ChapterZero

Some time soon, the site’s going wayyy down for a while – hopefully it’ll be back up by Monday, but in the worst case scenario, I plan to have it up by the following Monday.

Apparently my host has not blocked port 80, and one of the tech people tried various approaches which didn’t work:

I have taken a look over you VPS. First thing I noticed is that you are low on free memory:

tangentspace:~# free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:         98492      84264      14228          0       8552      47212
-/+ buffers/cache:      28500      69992
Swap:        65528      11452      54076

And this is right away after a reboot. There were processes killed by oom (out-of-memory) killer (sometime in the past).

Your issue is really strange, though. I have installed chkrootkit (which also upgraded your libc6 core libraries) to check if your VPS was not hijacked but nothing solid was found. I still presume that it was somehow hacked (by the way: please consider upgrading your system:
‘apt-get dist-upgrade’ as there is already a new stable branch) because of the strange issue on lynx, wget and (maybe) any other webbrowser installed on your VPS.

I have checked also iptables with:

# iptables -nL

and

# iptables -t nat -nL

but nothing shows up.

I have also installed ‘links’ (another web browser) and that one seems to work correctly, please try it out.

Please try a dist-upgrade as this will basically replace your old files with new ones, and maybe you get rid of this enoying issue.

If you have anymore questions, please get back to us!

Unfortunately, whatever method apt-get uses to retrieve the list of packages from the servers has been affected by this ‘bug’, so I can’t run an upgrade. So, to deal with both the memory problem and web access problems, I’m going to switch VPS plans to one with the next highest amount of memory, and wipe the filesystem. I’ve backed up all the relevant data, so I can painlessly restore the site’s directory structure and database tables. However, I forgot all the mods that needed to be made to apache’s configuration, so I might have to mess around with that for a while. That’s going to be meesssyyyy — I know my domain serving is set up nonstandard, but I don’t recall exactly how — involving trial and error on an epic scale (you know, days of waiting for DNS records to update), most likely. Maybe this time around I’ll manage to do things right (TM).

Possibly relevant posts:

• Changes… going through changes (6/28/2007)
• In Media Res (3/11/2005)
• Upgrading caveats (3/6/2005)