Checksum Arcanius

Previously, I ran into a problem on sf2 where I could only have a user in 32 groups. Because of the security scheme I implement on sf2 – a combination of user-private groups and some stuff I made up – this meant I could only have 32 sites active at a time. I ran into the issue several times, but was able to find a solution by disabling some older, no longer used sites.

However, I always wished there were a solution in case the limit came up agian. So when I upgrded to kernel version 2.6, I was pleased to read that the rther arbitrary 32 group limit had been removed.

Or had it?

Despite this line showing up in the 2.6.11.11 kernel sources:

# grep GROUPS /usr/src/linux/include/linux/limits.h
#define NGROUPS_MAX 65536 /* supplemental group IDs are available */

today, I ran into the problem again. Zut alors!

Yes, there is a workaround – Access Control Lists (ACLs), but I really don’t want to have to do the work to learn and implement them, when the group system would work just fine if it weren’t for a dumb arbitrary limit. Just like how I had to reset enfusion a few days ago to get the ftp server working properly, Linux isn’t always all its cracked up to be.

I will not upgrade router firmware after midnight
I will not upgrade router firmware after midnight
I will not upgrade router firmware after midnight
I will not upgrade router firmware after midnight
I will not upgrade router firmware after midnight
I will not upgrade router firmware after midnight
I will not upgrade router firmware after midnight
I will not upgrade router firmware after midnight
I will not upgrade router firmware after midnight
I will not upgrade router firmware after midnight
I will not upgrade router firmware after midnight
I will not upgrade router firmware after midnight
I will not upgrade router firmware after midnight
I will not upgrade router firmware after midnight
I will not upgrade router firmware after midnight…

Thanks to Dan Marsh, Tim Montague, and my dad, SilverFir.net is fully recovered from what I can only surmise was a series of remodel-related power outages that caused harm to the filesystem. I would suggest that silverfir.net users check the integrity of their data, if they care about such things.

Concerning the recent downtime of SilverFir.net, sorry about that. I made a mistake.

Three recent kernel panics on sf2, the server behind most of silverfir.net, had me concerned. I googled the problem, found that it was linked to Kernel version 2.6.10, which I was running, and so it became clear the an upgrade to Kernel 2.6.11 was in order. Being the master that I sometimes am, I performed the upgrade nearly flawlessly, and sf2 is now running with the new kernel. Let me know if you notice anything weird. Assuming that no problems are seen, I will make the new kernel permanent (and probably delete the old 2.6 kernel as well).

The web statistics for SilverFir.net continue to astound me. May was a record-breaking month in nearly every category. Total transfer approached five and a half gigabytes, more than a gigabyte and a half more than in any previous month. Average hits surpassed 5,000 a day for the first time ever, fueled primarily by explosive readership growth of the Well of Mirmir, a newer silverfir.net-hosted blog that is already accounting for an astounding one fifth of all traffic on the server.

June, from the looks of it, is going to be even hotter: so far, less than two days in, its averages already well exceed those of May. On an interesting side note, just minutes ago, sf2 had become very slow and unresponsive. MySQL, especially, seemed to be having problems. A reboot seems to have cleared things up just fine. We shall see how things hold up in the future.

I finally broke down and learned how to get rotating logs and web statistics working. For ease of use, I recommend cronolog and webalyzer. AWStats provided more information, but it is not fun to set up, so I put it aside for me. Webalyzer just works, and outputs the info in a nice form. Well, getting to the point, I was quite surprised by the results of the analysis. Since mid-October, 2004, sf2 has served well over 23 gigabytes of content. Thats averaging around three gigabytes a month. Thats hardcore. And thats just web content. sf2 is also a heavily used mail server, and sports a few other less-used daemons as well. In the same time, the sites powered by sf2 have seen almost 100,000 visitors viewing more than 270,000 pages, with more than 500,000 files requested, for a grand total of 760,513 hits. Silverfir.net has been up since sometime around March, 2003. So, I imagine that in reality, the various forms that silverfir.net has taken have surpassed one million hits. Not too shabby for a web site that looks like this.