Tag: linode

Evil Genius Chronicles Podcast for January 27 2023 – More Money In The Weepy Stuff

In this episode, I play a song by the Dolly Varden; “You Make Loving Fun” has a weird structure; whisper is making me organize myself; I realized that Linode machines can do my transcribing; as many television shows we have access to, we can’t find shows to watch; I hate reality shows for the formula of it; Love It or List It is being endured in this house; the only thing I like about the show is figuring out what city they are in; Slow Horses, Reservation Dogs and Dark Winds are the best shows I have watched in the last year; the movie “Dog” with Channing Tatum is bleh but we love troubled dog redemption stories; pipewire continues winning the war; big tech companies laying off workers is exactly what I have been talking about in the world of work; human misery is a bad tool for policy; Mastodon and the Fediverse can’t fix the giant hole in me that seeks approval; I am finally learning how to handle third parties on social media; there is a pointlessness to the umbrage filled replies.

Here is the direct MP3 download for the Evil Genius Chronicles podcast, January 27 2023.

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You can subscribe to this podcast feed via RSS. To sponsor the show, contact BackBeat Media. Don’t forget, you can fly your EGC flag by buying the stuff package. This show as a whole is Creative Commons licensed Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 Unported. Bandwidth for this episode is provided by Cachefly.

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Server Fun

FYI, if you noticed and were wondering why my various sites have been down so much … there is a story.

I noticed lots of reboots starting this afternoon, and this evening I found that the site would only stay up for 1 minute at a time. It would reboot so much that Linode would stop trying and leave it powered off.

I filed a support ticket and then tried various rescue mode things. I fsck the disk, I did the whole chroot thing and updated all packages. The tech handling my ticket noticed the console.log was full of apache2 processes spinning up, running the VM out of memory and then kernel panicking. I configured apache2 to allow for a lower number of max processes.

When I did that, the server stayed up long enough for me to get to my home directory and do a multi-tail on every access log of every site on there. When I did, I noticed that one obscure site was getting hammered on its xmlrpc.php, to the tune of multiple hits every second from three IP addresses. This was the culprit. Three iptables DROP rules later, all this nonsense was gone.

This wasn’t the most fun evening I’ve ever had (and this shit consumed the ENTIRE evening) but it probably has a positive outcome. This Linode server has always rebooted more than I like, daily at times but is seldom up more than 2 solid weeks. That has probably always been a problem with the apache2 default configuration being more than this small VM can handle. By configuring it to have a lower max usage, that may solve the rebooting issue.

Evil Genius Chronicles Podcast for July 24, 2014 – “Broken Windows”

Here is the direct MP3 download for the Evil Genius Chronicles podcast, July 24, 2014

In this episode, I talk about the upcoming Dog Days of Podcasting; about my manic-depressive cycles of organizing and disorganizing; about tool chains and processing audio and other fun stuff.

You can subscribe to this podcast feed via RSS. To sponsor the show, contact BackBeat Media. Don’t forget, you can fly your EGC flag by buying the stuff package. This show as a whole is Creative Commons licensed Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported. Bandwidth for this episode is provided by Cachefly.

Links mentioned in this episode:

Podcast: Play in new window | Download