So I spent an hour and a half fixing this, so hopefully someone comes across this post and it helps them.

My issue was that the OpenVPN adapter on my Windows 7 computer was an Unidentified network and I couldn’t change it. Because of this, it didn’t follow the right firewall rules, making it impossible to RDP in over the VPN.

So, after much searching high and low, the fix is very simple, just add the following lines to your client config file:

And restart the VPN connection.

Thanks to this site which was very difficult to find.

So, as a result of not understanding Amazon EC2 and not having backups, I’ve lost some months of data and changes to the server.

You can believe I now have backups.

So, I experienced quite a bit of data loss and was forced to restore the site from a quite dated backup. I won’t be re-writing the posts that were lost for now, but I will be setting up a more resilient backup solution, most likely off-site.

Sucks.

I installed CGIProxy on the server here. You’ll have to ask for the login information, but I hope to eventually have a working SSL proxy to replace the SSH proxy I currently have. I am hesitant to, because SSH can do file transfers too, but I can always do file hosting magic with S3 and my home server if I need a file to or from QTOSW.

So this server now runs an IRC. Just point your client here on port 6667 or so and it should connect. I idle in #chat, come stop by sometime! :)

I reinstalled everything and all my data was backed up, but I’m hesitant to set up Minecraft again. Does anyone even care?

In any case, I’ve hosted a ZIP of the minecraft server, in full if anyone wants it.

Link here

So, I broke the server and now I can’t run things as root. Also, the Minecraft portion was stopped. It will be fixed within the hour.

[EDIT: So, I have no idea what happened, but here is a step-by-step process of what broke:

1. I misformat /etc/sudoers. I cannot log in as root
2. I finally fix the sudoers file, and now I can run things as root again
3. I reboot and XBMC says the video drivers are not installed.
4. I verify this with lspci or some other command, I can’t remember
5. I attempt to reinstall the video drivers from the repos
6. I attempt to reinstall the video drivers from nVidia
7. I get fed up and try to restore from backup, but I use the rsync archive command.
8. This command runs for ~5 hours
9. I log in and notice now XBMC and Mumble aren’t running
10. Mumble has a SQL error. I fix this by changing the permissions of the file to 777.
11. I run df on an unrelated whim.
12. 0 bytes free on /
13. ????
14. Profit.

So, I shut down the server and will reinstall everything sometime today or tomorrow. Everything was backed up, but the server will be down for at least 24 hours.]

Some URLs (such as the minecraft map) aren’t loading.  I know, I’m working on it.  It has something to do with mod_rewrite.

[Edit: all fixed, that was easier than I thought]

For those interested, here is some specs on what’s running the site:

Hardware:

MSI Wind

1.6GHz Dual Core Atom Processor

2GB of RAM

1TB Harddrive

Internal Wireless Card, 10/100 Ethernet

Operating System:

XBMC Live (Ubuntu-based, boots in ~30s)

Software:

XMBC, Mumble, Minecraft Server (more on this below), Deluge, Apache, MySQL

Minecraft Server:

The Minecraft server runs Craftbukkit with the following plugins:

AdminCmd, ChatterCraft, MagicCarpet, MapMarkers, Nanobot, Runecraft, WorldEdit

The Minecraft world is backed up every 30 minutes.  Overviewer is installed at tylerphawkins.com/minecraftmap/ and it updates nightly.

Other Thoughts:

There’s other stuff running on the server and special configurations for different things, but most of it was made only for me.

[Update 12/3/11]

I now run the site on an EC2 instance.  This machine now is media-center only.