Mayhem
Wednesday, 23 March, 2011, 14:59 PST

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Over the past couple of weeks, many folks have noticed that services here have been highly disrupted.

It's true.

In January, I replaced the aging box that had been serving up web pages, delivering email, running 3 packet nodes, 2 BBSs, a convers server, performing network filtering and policy-based routing, and a variety of other tasks.  Occasionally, the lack of adequate RAM was causing problems, and the kernel had to kill certain processes when there wasn't enough memory to go around.

The new box has vastly more system resources, and I had made up my mind that I wanted to virtualize the system, to split off the services into several virtual machines. I reasoned that I could be performing updates, making modifications, or even experimenting on one virtual machine (aren't amateur radio operators supposed to experiment?), while the others could be running without interruption.  For applications that hook directly into a Linux kernel's networking stack and use all of the kernel's IP addresses, I would gain the advantage of having multiple kernels, just as if they were distinct physical boxes.

So, when I replaced the hardware, I copied the old system into its own virtual machine, with everything functioning exactly as before, and then prepared to migrate and separate all of the services from that vm into new ones.

Then, nearly 2 weeks ago, the lemming migration started. *sigh*

It has proven to be a huge job to do in one's spare time, but it is getting there.

Currently, the functioning services are:

• Hub_NA SAUPP convers server
• AMPRnet tunneling / routing
• Email server
• ALWGW TNOS BBS (without RF link at the moment)
• PNW (X)Net Node (without RF link at the moment)
• Web server (obviously!)
• Mailman mailing list server
  

Services that still need to be restored:

• FBB BBS (there is no AX.25 mail being forwarded in or out of ALWGW currently) 
• URO node
• Winlink2000 RMS gateway
• DX Spider

To linking partners and users, thank you for your patience. I hate having services down for so long, but it will all be back soon. In the end, I hope it will be better than ever.

73 de WA7V

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