Could you be running out of RAM and then having oom killer knock off some random processes such as sshd, thus disconnecting you and causing problems?
There should be something in dmesg output, /var/log/messages or the journalctl output if oom killer is running.
I doubt that running out of RAM is my problem, itâs rather me stubbornly using PuTTY console instead of the DO console.
So, I am going to switch to @pfaffmanâs suggestion above, particularly since my discovery that PuTTY console gets disconnected even when I am using it for something completely different from Discourse management.
Ram could be it. Do you have swap?
Have you tried adjusting the keep alive setting, something like this?
@pfaffman I did not specify anything - using all droplet defaults, relying on DO folks to ensure reasonable behavior.
First, I am going to try to set the keep-alive as @omarfilip suggested above, then I will look at the swap space situation, followed by the @pfaffmanâs suggestion to use the DO original console (if the keep-alive setting will allow me to continue using the PuTTY console, I will use it as itâs a lot more user friendly than the DOâs equivalent.
Having so many friendly people helping me, I wish to restate my reasons for trying to put together Ghost and Discourse: itâs in my view ideal tool for someone to write technical documents and offer the best support for discussing these documents. My plan is to address Identity and Account Management (IAM) using several interesting PaaS IAM providers; this subject is not sufficiently well documented (at least in my opinion, based on years of using such services myself).
In order to âbeta testâ my Ghost/Discourse integrated tool, I decided to describe all details of the creation process of creating and testing this tool. So, all people helping me should know that this effort is intended to help Discourse, Ghost and Digital Ocean community.
If you used the Digital-Ocean 1-click install and not the Discourse official Standard Installation then you likely donât have swap configured, so when you rebuild you run out of ram unless you have > 2GB.
You can try doing
cd /var/discourse
./discourse-setup
and it will create swap for you if it is needed.
If you want help with Digital Oceanâs one-click installation and want to ârely on DO folks to ensure reasonable behaviorâ, then you should rely on them to support you.
But since Iâm already posting, an easier way to confirm that itâs not PuTTY thatâs at fault (which might save a long time in fussing with PuTTYâs parameters for naught) is to try the console. If you havenât run discourse-setup then Iâm pretty sure that the issue is swap space.
@pfaffman I did use the discourse official installation process to the letter, including the use of PuTTY referenced in that official installation document.
It is possible that you derived the opinion how I used DO 1-click install and think that I should depend on DO:
If you want help with Digital Oceanâs one-click installation and want to ârely on DO folks to ensure reasonable behaviorâ, then you should rely on them to support you.
My reference to 1-clock install comes from the recent email from Discourse:
Hooray, a new version of Discourse is available!
Your version: 2.7.0.beta1
New version: 2.7.0.beta2
- Upgrade using our easy one-click browser upgrade
So, the current situation is that
knowing that you make your living from helping people with Discourse. Despite me not looking like a potential customer, you spent time pulling me out of the weeds../launcher rebuild app command successfully.Many thanks to everyone who provided parts of the solution.
Oh! Mea culpa! So sorry!
Then you do have swap and my guess is all wrong. Thatâs too bad, because it was going to be an easy fix. 
Thatâs a relief after I falsely accused you!
And itâs terrible to learn that putty is so bad. I donât understand how it continues to be the recommended ssh client for windows.
I think that thereâs now some client thatâs part of that Linux subsystem thing, but the list version of windows I used regularly was windows 98.
Glad you got it sorted!
All modern operating systems ship with SSH clients out of the box, there should be no need for third party clients. Even on windows terminal I can just type SSH. It should work provided your windows is updated.
Oh my word. Really? Last I (thought I) looked it required some installation that looked hard.
And it can use a normal ssh key and not that pem nonsense?
This long story has a big happy-end and could be categorized as a storm in a teacup. I learned a lot about Discourse and as a consequence plan to stay around indefinitely. Here is the itemized happy-end description:
My problem upgrading from Beta1 to Beta2 was manifested by the PuTTY console timing out. I interpreted this as a colossal crash in the Discourse upgrade task and spent a lot of time learning Discourse âinternalsâ - a rabbit hole I am very happy to follow needlessly
The solution to my problem is extremely simple (once you know where to âpushâ) - simple as 1, 2, 3 below
(the fact that I started with too big âkeep-aliveâ interval, let me to believe how PuTTY is really a crappy software and spent a lot of time switching from SSH based droplet access to [id, password] based authentication needed for Digital Oceanâs own console (which is really bad). Note that this experiment completely rehabilitates the PuTTY tool.
@Falco opened our âcollective eyesâ pointing out to simply use Windows 10âs built -in OpenSSH (thanks to Scott Hanselman).
Since I already promised to @codinghorror to write the best ever document presenting Discourse to the world as a thank you for his (and his team) help to get me understanding Discourse, @pfaffman let me make this @Falco 's suggestion be the first part of my document
I recommend using tmux, this way you can reconnect to the session running rebuild even if your client times out.
@md-misko thanks for the tip:
The great thing about tmux is it allows you to have multiple panes open at the same time, each with their own shell running, but using the same single ssh connection. Not only that, but you can also have multiple âwindowsâ open at the same time, a bit like tabs with more panes in them
Hi @sunjam , seems the problem can be fixed by new version of gem omniauth-vkontakte 1.7.0.
Iâve created a pull request to pluginâs maintainer. As a temporary workaround, you can switch github link in your app.yml to
- git clone https://github.com/rapekas/discourse-vk-auth
and rebuild.