[CollEc] Helos offline

[Düben, Christian]

The fact that the machine still runs bionic should not be a problem. Bionic is still supported. And I just checked the logs. Unattended upgrades is running. A problem might be that some updates require a reboot and we rarely reboot the machine. We could automate reboots using unattended upgrades or a cron job.

By the way, I do not mind upgrading to focal. I am currently setting up a web app on an Ubuntu 20.04 machine for my new job at another university and there are no compatibility issues with the shiny app.

At the beginning of June, I installed a script that records the times CollEc was accessed - no other variable, just the access time. When plotting the results aggregated by day, you can see that the number of daily app visits tends to fluctuate around 1,000 (see Subset.pdf). However, yesterday it surged to almost 30,000 (see Full_Period.pdf). Monit just notified me at 9:30 am today that the app was offline. So, I do not know whether that is related to the server issue. But tons of machines firing requests at port 80 on one day and the server becoming inaccessible on the next appears to be an odd coincidence.

As I have to design a web app for my new job, I learned how to set up a Nginx web server with TLS certificates, set up the firewall etc. If you would be willing to drop Apache, I could install that on Helos as well. This is up to you.

What we can also do, is connect the app to the web server via the loopback interface instead of the host. That is apparently more secure. I know how to do this in Nginx, but not in Apache.

Christian Düben
Doctoral Candidate
Chair of Macroeconomics
Hamburg University
Germany
christian.dueben at uni-hamburg.de
http://www.christian-dueben.com


-----Original Message-----
From: Thomas Krichel <krichel at openlib.org> 
Sent: Samstag, 24. Juli 2021 19:15
To: Düben, Christian <Christian.Dueben at uni-hamburg.de>
Cc: CollEc Run <collec-run at lists.openlib.org>
Subject: Re: [CollEc] Helos offline

  Düben, Christian writes

> Thanks for fixing the server issues.

  It was Cezar who rebooted.

> 
> Could the server have been compromised by an attack?

  I don't have any evidence of that. A compromised machine
  would keep running to use it.

  But we need to update the software regularly to keep
  known bug out. Is there any update on an upgrade to focal
  or so?

-- 

  Cheers,

  Thomas Krichel                  http://openlib.org/home/krichel
                                              skype:thomaskrichel
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