Return of Capsule

Outage

For roughly a month, this capsule was down. Not sure exactly when it started, or why, but by the time I noticed, the server could not talk to any machine outside of its network and vice versa. Deeply troubleshooting this, while interesting, is outside the realm of my expertise and time constraints.

I have had it back up for about a couple weeks now, but had not gotten around to writing about it until now.

Restoration

The Operating System (OS) was out of its Long Term Support (LTS) window anyway (Ubuntu 18.x, if I recall correctly?), so I figured the simplest thing would be to nuke it and start from scratch. Now it is on Debian 12.

The only gotcha was that that version of Debian has too new a version of OpenSSL for smolver, my server. So I just compiled the one I needed from source, which was much simpler than I anticipated.

smolver Devlog

smolver source code

I already had it on smolver's backlog to replace the SSL dependency with something more actively maintained (I maintain a cutomized fork for reasons explained in another post), but I was not sure if or when I'd've ever actually done it. Now, I guess it is less low priority.

smolver development log, part 9 - client certificates

Data Loss

The only thing I lost, simply because I had forgotten about them until I deleted the old server and so never backed them up, were the capsule's logs. I had intended on eventually using those to generate lifetime capsule reading stats, but oh well. If I ever get around to building that, the stats just won't be lifetime, which in all honesty, is probably for the best anyway.