It’s been a crazy week for time, never mind the fact time is fluid and flexible. People have always observed time, but modern society obsesses on minutes and seconds being in sync ever since railroad time… then there’s Daylight Savings Time. Last weekend, it was time to Fall back an hour. For whatever reason, some clocks still require manual intervention to be correct though most things are run by cell towers and the atomic clock these days. But this year, I had a new problem. One computer was apparently not aware of the time change – it corrected the timezone from Pacific to Central, instead. I woke up to clocks that said 2am, 3am, and 4am. And UTC does NOT make things easier.

On the server, skysurfer.media has an uptime of 176 days, almost 6 months since being rebooted (which was an accident), but a server like this requires maintenance and there have been a few problems recently.

The image server was down for a couple of days after an update with breaking changes. The problem stems from a major update in postgresql to version 18. Migrating from version 17 is not a trivial task, but immich (the image server) requires an additional extension which complicates things even further. After too many unsuccessful database dump and restore attempts, and after failing the packaged upgrade tools, I conceded and actually downgraded postgresql to get things working again… so this is now on the to-do list but images are back online. As it is, upgrading from pgvector to vectorchord was enough of a learning curve, but this is part of self-hosting without the use of secondary programs like docker.

Another bit of server news is that there were recently improvements in email security after another breaking update. Apparently, last January Dovecot changed their configuration format which required a complete rewrite of the config file but I didn’t read the update notes until last week. Ah, it was trying to run an old config but that meant it was defaulting to plaintext until a remote server negotiated a TLS connection. In short, the first part of emails including the header were being sent in text, then the rest of the message was encrypted and that was flagging spam filters. I had already cleaned up DNS records for the server so there are no problems with verification of the messages, but when I tried to update the config file to the new format the server failed. Then, in the process of trial and error, I accidentally overwrote the backed up original file so there was no going back. I can’t remember that last time an upgrade almost made me cry. I had to rewrite the configuration from scratch in more or less a new language, but in the process I tightened up security on Roundcube, too… so, now there is end-to-end encryption and email is fully functional. There was a short period of downtime, and one day massages could be received but not accessed. All is good now, although message may still be showing up in the spam folder. The server passes all checks and isn’t on any blacklist now, so that should be fixed with time.

More on time, later…