0xStubs

System Administration, Reconfigurable Computing and Other Random Topics

Debugging a flaky cpu steal time counter on a paravirtualized Xen guest

/ By / In System Administration / 2 Comments

I recently noticed a strange phenomenon on a Debian Stretch server running as a paravirtualized guest on a Xen host: top showed the CPU either be 100% idle or 100% stolen. User, system, nice and waiting times were stuck at 0%. I cross-checked with vmstat and it showed 0% for all cpu time counters. Both tools are getting their information from /proc/stat which looked like the following:

cpu 5322 0 4376 12720669 37879 0 59 1198368772563 0 0
cpu0 5322 0 4376 12720669 37879 0 59 1198368772563 0 0
...

The third to last value is the steal time, denoting “stolen time, which is the time spent in other operating systems when running in a virtualized environment” [procfs(5)]. This value looked way too high and, in particular, it was counting backwards. So, if I wanted to put this system into production, some debugging was required before…

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Migrating from ownCloud 9.1.6 to Nextcloud 10

/ By / In System Administration / 3 Comments

If you are stuck with PHP 5.4 (e.g. because you are still running Debian Wheezy) and want to migrate from ownCloud to Nextcloud, you are probably facing a minor issue. Nextcloud 11 and newer require PHP 5.6 so you have to stick to version 10 instead. Nextcloud 10 reached its end-of-life with version 10.0.5, which internally corresponds to ownCloud version 9.1.5. The most recent version of ownCloud 9 is version 9.1.6 though, so when trying to migrate to Nextcloud you will face the following error:

Downgrading is not supported and is likely to cause unpredictable issues (from 9.1.6.2 to 9.1.5.2)

Looking at the git commits between ownCloud 9.1.5 and 9.1.6 shows that there were no changes to the database layout. So, as a workaround, you can just edit your config/config.php and set version to 9.1.5.1 or lower. Afterwards, you should be able to run the normal upgrade procedure.

Fixing Roundcube’s command execution vulnerability in Debian Wheezy

/ By / In System Administration / Leave Comment

Recently a quite serious vulnerability (CVE-2016-9920) in Roundcube was reported. Until now (7th Dec) this vulnerability is unfixed in Debian’s roundcube packages (see the corresponding entry in the Debian Security Tracker).

The upstream patch is not directly applicable to version 0.7 which is used in Debian Wheezy but with a little modification it is. Following you find a corresponding patch*.
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