[axxs-sysadmin] Two Questions

[andrew]

Torrance wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I have two questions:
>
> 1. Does anyone know how to access the 100GB of "backup" space that came
> with Hetzner? Indymedia.org.nz is soon to lose the server that currently
> hosts its backups, and if it's possible we would like to start backing
> up onto that space. Dave, this is probably your area since Hetzner is in
> your name?
>   
I think it's made available via FTP.  If I ever had the details for
logging into it, I'd have to do a fair bit of digging around to find them.
> 2. How would people feel about dropping Varnish as reverse proxy (for
> now)? We have been having persistent problems with getting 503 errors on
> about 40% of all POST requests to the server, and this is particularly
> offputting for people trying to post articles, comments, etc. The
> problem is with Varnish, but discussion on the Varnish developers list
> hasn't provided any solutions. The only difficulty in moving off varnish
> would be fashioning a script to change the port numbers in
> /etc/apache2/sites-available/ back to 80.
>   
What's actually going wrong?  I reckon it's worth a bit of debugging
before throwing varnish out.

Are some requests consistently getting 503s, or is it random which
requests are affected?

How much load is the server under?  Can you run the same request against
apache directly without problems?  Are the requests that fail reaching
apache?  If so, how long do they run before they fail?

If apache's failing in some way, and varnish can't reach it, then a 503
seems a likely error to get.  removing varnish would likely just make
that worse.

It might be worth experimenting with how varnish handles specific POST
requests, rather than trying to take it out of the picture entirely.

Andrew