upload a file, and then download it. You use it. Both my machines are configured normally, ie: anyone can upload into incoming, but nobody can download from it, it has to be moved to pub. You'd think a thin file would be enough to test it? So would I, but it appears the "best" way to test for open ftps is to send over 1Mb to the server and try to download that. Gah! So I get to delete 20ish Mb of dumb, useless data every few days.
Mind you, one idiot has a better one. He/she uploads a script, and calls it from a webbrowser, hopeing that the ftp space is directly linked.
Point 1: it's not ;)
Point 2: even if it was, his .asp script isn't going to return the size of the discs from my *nix based apache ;)
Idiots...
OK, rant over.

20021121
Added a form to email .cgi for the system for irc.
If others want to use it, let me know and I'll make the changes.
Also, the IRC server's webpages have been re-written by Joanne.
All validates (of course, this _is_ joanne...) and uptodate now.

20021114
And having mentioned r26a in the last message.. *sigh*

12:50 Nov 14
We are currently receiving reports of customers experiencing loss of connection on the ADSL Pipe anchor-r26a.demonadsl.co.uk. Engineers are investigating.

Weird line faults today. Hopefully is fixed now.
20021106
There have been problems with anchor-border-1, the main external router for the anchorage house noc for demon. Unforunatly, my dsl is terminated on anchor-r26a.. I've been able to get to demon based things because that goes out though anchor-service. Hopefully the maintance has fixed the packetloss on anchor-boader-1. This is why there have been so meny dropouts from procione, esp. between procione and penguin. I hope it's finished now..

20021017
Outage.
Nothing I could do about this one. Came home to find a screen full of errors, when I talked with people online.. it went dead. 3-4 hours later, it's up again. It's not demon's fault either... I couldn't get the router to log in on the BT test account for new system. I'll stick in the reason when I find out.

20020814
OK.. storytime.
If you read my home page and about files, you'll find I'm a furry (*Shock*).
I sometimes go to the northern uk furs meets around the north of the UK. I take a few photos. When I moved www.raccoons.co.uk to home, I started getting lots of 404's into the logs, pointing to some of the images. I was never asked if people could link to them though.
In the end, I put in referer logging, and found that they are being linked from someone live journal.
Fine. If you want to link to my photos with out even asking, I have to deal with it. Sorry, but from now on access to the photos can only come from the index pages of said photos, all other access, even typing in the direct URI to the files is banned.
If the person in question had been polite, ie: asked, things might not have to be this way.

20020810
More work on the IRC system, to sync the settings on menagerie to raccoons. This should be the last for a while. I hope!
Work done:
Sorry for the distruption. Servers are now resynced, and channels will not automatcally set +t. (clients might though ;)

Also, users shouldn't be set +i (Invisible) on logon either. If you need/want +i set, your client will need to do this now. And Rhino can stop bugging me now ;)


Problem found. It's the delay of the twin servers (Primary/secondary) (Master/Slave for the Bind9 users like me ;)
I'll be adding a couple of faster linked secondary's soon.
OK, when I get around to it, but soon.

Still having DNS weirdness atm.
People with their own nameservers can resolve raccoons.co.uk,
people on demon, efni and such, also can.
People on freeserve and attbi, can't, however. *sighs* I can't understand it atm.

20020808
More modifications to the IRC server.
Users are no longer set +1 on join, or channels +t on creation.
Thank Joanne for the work/changes.

20020807
Today irc.raccoons.co.uk became part of TFNet.
Follow for more information.