We had an issue with the web server eating itself after an upgrade introduced a library that conflicted with a library I had compiled in order to enable http2 protocol before Ubuntu included it in their distribution.

     I ended up having to restore this server from backups and bring it forward again, removing the offending library in advance so that this would proceed properly.

     I upgraded the server to php 8.1, however some apps even which were supposedly 8.1 compatible did not work.  It suggests a problem with our 8.1 install.  I am working to remove existing users and apps from this server and transferring it to a new server.

     I am laying some things out differently, in particular some webapps, like roundcube, which are presently https://www.eskimo.com/roundcube, will instead get their own subdomain, https://roundcube.eskimo.com/.  There are several reasons for this.  First, it allows each to exist in the root directory of it’s subdomain, most code doesn’t care but there are some applications that do.  Second, it allows each application to have it’s own .htaccess file so I can tailor the server environment for that specific application.  Third, it allows moving applications to different servers for load balancing reasons.

      I am upgrading some servers to 24.04 early just because it has more compatibilities with a lot of my self-compiled libraries than does 22.04 which is two years old now.  There are some elements of 24.04 that are improvements, but pretty much all the systemd bugs from 22.04 were retained.  There seems to be a new bug in which NIS reports to systemd that it’s up and running about three seconds before this is actually the case.  This causes issues with applications depending upon NIS to be running first.  I’ve worked around this by adding automatic restarts to services thusly affected, so that if they fail to start the first time, they will restart three seconds later.