Category: Uncategorized

As you might have noticed, in the last few weeks there were issues with the website and repositories.

This was due to the fact that after all the load moved to the dedicated server, the sizing of it was not enough to cope with load. CPU usage constantly at limit and not enough memory that resulted in OOM killing (most of the time) the database.

I’m just finished replacing the server with a bigger one (4 times the size), hope this would be enough for the moment. If not, I will separate the repository download from the main website.

Hope that this will be stable for a while.

So, the website is back online, with some changes! There might be some issues still on some random link or database references to the old hosting directory structure but I will fix them as soon as I spot them.

Hope you will receive an email from this 🙂

This is what happened on GoDaddy:

The hosting was a “shared hosting”, basically a WordPress instance and a shared folder to host some content (the packages). This is how it was born and how it stayed for quite some years. At the time it was “ok” but it went downhill over the years.

Unfortunately for GoDaddy users, being a shared hosting, you have no choice but click on some web page to get what you need. One of these needs is an SSL certificate.

Yesterday my credit card was billed more than 200 USD for an SSL certificate signed by GoDaddy. Since they sell certificates and control the platform, switching to Let’s Encrypt is not possible.

After the billing, I could see the new certificate, but the certificate was not pushed to the instance. After almost a day on the chat with random people that just told me to wait an hour without getting anything fixed, I was put into phone contact with the “shared hosting” services.

There I was told that they were aware of the problem, and that all customers on the same shared hosting (“legacy”, according to what they said) were impacted since the 30th of April (seriously??) and there was no fix yet.

You are forced to pay a stupid SSL certificate a lot, you get an issue, the certificate can’t be used, they don’t fix it and good bye. Their service is beyond ridiculous.

After some more chatting with support it seems that at least I can be refunded for the last renewal of the certificate, let’s see if this happens.

After this bit of history, back on the new hosting.

Dedicated hosting

The site is no longer hosted on GoDaddy, so now this time I picked up a dedicated sysmte where I have direct access to it and I can do much more than before. This has led me to being able to use Let’s Encrypt certificates and certbot for automated renewals, thus saving money as well.

Bandwidth is much more stable, so download times should be greatly improved, especially for me for uploading the packages. I was able to sync the ~100 GB of packages in just a few minutes.

Mirroring repositories

Having access to the system means that now there is also an RSYNC daemon running serving all the content of the /repos folder. You can sync a specific repository with a command like this:

rsync -crlpvz --progress --delete-after rsync://negativo17.org:/repos/nvidia local/path

I’ve also added the instructions on the /repos folder directly.

A big thank you

Thank you very much with all my heart for the round of donations received! This means a lot to me.

All the donations received on Paypal and the cheaper / more versatile hosting should be enough to keep this site alive for another couple of years!

What’s next?

I’m planning to add some more content (ARM packages) and maybe migrate to something else that is not WordPress. I was thinking about a wiki, probably MediaWiki to make it similar to the Arch wiki, which I found very clear and easy to read, if you have any preferences please let me know.

After spending a day on the phone with GoDaddy, they informed me that they have an issue with the shared hosting and they can not update certificates on the various instances. According to them they had this issue on the past 3 weeks!

Of course nobody bothered to tell me and now the certificate is expired and I have no way of fixing it. I’m now in the process of moving everything to a separate hosting provider, starting from the repositories.

Of course now it will be a dedicated box, so the cost will not be the same. Any donation is of course accepted.

Some automated bot added an extra PHP file and a redirect, so when Googling for this website you would have been redirected to a page selling drugs.

I’m still trying to think why looking for some Fedora package would trigger a compulsive Viagra purchase, but hey, not everyone is the same.

Page & redirects have been removed, everything is back to normal. The specific repository pages were not visible (404) due to a faulty WordPress plugin update, which I removed. A crawl from Google has been triggered to remove the drugs page from Google search.

I will move the GPG public key of the repositories somewhere else, so people can still check if they have any doubt.

Now, If I could figure out how to remove that Jetpack error about AMP….

Also, looking for a cheap hosting solution (hey, this has been running for free since 2013), ideally where I also manage the website (no more WordPress..) and not the hosting company managing it for me, so if you have any suggestion let me know.