Troubleshooting problems
Start the daemon with one or more of the following program options to make it easier to troubleshoot and perform maintenance:
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-single will start in "single user mode" which is a convenience combination of -nolisten -wa -console options described below.
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-nolisten will disable the loading of any listener sockets during startup.
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-nobackfill specifically skips the initial-backfill background task.
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-wa write-avoid will discourage (but not deny) writes to the database. This prevents a lot of background tasks and other noise, making it easier to conduct maintenance (implies -nobackfill).
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-console convenience to immediately drop to the adminstrator console after startup.
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-debug enables full debug log output.
If your server ever fails to start from an errant conf item: you can override any item using an environmental variable before starting the program. To do this simply replace the '.' characters with '_' in the name of the item when setting it in the environment. The name is otherwise the same, including its lower case.
Otherwise, the program can be run with the option -defaults. This will
prevent initial loading of the configuration from the database. It will
not prevent environmental variable overrides (as mentioned above). Values
will not be written back to the database unless they are explicitly set by
the user in the console.
In very rare cases after a hard crash the journal cannot completely restore data before the crash. Due to the design of rocksdb and the way we apply it for Matrix, data is lost in chronological order starting from the most recent transaction (matrix event). The database is consistent for all events up until the first corrupt event, called the point-in-time.
When any loss has occurred the daemon will fail to start normally. To enable
point-in-time recovery use the command-line option -pitrecdb at the next
invocation. Some recent events may be lost.
If -pitrecdb does not work, a stronger technique can be invoked with -recoverdb. This allows for the point-in-time to be even further in the past. All events going back to the point of corruption will be dropped.
Alternatively, -repairdb will drop corrupt data without using point-in-time techniques. This will give the database an inconsistent state. The server must no longer be used. This is for disaster recovery only.
Construct is designed to be capable internet service software and should perform best when directly interfacing with remote parties. Nevertheless, some users wish to employ middlewares known as "reverse-proxies" through which all communication is forwarded. This gives the appearance, from the server's perspective, that all clients are connecting from the same IP address on different ports.
At this time there are some known issues with reverse proxies which may be mitigated by administrators having reviewed the following:
- The connection limit from a single remote IP address must be raised from its default, for example by entering the following in !control or console:
conf set ircd.client.max_client_per_peer 65535
- The server does not yet support non-SSL listening sockets. Administrators may have to generate locally signed certificates for communication from the reverse-proxy.
