…and it seems to work. Sorry for the 30 minute downtime because of that.
Planned Pubsub/PEP migration to MySQL
We are planning to migrate Pubsub/PEP (Publish-Subscribe / Personal Eventing Protocol) from Mnesia to MySQL in the very near future, which means the next two days.
Unfortunally there is no export/import script, so all data will be lost. It is also impossible to export own data from a client, at least I was told so.
Migration should fix some problems with PEP, also MySQL allows more administration and has less resource overhead.
Due to until now unknown reasons the server which holds the Jabber services crashed four times in the last not even two hours. From one second to the other the ejabberd processes took every resource they could get, and even more. 8 gigs of RAM and 8 gigs of swap, everything gone. Plus a lot of CPU load. The machine was loaded that “top” refreshed just every 5 minutes and in the end just a hardware reset helped to reboot the machine.
For the tech geeks:
top – 19:56:21 up 31 min, 1 user, load average: 22.86, 13.11, 8.71
Tasks: 240 total,  3 running, 231 sleeping,  0 stopped,  6 zombie
Cpu(s): 1.4%us, 5.8%sy, 0.0%ni, 12.4%id, 80.3%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.1%si, 0.0%st
Mem:  8190900k total, 8138972k used,   51928k free,     796k buffers
Swap: 8393848k total, 7276916k used, 1116932k free,   42404k cachedPID USER     PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM   TIME+ COMMAND
3239 ejabberd 20  0 15.7g 6.0g 460 S  23 76.7  3:06.65 beam.smp
We are looking into this issue. Maybe a severe bug with ejabberd, maybe a DoS attack. We don’t know, yet.
The server was offline this morning because of Kernel and MySQL upgrade. It would have happened faster if the server rebooted cleanly after “shutdown -r now” which it didn’t. So we had to send someone there to reset the machine manually.
We also upgraded Spectrum to support JID escaping. If this works after our tests (there seem to be some problems with clients who don’t support the unofficial % character which is used for @) I write more about this here.
Moods now also work on secondary domains
We stumbled upon this by accident – moods (or to be precise: everything which Pubsub/PEP offer) did not work on secondary domains.
It works now, it was just a little configuration change. The Pubsub service subdomain (e.g. pubsub.jabber.hot-chilli.eu) has to be the same domain as the Jabber service (e.g. jabber.hot-chilli.eu), not a subdomain of the Jabber server’s primary domain (e.g. jabber.hot-chilli.net).
The thing with contacts appearing to be online after a Spectrum transport crashed (mentioned here) got fixed on May 23rd.
ICQ Transport stable again
We had stability problems with ICQ Transport starting yesterday morning. This was caused by a certain version of libpurple. Issues should be fixed now.
Please note that with Spectrum transports crashes (not “normal” stops or restarts) it might happen that your client thinks it’s still online. Therefore some contacts appear online even if the client is not really logged into the transport at the moment. Spectrum developers are working on this issue. Until then I just hope that the Spectrum transports run stable. ;-)
With the new libpurple Gadu-Gadu transport should finally be stable, too. We’ll see how this works out in the near feature.
Facebook changed JIDs
It looks like Facebook changed their JIDs from u1234567890@chat.facebook.com to –1234567890@chat.facebook.com. For our Facebook Transport users this means that you might see all Facebook contacts again in your roster, maybe twice, old and new. Sorry for the trouble, but lucky for us this is a Facebook issue.
Old transport contact on facebook.jabber.hot-chilli.net:
u1234567890%chat.facebook.com@facebook.jabber.hot-chilli.net
New transport contact on facebook.jabber.hot-chilli.net:
–1234567890%chat.facebook.com@facebook.jabber.hot-chilli.net