The Devi Nivas Family

Blog

  • US-VA-01 upgrade complete

    The long pending upgrade to US-VA-01 has finally been completed. In the process, we got rid of some unused sites. Here are a list of sites now hosted on this server:

    • people.devinivas.org (PDO)
    • git.devinivas.org (Git)1
    • dish.devinivas.org (DISH Homepage)

    To make optimal use of our limited resources, there will be an indefinite hiatus on the following services:

    • time.bp4k.net (Devi Nivas HTTP Time Service) and its HTTP-only sister site
    • git.bp4k.net (now only accessible via git.devinivas.org)

    There is also a temporary hiatus on gt3.in, which we do plan to get up and running soon.

    On a technical note, we bid adieu to Apache2 and now use NGINX instead. This gets rid of htaccess/htpasswd configuration options but the site now loads with reduced latency. We have also increased the EC2 tier of the server (i.e. more RAM) hence response times should further improve from the previously sluggish performance. We have also gotten rid of Anubis and will replace it with an equivalent in-house system later next year.

    We have also updated the DISH information page, adding adequate information that can give context to family members who aren’t a part of the project yet.

    As with the last IN-MH-01 update, if you notice any discrepancies, such as missing data or pages that have lost protection, please contact DISH support immediately. We’ll be retaining the old instance for a month from today.

    -Your friendly sysadmins!

    1. For security reasons, push access has been removed for all previously authorized users. Please contact DISH support to be added again. ↩︎

  • PDO and Git downtime

    We will be switching to the new US-VA instance tonight (IST). Expect extended downtime on people.devinivas.org and git.devinivas.org from 2025-12-15 20:00 to 2025-12-16 15:00 IST1. We will make another post once the transition is finished.

    1. end time has been updated (at 2025-12-15 23:12 IST)! (NB most services have been migrated to a functional state at this time.) ↩︎

  • US-VA-01 Maintenance

    We’ll be upgrading US-VA-01 during the Winter Break. Expect downtime on people.devinivas.org, dish.devinivas.org, git.devinivas.org and related sites for the following week (2025-12-14 to 2025-12-20).

  • HTTP Time Service Usage

    The HTTP Time Service is run on Devi Nivas DISH servers and is useful for embedded systems to get up-to-date time info related to the EST/EDT time zones.

    The service was introduced on 2025-11-25 as a personal project of a system administrator.

    The server can be accessed at time.bp4k.net (https) or timehttp.bp4k.net (http). Use the query parameter ?epoch=1 verbatim to get the epoch time instead.

    The server source code can be obtained from Devi Nivas Git under the GNU AGPL v3 (NOT the GPL) license.

  • Maintenance on US-VA-01

    We are performing some maintenance on US-VA-01. The following sites will be inaccessible for a few hours:

    • people.devinivas.org
    • gt3.in
    • dish.devinivas.org
    • pamenon.ddns.net

    Thank you for your patience.

    -Your friendly sysadmins

  • GT3.IN has been taken down (again!)

    The one black sheep in our diligent administration is GT3.IN. Despite following the mod_wsgi docs word-for-word, there seems to be some issue when Apache terminates worker processes. I don’t have the time to debug all of that, and as an avid NGINX user, I’d prefer to switch.

    Here are the solutions I’ve come up with to fix this issue:

    1. Deploy gt3.in using a discrete WSGI server (probably Gunicorn/uWSGI) and use mod_proxy to proxy requests to that server.
    2. Wait till US-VA-01 is upgraded, switch to NGINX and use a standard WSGI proxy deployment.
    3. Restart Apache weekly.

    Option 1 is great, but going through all of that trouble for all of it to be washed away when we upgrade to Trixie isn’t worth it. I’d love to switch to NGINX as in Option 2, but that would break some htaccess configurations used by existing users. Option 3 isn’t really a fix, it’s a Jerry-rigged solution, so I’m not making a cron job for that.

    Since there’s basically only two of us sysadmins, and GT3.IN is my thing, I’ll be going for Option 2. I can’t promise a definitive timeline for the fix since I have a lot of other commitments, but I can guarantee that it’ll be done before Debian 12 goes EOL.

    I have also created a Statuspage for streamlined communication: https://devinivas.statuspage.io/. Unfortunately, it’s not automated, but it’s certainly better than blog posts on a website for family-related information.

    To the few of my friends who use GT3.IN, I apologize for this downtime. I can guarantee >95% uptime with the NGINX method – I’ve used it in multiple deployments which haven’t been touched in years, and they’re holding up just fine!

  • GT3.IN has been temporarily redeployed

    GT3.IN has been deployed using a different configuration. The deployment shall stay in place until 2025-10-06 (Fall Break) or until there is a regression.

    To get started on using GT3.IN, go to gt3.in/about.

  • Update on System Upgrades

    As die-hard Debian GNU/Linux fans might know, Debian 13 was released a couple of weeks ago. We have now upgraded IN-MH-01 to use the latest version of the Universal Operating System.

    about.devinivas.org, the original domain this site was hosted on, has been retired.

    If there is any missing content, please notify the site admins at the earliest.

    US-VA-01 will be upgraded by the end of September.

    We apologize for the prolonged downtime on the GT3.IN service, the redeployment of which was prolonged by the OS upgrade. We hope to have it up and running as soon as we update US-VA-01.

    -Advaith

  • Update on US-VA-01 outage

    As part of the resolution for the US-VA-01 outage, we have temporarily taken down the Flask application running GT3.IN.

    Hopefully, GT3.IN will be redeployed by 2025-08-23. This is a tentative date.

    Standard Date and Time Formats

    For technical blog posts and reports, we have decided to use UTC as the official time zone, and ISO (YYYY-MM-DD) as the official date format. We will also be using 24-hour time in the format HH:MM. We will not be using ISO 8601 Datetime formats (YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SSZ).

  • Outage on US-VA-01

    Server US-VA-01 is currently down, meaning that people.devinivas.org, gt3.in and dish.devinivas.org are all unreachable. We will get them up and running as soon as we can.

    -Advaith