radman's questions

I have my website hosted with a hosting provider and they have recently had a serious outage. So at the moment it is at 48 hours and counting where I can't access email, http or ftp. I'm obviously pretty annoyed and I'm wondering how normal a thing this is? I'd always thought that hosting providers sold themselves on 99.8% up time and other metrics of that nature and my assumption was that a good host would just NOT have something like this happen. I am paying for the hosting and the company is supposed to be on the upper side of prestige.

So my question is: Is this as terrible a failure as I think it is and should I change hosting providers?

EDIT: Additional Info

• Outage was transparently documented on their website and email list
• Reason given: "Backup restoration in progress"
• Responded to support requests regarding it promptly (if just to mollify)
• Don't have an SLA, just on shared hosting

I've been having an issue with one host on my network not being able to ping or tracert machines on the internet while all other hosts can.

When I run a tracert from the machine I get the following output:

traceroute to host.to.trace.to (XXX.XXX.XXX.X), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
1 (192.168.XXX.XXX) 0.173 ms 0.259 ms *

In this example 192.168.XXX.XXX is the machine I am tracerouting from. So it looks like something funky is going on as no other tracert I've seen includes the source IP.

I am also under the assumption that the tracert should at least be hitting my local router.

Can anyone explain this anomaly?

I am having an issue where one host on my network cannot FTP or ping external sites but the rest can. My setup is with a single router with wireless and ethernet. With my host on the wireless I can FTP and ping fine but with my host on ethernet I can't ping or FTP external sites.

What makes this a bit strange to me is that I can wget from the ethernet host fine and it is resolving names correctly. Also I CAN ping the internet gateway immediately beyond my router so it doesn't seem like it's the routers doing. At this stage I'm at a bit of a loss as to how to diagnose the problem further.

Both hosts described are linux. The ethernet host that can't connect is a server with no GUI and it is the only wired host so I can't wireshark capture what is going on. Also router has no firewall enabled.

Anyone have any ideas as to what could be happening here?

I have recently signed up for an account with a web host on which I am running an install of Wordpress. I am the only person that will be administrating it and I would like to have secure access to the admin console. As I am the only person who will be using it I don't require a properly signed certificate and am planning to use a self signed one that I generated.

My web host wants to give me a static IP and install the certificate on their servers, both of which have a charge attached.

My question is: is it ok to use the certificate that I generated on their servers and does the setup process and charges seem normal?

I was looking at following the instructions in this serverfault question for restoring a backup of a server to new hardware. I am a little bit confused by the whole process and have a few specific questions that I would really like answered.

If the backup procedure as defined was followed would this be manifestly the same as taking the physical drive out and putting it in the target machine?

What happens with differing hardware devices, does any hardware not present in the original need to be set up manually after the backup restore on the target machine?

What is the issue with doing a clean bare install and copying over with a full backup of the old system?

Why is copying the MBR and partition table an important step?

Finally, I would really like to just keep all the installed programs and configuration (including stuff like apache, bind etc) when moving to new hardware and have an installer deal with the OS and driver issues. Is this at all feasible?

Thanks

I'm in the process of setting up a webserver and I was wondering what the best practice method of updating the website it contains would be. I'm aware that I should have some sort of 'test' server running in parallel so that changes can be tried their first before they go live. So how closely should the test server mimic the production box and is there any known method of easily deploying the same changes to the production box once they've been tested?

I really would like to have a foolproof method of testing and applying changes to the production website and any advice with regard to this is much appreciated.

Platform:
Working on a linux ubuntu server. Running mediawiki, wordpress and a mail server. I have root access to the box via ssh. Mediawiki and Wordpress both have PHP and MySQL backends. The mail server uses a MySQL database also.

This is a bit of a weird question and I'm not sure that there is any easy answer to it but I am very interested in finding a solution.

So when I work on a linux machine via a console I find that I am constantly staring at the bottom of the screen, as once you have executed a bunch of commands text fills toward the bottom. Now I find that this is decidedly not good for my neck and it would be far better if instead of scrolling to the bottom, the text would scroll to the top instead.

So does anyone out there know if there is a way to reverse the direction text appears in a console?

(note that i am aware of the clear command)

Example:
default behaviour

user@machine:~$ command 1  
user@machine:~$ command 2  
user@machine:~$ command 3  
user@machine:~$ __active_prompt__  

desired behaviour

user@machine:~$ __active_prompt__  
user@machine:~$ command 3  
user@machine:~$ command 2  
user@machine:~$ command 1 

Running Kubuntu 10.04 using Konsole

I realise this is an odd question, thanks for any help.

I have a 2 1.5TB drives containing numerous video, audio, documents etc that I would like to essentially mirror to 2 other drives for backup. I would like to do this using rsync (as it seems the most appropriate thing to use).

What command should I use to do so? Is there anything to be aware of when rsyncing NTFS partitioned drives/files?

EDIT: To clarify I am running NTFS formatted drives in Kubuntu 10.04 machine. I am rsync'ing the drives from here.

I am currently in the process of writing a backup plan for the webserver in use by my business. I am very new to this area and have a few ideas about how things should work but am unsure of what tools to use and what sort of restore process is appropriate.

I'm looking for something relatively simplistic and it doesn't have to be 100% paranoid just enough to give me a reliable backup. Speed is not of the essence and there is not going to be a live fallback in place.

The backup will be onto a single hdd that will be stored onsite (no option for offsite as yet).

Backups will be taking place weekly.

I am constrained by both time and money which is why I'm aiming for a good enough solution.

Is taking an image of the webserver system drive periodically and using that as the backup appropriate?

Should I be testing that the backups restore correctly every time that I perform one?

This is a bit broad but what setup would you use if you were in my place, given the services I am running? Should I add additonal machines and split the services?

Any advice is much appreciated!

See below for server details

• Webserver

  • Platform

    • Linux Ubuntu server

• Running

  • mail-server

  • svn-server

  • mediawiki

  • wordpress

  • apache-webserver

• Hardware

  • single 500gb sata drive

• Architecture

  • Single machine behind router (with firewall) accessible to the internet.

Plan:
Based off the answers here and in the interest of not being too dodgy I have landed on the following plan of action.

• RAID 1 // makes sense and the consensus is it would be unwise not to
• Separate backup box with rsnapshot for continuous backup
• Weekly images on external HDD just in case
• Offsite backup // haven't found a vendor yet and will worry about this later

Thanks for the help from everyone!

After recently setting up a mail server I am now adding the users that I need. As part of the tutorial I followed I created root@localhost as an account and also a bunch of aliases (postmaster@localhost, webmaster@localhost etc).

What is the point of having al these localhost addresses? it seems that no one can ever mail them directly...

Also I am curious as to what targets I should include on my domain (like postmaster, root, webmaster etc) and what ramifications there might be for doing so?

I have just finished setting up a Postfix mail server on a linux (ubuntu) platform. I have it sending and receiving email and it is not an open relay. It also supports secure smtp and imap.

Now this is a pretty beginner question but should I be leaving port 25 open? (since secure smtp is preferred). if so then why?

Also what about port 587?

Also should I require any authentication on either of these ports?

Please excuse my ignorance in this area :P