Penguin

penguin.webarch.net is a 3GB RAM Xen Debian virtual server, it replaced NewLiveServer and DevelopmentServer for running all non-Drupal sites, and went live in early January 2013. Drupal sites from the old servers were migrated to PuffinServer.

The install and initial configuration of this server was tracked on ticket:470.

This server was upgraded from Squeeze to Wheezy on ticket:535 in December 2013.

Console Access

There is a Xen shell available for console access, see wiki:XenShell.

Munin Stats

There are munin stats for the server available here

• ​https://penguin.transitionnetwork.org/munin/transitionnetwork.org/penguin.transitionnetwork.org/

Munin was installed on penguin via ticket:483#comment:35 and the dynamic graph generation and zooming was sorted out on ticket:641 and the APC plugin was installed on ticket:535#comment:55.

APC Stats and PHP info

There are a few scripts in ​https://penguin.transitionnetwork.org/info/ which use the same username and password as this Trac site:

• ​https://penguin.transitionnetwork.org/info/apc.php APC cache stats, see also ​the Munin stats
• ​https://penguin.transitionnetwork.org/info/apc_info.php plain text data used by the Munin plugin
• ​https://penguin.transitionnetwork.org/info/php-info.php PHP module info

See ticket:645 for APC tuning.

Nginx

This server was switched from using the ​nginx from wheezy-backports to ​guide Nginx.html Nginx from Phusion Passenger on ticket:691 via /etc/apt/sources.list.d/passenger.list:

deb https://oss-binaries.phusionpassenger.com/apt/passenger wheezy main

Updates

All systems updates are now recorded on ticket:692 (previously they were on ticket:218).

There is a script in /usr/local/bin called a-up which can be used to update the system via aptitude, the advantage of using this script is that it writes things that are changed to the /root/Changelog and the time spent doing the updates can then be reported via ticket:218, see AptitudeUpdateScript for a copy of a-up and the logchange script it uses to update the Changelog.

Due some packages from dotdeb and backports being used, see ticket:470#comment:6 and ticket:470#comment:41 for some notes on this -- the pinning setup could do with some work, but this is non-urgent, the work-around is to manually upgrade some packages, eg:

a-up
  About to upgrade munin-node/squeeze-backports munin-plugins-extra/squeeze-backports
  No packages will be installed, upgraded, or removed.
aptitude install munin-node/squeeze-backports munin-plugins-extra/squeeze-backports

Metche

The matche script which moninotors the state of the system and emails changes to the /root/Changelog out is installed, but it generates a lot of data in /var/lib/metche so the wiki:MetcheCleanScript was installed on ticket:531#comment:6 and set to be run via the root crontab.

Tickets

Most the "dev server" tickets relate to penguin, but the older ones, are for previous servers.

Current dev server tickets

Ticket	Summary	Owner	Reporter
#787	Access to Parrot	chris	annesley
#767	robots.txt on dev site	ed	sam
#645	APC Tuning on Parrot and Penguin	chris	chris

Closed dev server tickets

Ticket	Summary	Owner	Reporter
#780	parrot	chris	annesley
#771	cannot access puffin over sftp again	ed	annesley
#743	IIRS dev copy	ed	annesley
#739	Set up DEV and other drupal accounts for Annesley	chris	ed
#666	Parrot lockups	chris	chris
#641	Enable dynamic Munin graphs	chris	chris
#632	Add accounts for Sam	chris	chris
#618	Migrate Penguin and Parrot to the ZFS fileserver	chris	chris
#613	Parrot mysql console errors	chris	chris
#476	Kiwi VSFTP compromise	chris	chris
#474	Images don't display on the 2010 archive	chris	chris
#406	Pressflow problem on Dev site	chris	chris
#363	Bring DEV up to date with LIVE	jim	jim
#357	nginx research	chris	chris
#274	Bring DEV and TEST up to speed with LIVE	chris	jim
#166	certs / domain names for dev and test sites	chris	chris
#161	Project Mercury and the Varnish Accelerating Proxy	chris	chris
#160	install and configure piwik (not awstats)	chris	chris
#136	dev server sending messages to users	chris	ed

Websites

Penguin is running nginx, the work to change all the old apache configuration to nginx configuration was done on ticket:357.

The following website are running on penguin:

penguin.transitionnetwork.org

• ​http://penguin.transitionnetwork.org/

This is a splash page which lists what the servers is running and is also served at the server's IP address.

tech.transitionnetwork.org

The main documentation page for Trac is wiki:TransitionTrac

This trac site is running using trac from debian backports and it is using nginx as a reverse proxy to tracd, to start and stop the server:

sudo -i
su - tracd -s /bin/bash
cd /web/tech.transitionnetwork.org/bin
./tracd-stop
./tracd-start

Trac is set to start after a reboot via cronjob, see ticket:470#comment:30.

See also the install notes, ticket:470#comment:24 and wiki:TracUserAdmin and wiki:TimingAndEstimationPlugin

Open Trac tickets: No results

Closed Trac tickets: #1, #3, #89, #90, #91, #179, #270, #345, #364, #413, #492, #494, #507, #534, #546, #597, #611, #642, #682, #822, #842

stats.transitionnetwork.org

• ​https://stats.transitionnetwork.org/

This is a ​Piwki site which currently collects usage stats for www.transitionnetwork.org but which could be used to collect stats from all the Transition Network sites, see wiki:PiwikServer for additional information.

wiki.transitionnetwork.org

• ​http://wiki.transitionnetwork.org/

For more information see MediaWiki.

patterns.transitionresearchnetwork.org

• ​http://patterns.transitionresearchnetwork.org/

See TransitionResearchWagn

static.transitionnetwork.org

• ​http://static.transitionnetwork.org/

This site has been used as an archive for media files from Network Conferences, see the Nginx migration notes ticket:470#comment:16. A FTP server to allow the site to be updated hasn't been setup, when updates are needed they should be done via SFTP.

2010.archive.transitionnetwork.org

• ​http://2010.archive.transitionnetwork.org/

This is a 283M archive of the wiki that was running at transitiontowns.org. The site is in /web/2010.archive.transitionnetwork.org/www/ and the nginx config is in /etc/nginx/archive-shared and /etc/nginx/sites-available/archive, see ticket:470#comment:7.

There was an issue with images not displaying on this archive, now solved, see ticket:474.

2011.archive.transitionnetwork.org

• ​http://2011.archive.transitionnetwork.org/

This is a 305M archive of the wiki that was running at transitiontowns.org and the forum that was at ransitiontowns.org/forum. The site is in /web/2011.archive.transitionnetwork.org/www/ and the nginx config is in /etc/nginx/archive-shared and /etc/nginx/sites-available/archive, see ticket:470#comment:7. See also the bbPress notes at wiki:DevelopmentServer#bbPress

redirects.transitionnetwork.org

• ​http://redirects.transitionnetwork.org/

This is a domain that domain names which are not currently being used can be pointed to and be redirected to the Transition Network site. See ticket:470#comment:21 for the nginx configuration and wiki:DomainNames.

totnes.transitionnetwork.org

• ​http://totnes.transitionnetwork.org/
• ​http://archive.transitiontowntotnes.org/

Static copy of the old Transition Town Totnes Drupal site, discussed on ticket:550#comment:5 and archive created on ticket:630.

Console and SSH Access

There is a Xen shell available for console access, see wiki:XenShell.

For developers and sysadmins there is SSH access, contact chris@… if you need an account creating.

The server is also running ​Mosh : the mobile shell which is very handy when you internet connection is poor, for example on a train. Mosh was installed on ticket:673.

Backups

See the install and configuration notes ticket:470#comment:1 and ticket:470#comment:16, on 17th November 2013 we switched the servers filesystem to a ZFS server on the network and filesystem backups are now done via ZFS snapshots so the rsync backup was disabled, see ticket:535#comment:22 however these backups are not available to anyone apart from the Webarchitects sysadmin so on 23rd July 2014 on ticket:763 additional backups were set up, these are done via /usr/local/bin/agile-backup, see AgileBackup and people who have had their ssh public keys added can access these backups via SFTP:

sftp tn-penguin@store1.webarch.net

The latest backups are in penguin.webarch.net and 60 days worth of snapshots are in ~/.zfs/, you can mount these backups locally, for example on Debian:

aptitude install sshfs
mkdir -p /media/tn-penguin
chmod 700 /media/tn-penguin/
mkdir /media/tn-penguin/latest
mkdir /media/tn-penguin/archive
echo "sshfs#tn-penguin@store1.webarch.net:penguin.webarch.net /media/tn-penguin/latest fuse ro,nobootwait 0 0" >> /etc/fstab
echo "sshfs#tn-penguin@store1.webarch.net::.zfs/snapshot /media/tn-penguin/archive fuse ro 0,nobootwait 0" >> /etc/fstab
mount -a