Posted on January 7, 2022

This affected Eskimo North and customer sites as well as friendica.eskimo.com, hubzilla.eskimo.com, and nextcloud.eskimo.com.

We had a web server issue causing intermittent failure of the web server. I thought this was load related as the server is quite heavily loaded, but it did it today during a time of very light load. I was able to chase the problem down to a cronjob being run on a wordpress site automatically configured to redirect to secure mode when the certificate had expired. The cronjobs were never exiting and ran once a minute and simply piled up until memory was exhausted causing failure of other services. Normally I get automatic notifications when certificates are about to expire but did not in this instance. I’ve ordered a new certificate and commented out the cron job until it arrives and can be installed.