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teaparty reboot and file system check
by Tom Yates 06 Apr '26

06 Apr '26

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA512 This morning I am going to the colo to reboot teaparty and to force a file system check. This will be the first FS check since the horrible file-system-eating disaster of last May. We have good backups as of 0100 this morning, which I devoutly hope not to need. But just be aware that teaparty should be down for about half an hour this morning, and possibly longer it decides to throw a hissy fit. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- iHUEARYKAB0WIQR191ZYWVnIG12QJlJNOt6uvVaA1QUCadNsjwAKCRBNOt6uvVaA 1QdTAP42ta9THu9sGm2xQ61l//oGDRa2kH5dMXGFUceNSGK5HgD/T7Kq33D2eczY Hffp+DFkYnAg6Px3oNU4oIs1DhEg2wc= =4pnD -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- Tom Yates - https://www.teaparty.net

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Annoying emails asking you to "reconfirm your teaparty account", and the like
by Tom Yates 18 Oct '25

18 Oct '25

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA512 I don't know how many of you get these emails, which for me at least are now coming thick and fast. For the avoidance of doubt: they're all fake, and you can ignore them. If I need you to do something to keep your acount active, then (a) the email will come from me, not some nebulous "support@" or "IT Admin" account, and it'll be GPG-signed (like this one), (b) I'll likely call you on the phone, anyway, and (c) it's a lot more likely that I'll ask for some cake, pizza, and/or beer than for you to go to some questionable website and enter a bunch of personal details. So for the avoidance of doubt, I will repeat the "official" advice (not that I think most of you need it): please ignore any and all emails that ask you to do anything in order to keep your teaparty account active. If you ever have questions, please get in touch directly. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- iHUEARYKAB0WIQR191ZYWVnIG12QJlJNOt6uvVaA1QUCaPNgaQAKCRBNOt6uvVaA 1a+0AQCv0B2K4vmdeKD/p1eBjrNT7PouK4vPg4kClWtEYEzHXwD8CW/6gjJjhxdD 2Im4Y1QOd2VE1Y5vyxsgQuq01rD92wc= =kV8n -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- Tom Yates - https://www.teaparty.net

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shortish outage today
by Tom Yates 16 May '25

16 May '25

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA512 Teaparty will be going down this morning for about an hour to fit the second SSD, and most likely just to check that the file system is OK, while I'm there. I don't know exactly when, but we should all be sorted by lunchtime. - -- Tom Yates - https://www.teaparty.net -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- iQIzBAEBCgAdFiEE35XTJ2Rqq4XkGD1cpc4IT7x26mMFAmgmyfEACgkQpc4IT7x2 6mM1Cw/7BA49QDwTe62zbEfVc7HGWVpGKLFxTlfVA91S6K6h7nUbSh7ZMS1R3rBD X2okH/IdcvwmK7y5NzrDuKoCTn9MITD0uB+PtH3HtrAS2r3Qy5jRJ9GZ9HytJf+g rs3Cka7h3KF8LpdYYQ9Ev7V4hmq7wTl+J5j5l3USqDHdXw+0rbo3z675k6wKedDS zuPsa2sLQhAAx6SrSgnIa0k+ZBMbIiloJvBaGJC6EE/Zx0U3QkJMXNbc0+a3USkF NnhfpduSJ4HpDz7QvD6ZbgkRHRYis2/YAHuEvR9J5iQu46g3iAtHLClw59vK9toJ ariCpjoLeTZ1OR8x3QTiO2UcKnVF4M8JxQ9Al1N0u6H/Qxj8CUOHSUzqdj8Tw5dh 66OTNHsunkUOg9E5frbmlAOEZdH/02KuJfN6Ij4UaWhXRe1W5DgVeo5MWoBckBm3 PGfD5cUxW01OgJn0rorWGsbizWGGXvYJC9luhH+EA5YwyRPFMC1me9hG/mWi+708 CCp2I81hpHRofLdL3wOwLc2Tmnsv8Y8rK/908O9+WHHRmJbKFL/bLoJ/P47h/v5p 9R5I3YSFnCo2hssdaNpjstuU917qQHM3lm16SNmUZ5u0ocFopRkVaFprZafDYGqy PfGo2mylsexXh4QLeT8MYyiIBxHIJNv/dxmU7QioXixncMMwPd0= =QVkx -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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teaparty in read-only state for about nine hours
by Tom Yates 19 Apr '25

19 Apr '25

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA512 ISSUE: teaparty file system read only for about nine hours (0012Z-0931Z 19-04-2025). SUBSYSTEMS AFFECTED: anything that requires changing the contents of the file system. This includes, but is not limited to, receiving email and logging the sending of email. It did not seem to affect teaparty's ability to serve static content, so DNS should have been unaffected. DETAILS: teaparty has been essentially read-only for about nine hours. At 0012Z today the root file system ran into the inability to store a directory leaf checksum, so to preserve the integrity of the stored data it decided to remount its own file system read-only, which prevented any further changes beong made to the file system. It turns out this is harder to detect than one might have thought (though you can be sure I'll be adding a monitoring check for it shortly) so I didn't spot it for about half an hour. We're currently in the US, and it was very late at night on the 18th when the issue was noticed, so to avoid doing anything precipitate that might mean the whole thing was down until we get back in two weeks, we decided to sleep on the problem. This morning (local time) I ran a command that compacts all the existing directory structures, which is the recommended fix, held my breath. and rebooted. It came back fully read-write at 0931Z. Any email that people were trying to send should have queued up in the interim, and will now be delivered as other mail servers notice that teaparty is back. As far as I can tell no email was lost, and nearly no data; the exception is one user who I will contact directly, who lost about 200 mail files when the file system was fixed. I'm really sorry about this, and will be reading more about the problem today as I have time, to find out if there's any routine maintenance that can be done to prevent a recurrence. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- iQIzBAEBCgAdFiEE35XTJ2Rqq4XkGD1cpc4IT7x26mMFAmgDdPEACgkQpc4IT7x2 6mMwMA//f7JPrhc7eT8SjpCxB6Qw0Lg+h3UDI7U/5c7JStmDQ5PC6xdgJxKylCT5 N4m/yu/O4FhV/w5xV+WbfVGhuPufLrbqX6gbINXXTHpsMsowqCWExUExkQ8lt5q7 nGtnXBY+STjhGFD27Cmhw1ADZh1lv5tJrEFCX3pEAjvzUBAV/+2iYAKudq9l1tYO bzAsJDpyWTY/N4Gcd0KmDUP9PeaPdaq/2vpbPEJbRibQcLu4CgoXT97xZ5WSHD4+ aa2Xp0neGrL/ViKLVlH5hoBN7QlBazRkzi6GgNBH+WM+sUp+NVO+nSFl/uqxPnHI 8acgemL2lqWnuhv9amos2AM8LT0t08vEZvQvmkCaBIYQzJsQNeIAKv5hRRfckPYz 1Q8CqijVCQNG0Qdu1oIsHIj0QyWDXpHWHMKF8wVMWdu24c0gmRtkk4ECRGKCOZHi nIbS1ckPAoRSCA4J1SgTCkqX4xgJc4DSG0GxxwgoE/FiMVtLH+ceF3ThtHQxbpkX +TieuMPbnB7qlQrQ9gc1Lwwv10HamXktJCYx+i6tctligYhL5+AJX89Uy0N2wWzC TqgP8tJT/TcOp0MHHLO913dY5eKXQqEl7eb2XotObSsovfjKi7fhurOuwTAbRHl8 1Hgz9IJcc7AENNKvcSeDv53PSo/WtFUXahVq/+KroRDWpdC24Vc= =c2+N -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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more downtime
by Tom Yates 23 Mar '24

23 Mar '24

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA256 I now have the first of the high-speed discs (an SSD, or solid-state device) to swap in. That means teaparty has to go down again, so I can open up the case. This will likely happen this afternoon, though I can't yet say exactly when. Teaparty will be down initially for about 30 minutes while I remove one of the existing Hard Disc Drives (HDDs) and insert the SSD. I'll then do some speed testing, probably with teaparty running. If this device is indeed faster (ie, it's the discs that are the problem, not some other aspect of the machine on the path to the discs) I will then have to take teaparty down for a further hour or so, while I shrink the existing filesystems by about 10% so they'll fit on the new SSD (the HDDs are 2TB, but annoyingly enterprise-grade SSDs are 1.92TB). At that point teaparty will come back up, and run slow while the new SSD syncs up, and at some point next week we'll have to repeat this to replace the other HDD. If the SSD is no faster, it means the bottleneck is elsewhere, and the second hour of downtime won't happen. There will instead be a brief second outage while I put the old disc back, then teaparty will run slow for another 24 hours while it resyncs the old second HDD. Hopefully all this is clear. Call me on my mobile if this is going to be a disaster for anyone. - Tom -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- iQIzBAEBCAAdFiEEXH+wuh43abCjtV3SLpQ5L1bxunsFAmX1axIACgkQLpQ5L1bx unvysA//VTwg3FVeW3acvfuH0Z6rzv/WiaT9s9g7Pee0Mbo/WYFtdRxlh6CUQYdH 2R/XNkNuklS8yd4PaRICanN4jS/n/Xxh0bsyO2pFH2KXGhMs5Uco8+cnkFfv5UmE he5A+Qgmtcsnqozb88MqPL8BSyhpOQI28zx5ooKsiaYHz8W5G/mHIKDoiCUF4tVA +aGuFmU9Q4Ejs7oNt2XhGboQjYeCnIsR4prWaO8tLP65zLHHHCcKHxjqTgfS784r A+aV8z1szXZLjvuztbf78bysjIACNqp3XjjsO3bEnImo4FARFT9ce2kNtHOyZyQb fgLqgw8zDDntOFDO3n794RoZIHBkseoVebpH0mtD1mdAuO/bASmficwT4+MOujx7 j9pbxEBOxMcMPkrXrTSwcTbcB8bukuI48gbXklkWUbNDqCMF9TzixlfgKlv4zC7n ME8e7iJhi9L3nGtMbKIMyIwz4ablPhkw9EhNONDaDZWsBeD/EDe6+X0RtSTn0A/K zlbljPg6N0goY0RcY2OJ7pLMK9k1uUcmx+2L+MEgnxn2ABFn9YmrksVN4NQffH8z eehI672NjXOvMFO/9hcLazIeWpDCc7hnVLUUuQfIRWzIf2f4eZsHDMimSwTAxnF0 t25UzOA1clAtri6uXZmqF7ivOvY1JUXwi3BUggUOgaoQRlN8oao= =Ijkb -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Unsubscription message
by Tom Yates 14 Mar '24

14 Mar '24

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA256 I'm still learning to drive this engine, and got myself into a sufficient pickle that I had to unsubscribe everyone on this list yesterday. If you get this, it means you have been re-subscribed, as you should be, and all is now well (at least until I mess things up again). Sorry about that. - Tom -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- iQIzBAEBCAAdFiEEXH+wuh43abCjtV3SLpQ5L1bxunsFAmXyra4ACgkQLpQ5L1bx uns3zA/+MFlsmkbpWXCUK4vA3DdHyFAdY6Ea7HHL7fMb4X0fIvifyBmoHWxEsX6L LkQsJmkFnCz7XCMz3e+nzEM9asaCwsxAx6BB+ssCOHRO9XkvKsYCt/M+NnIVPq7r 4B8RfNpT42Yf88Ef750y9cEOmOmhyjMfAHuiWLYZpbBj72FkLo3JtjKREJkoHBnt oLnDk+92Xqm4UxZe/xuAyZ6sRue/R+AHiQ8DBevifPSW2iw5W5khJW5+0JA/KcFz S8kG/5jQ24RP3gfEUlkRwsKg+UdWwhSyIKmXkvMlybQp0wIFkItIvWnvIgkZGCix zDl5V777JZBVVkHdEWCPYSEOcUpliJEqQ72n84uJf9tsCcil9jvcT6Ztj1lpHxfd DaNEXq4MORxciVglCnByT+h3A4LvYGX3w+28FWKCb7fJth0d1zeQ9PgW0sozrJ4I uWHA/pd53pztrcPzUaGvkElsvhbzErAuCwMwO6aevDtKfuV2OkKJFNCsjH4oPEK1 T79w0CRRWNue3beKh7R/lVTUZyksmC36aDd0xFTpxa5zTFP5w0BrJ+zDXvLgi7cE xviSDlwPddV457AGhsJP840mwi6TzjBT47U04juGvzNCIf7D1TEJo/+IacJByRer Uf0mBOnrFg+MPXv7bCenBxhRWJKoEpcV/ulHZNhdiKktkUJEtIc= =3LEK -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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fellow-users