So this morning I had my back waxed by Sharlene. Yes it’s vane. I really don’t care. I just don’t like a hairy back, plus I can’t reach it and I’ve known Sharlene for years. I shave everything else myself. Plus I only do it if I’m going somewhere where I’ll be on a sun bed.

It rained a lot. The weather in this country is really pissing me off. I’ll miss the dogs, I won’t miss the rain. Still, managed to walk everyone and myself. Still haven’t reached my weight goal.

Sat down this evening and removed the private keys out of my courier .pem’s. These have always annoyed me as it makes the private key readable. So removed the privated key, put it in it’s own key file and made it only readable by the courier user, updated the config and restarted the service. After a couple of cockups mail reading was working again. I moved them to the certs folder, I’m happier now, I’ll need to update the doc.

Also logged into the SFTP server and downloaded last nights backup, decrypted it with my private key and then tested the integrity of the tar file, all good.

My new hat arrived. I like it. Feel like I need matching shoes.

So spent a few hours yesterday on SSH into the server. So got an account with ‘adrive.com’ which is one of the only ones which is a) cheap and b) allows ftp access, more importantly SFTP access. So created a public / private key pair with ssh-keygen. Uploaded the public key to ‘adrive’ and magically I can now log in with open-ssh. This is handy as it has a batch mode, so you can log in and upload from a bash script. So I modified the backup script to backup to the tmp directory and then copy this to the external drive. Then use open-ssl to encrypt it using another private key. It then logs into the ftp server using SFTP and uploads the file. To find out if the upload was successful was a bit more tricky. Uses ‘stat’ to get the file size of the local file, then uses ‘ls -l’ on the remote file and stores that in a file. I then had to use a series of ‘sed’, ‘grep’ and ‘cut’ commands to get the file size. I dump this to a file and then just compare the two files. It failed multiple times in testing until I got the script right. Satisfaction.

Also bought a new hat.

So I’ve now got to Saturday and failed to come down with anything. Much to be said by spraying vast amounts of chemicals up your nose. I did a fifteen mile walk as well as walking the dogs. Got back and immersed myself in a bash script. The object of the exercise was to produce a script that could upload a file to a ftp server. First issue was said server requires an SSH public / private key to validate. To be fair after a bit of Googling this wasn’t much of an issue. Producing a batch file to do this, again wasn’t a problem. Validating the file was there however turned out to be a challenge. There wasn’t any response to say that ‘file is uploaded’. So ended up with with a very interesting combination of ‘sed’ pipes to list the directory entry to a file to get it’s size. So validated the upload by comparing file sizes in a file containing the file size. Still. It was a night in.

So after almost two years of procrastinating and a PC on my bench, I’ve finally finished the upgrade. Server has been running Ubuntu 12.04LTS (Long term support) version for almost ten years. I know it’s long term support, but that ran out a few years ago. So started to upgrade it to 16LTS I think, started writing down the entire procedure in a notebook. Some eighteen months later and it hadn’t been touched. Decided it really was time as sooner of later the server was going to die. I’d got as far as getting the web server working and updating all the SQL stuff, so basically this blog was working.

So a couple of weeks ago I decided to take what I did and actually document it in a word document. Three weeks later and it’s done (well very much almost). It’s completely rebuilt from scratch and now running Ubuntu 20.04.3LTS which is apparently good until 2030….I wonder if I’ll upgrade in time. Doubt it. Everything was fairly smooth when I followed all the instructions correctly. The original Shorewall config didn’t work, so that put up fight trying to get something going there. Also I have a fault in fstab somewhere and need to work out what root disc to mount, but that’s quite minor in the grand scheme of things.

Also upgraded the hardware as the old server was struggling with memory. Had a look around and found a ‘mini PC’ on Amazon for £270. It has 8GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD, plus six USB ports and VGA. So was pretty much perfect. It came with Windows 10 Pro, but soon said goodbye to that.

It’s now all working perfectly except the mount issue, and it’s getting late. But now I have a very secure up to date server running Apache, Postfix, Courier and lots of other goodies. It’s all setup correctly with SSL and a very strict double firewall in my DMZ.

So overall, very pleased.

Noticed this morning that my cloud backup hadn’t actually worked since last August. After much investigation it appears to be due to some update of the linux client. Spent bloody ages trying to upgrade it and get it all installed. Managed eventually, but I can no longer get the deamon to startup on er, startup. I’ve shoved it in the backup script which is triggered by cron, so will see what happens tonight.

Work wise was actually quite interesting today. Working on a compute shader to do the lighting pass. It’s been tricky to try and hack it into existing systems, it’s not working yet, but does have promise. Walked Sasha, then went for a walk early evening. Oh I did do it….this morning I was sub ten stone. Still got some Aloe Vera left, so will have that tomorrow. But I will have a drink tonight, and cheese, just not much cheese.

Spent the entire day working on clouds again. I vowed never to touch these fuckers again. Still. Made some progress anyway, got rid of a load vertex data that wasn’t required. It’s now dead quick in the vertex department and still bloody heavy in the pixel one. Looked at grout, can’t seem to get a colour chart anywhere, so will have to guess. Think I’m going for some kind of grey.

Walked over to Aztec West and took the drill bit back. Did more work. Finally went for a run. It’s now officially bloody cold. Had shower. Watched deep ITV drama’s. Then finally after yet another reminder email got round to rekeying my SSL certificates. As apparently 1024 bits isn’t enough these days so had to be changed to 2048 bits. Anyway, now after lots of buggering about it’s all done and now valid until May 2016. By then I will either be dead or will have forgotten where to stick the files again.

Dillon off to daycare tomorrow and then more bloody clouds.