[Box-Admins] For information - possible squeaksource.com issue

[Levente Uzonyi]

On Sun, 10 Nov 2013, David T. Lewis wrote:

> For information - no action required:
>
> Our squeaksource.com service is running with no apparent problems, but
> there is a possibility of problems arising in the next day, so I am
> sending this for information.
>
> I checked our squeaksource.com image on box3 via VNC about an hour ago,
> and noticed an error notifier related to startup processing following
> an image save. The error was related to port 8888 already in use. I
> closed the notifier, then found that http://squeaksource.com was no
> longer active.  I made a backup copy of the most recently saved disk
> image (in a BACKUPS subdirectory), then saved the image and restarted
> it.
>
> Squeaksource.com is running normally, but VNC access is no longer
> working. This means that something failed in the startup processing,
> and this may lead to problems later on. It also means that it is
> hard to debug, because I no longer have VNC access.
>
> I cannot do anything further tonight, but will follow up tomorrow
> to correct the problem.

It would be worth installing xpra[1][2], and starting the image with it. 
IIRC the box has debian installed on it, so the following steps should 
work:


On the server:

Installation:
$ sudo apt-get install xpra

Start xpra on display #100:
$ xpra start :100

Start the VM (this might have to be different on the server):
$ DISPLAY=:100 squeak -vm-sound-null squeaksource.image


On your machine:

Once you have xpra installed, you can attach to squeak running on the 
server via ssh:

$ xpra attach --encoding=jpeg --auto-refresh-delay=0.1 ssh:box3:100

Here box3 is the label defined in the ssh config file, which can usually 
be found in $HOME/.ssh/config
If you don't have such entry or file yet, then the following will do the 
trick:

Host box3
      hostname box3.squeak.org
      user <your_username>
      compression yes
      port 22

You might want to use a different value for the --auto-refresh-delay 
parameter.

To detach from the image - but keep it running on the server - simply stop 
the xpra on your machine with Ctrl-C.


Levente

[1] http://xpra.org/
[2] https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Xpra

>
> Dave
>
>