lifebsideben

I ordered a new server from theplanet.com (whom I really like, so don’t take this as a dis — I’ve been a customer for over 5 years, and plan to continue with them). So the new server is supposed to have 2 hard drives. Turns out the provisioned it with only one, and then told me, oops, we need to order the hardware. A few hours later (yes, really–I think they must have run out to Fry’s), they said it was in stock, and needed to take the machine down to install it. Fine, I said do it anytime. They actually did start about 30 minutes later (and this was the middle of the night), while I was online. While I was yum-installing packages. Sigh. Here’s from the lastlog (remember these are in reverse order, and some data removed for my protection

reboot system boot 2.6.xx Thu Mar 6 03:46 (00:01)
root pts/1 63.xx.xx.xx Thu Mar 6 03:37 - crash (00:09)
root pts/0 63.xx.xx.xx Thu Mar 6 03:29 - crash (00:17)
root pts/0 spyglass.dllstx4 Wed Mar 5 07:26 - 07:26 (00:00)
root pts/0 spyglass.dllstx4 Tue Mar 4 11:55 - 12:02 (00:07)

Hmm, if they could log into it the previous day, it really doesn’t take much longer to just log in and run ’shutdown’, huh? Apparently flipping the power switch is a lot easier. Alright, I can deal. Anyhow, they did install it, so I log in and happen to do ‘history’. Looks like the tech wasn’t too sure of him/herself:

1 fdisk -l
2 exit
3 ls
4 exit
5 fdisk -l
6 reboot
7 fdisk -
8 fdisk -l
9 reboot
10 fdisk -l
11 df
12 mke2fs ext3 /dev/hdb1
13 ls
14 mkdir /Backup_drive
15 mount -t ext3 /hdb /Backup_drive
16 fdisk -
17 fdisk -l
18 reboot
19 fdisk -l
20 mount -t ext3 /dev/hdb0 Backup_drive
21 mount -t ext3 /dev/hdb0 /Backup_drive
22 mount -t ext3 /dev/hdb1 /Backup_drive
23 df
24 reboot
25 fdisk -l
26 ls
27 cd ..
28 ls
29 fdisk -l
30 reboot
31 fdisk -l
32 cd ..
33 ls
34 mount -t ext3 /dev/hdb /Backup_drive
35 mount -t ext3 /dev/hdb1 /Backup_drive
36 fdisk -l
37 history

Wow, that’s a lot of fdisk’ing. And kind of a lot of tries to mount it, considering you just ran fdisk so much. And hey, you didn’t add anything to my fstab or similar… but you did create a silly directory in the root of my other drive. Feh.

Ah well, at least it’s installed and seems to be working fine, and the turnaround was really quite fast to get it done.

Tags: bofh, hardware, hosting, linux, sysadmin, the planet

I spent probably 6 hours today trying to get Bacula working fully. I’d never tried it, but have been thinking about trying to implement a “real” backup system for some time. By “real”, I mean, something that can back up the most important bits of my two Macs, my remote webserver, and even bits of the RAID5 array that are “super critical”, to a separate harddrive, handle incrementals, and not involve lots of hackery on the clients. Bacula does seem to fit the bill, and I picked up a 400G eSATA drive to add to the server last week for about $100 to be the backup media (tapes? we don’t need no stinkin’ tapes!)
Read more »

Tags: bacula, hardware, linux, mac, NAS, software

I usually leave my PCs on 24/7, so I can ssh in if I need to, and let my various cronjobs to their thing, and because I’m lazy, and to do my part in keeping the US reliant on foreign energy sources. Yesterday however I decided to give ’sleep’ mode a shot on the Mac mini. Works great. Except for one thing… if you’ve got a wireless keyboard and mouse, apparently the signal doesn’t get through to wake it back up! Well, I’m guessing it’s a artifact of the wireless nature of my K&M, or perhaps it’s another part of the vast Microsoft anti-Mac conspiracy (”if we can’t get them to use our OS, at least they’ll use our keyboards and oddly shaped pointing devices! Muahahaha!”)

On the plus side, it’s not that big a deal. Tapping the power button (but it’s all the way on the baaaack of the compuuuter) also wakes from sleep. Wish I could say it was as easy for me to wake up in the a.m…

Tags: apple

I finally hit the 10,000 mark of photos in iPhoto. It’s taking about 15 seconds to load now, which I think is fairly reasonable. And what’s even better, the 5.0.2 upgrade Apple released a few days ago actually fixed a problem I had intermittently with importing photos from my Canon digital camera. (Well, it’s possible the OS X 10.3.9 upgrade actually contained the fix, as part of the Image Capture application, but whatever.)

Now if only it was speedier when moving between photos. And I’m really looking forward to the Spotlight integration in Tiger, so I can do fulltext searching against image comments, etc. That’ll rock.

While I’m on the subject of digital photos, I want to plug one of my favorite apps, JAlbum. It’s Java freeware, and creates kick-butt static HTML albums for uploading to any webspace. Super flexible, almost too good to be free. I donated to the author, so ya know it’s good. Although, I find myself doing that a few times lately, which is something strange for me considering my uber-pirate past. I guess now, my time really is worth enough that anything cool enough, or time-saving enough, is worthwhile me tossing a few bucks to the author. Not a bad trend.

Tags: apple, iPhoto, jAlbum, photography

I’m trying to figure out where to post entries when I do happen to do so, which is a pretty rare event anyhow. Here, or at 360°? WordPress pretty much kicks 360’s ass at the moment when it comes to editing tools, so I suppose I’ll keep posting the majority here. But, 360 is all Yahoorific, and more at my fingertips while working. I guess I shouldn’t blog from work much anyhow

Well, in the meantime, just a few interesting links… Mac serial number decoder–find out when your Mac was made.
As a guy at work would say, this is totally ringing the bell on the nerdometer. Some guy made Mac OS X Engineer Trading Cards. Yeah… but I have to admit his Ajax-style commenting system rocks. Pretty sweet effect, if a tad useless. Well, I like the submit-without-refresh bit, but the live preview bit is not too useful IMO.
One more: dissecting WordPress themes, seems handy.

Tags: apple, blogging, DHTML, wordpress, Yahoo

I admit it, I’m totally geeked over the new Mac Mini. When we upgraded my wife’s old G3 tower to OS X a few years back, I was surely impressed with the “unix with a usable UI”, but it didn’t seem like a real replacement for my windows desktop, especially with the price/performance ratio (perceived or real) of Mac hardware. When we sold the G3 and got a G4 PowerBook, and eventually upgraded to Panther, I started thinking, “hmm, maybe I could use one of these as my desktop…” but again, I didn’t want to fork out for a pricey Mac in addition to my PC. And all the cheaper Macs came with CRTs, and moving to that from my 19″ LCD was going to be an unpleasant experience for both my eyes and my back.

Now that the Mac Mini is out, it seems like perhaps a perfect fit for me. Still not convinced I can switch 100% of what I do to the Mac, but willing to give it a shot. I’ll be able to run “real” apache, php, mysql, instead of the not-identical Windows ports (I’ve resorted to Virtual PC, which actually works pretty well). With the Mac Mini, I can keep my 19″ DVI LCD, my nice mouse, etc. and for a reasonable investment (say $600 for the higher-end Mini; I’ll hack my own RAM upgrade with a spare PC2700 512M DIMM I’ve got), I’ll see if I can be won over to the Gray side (if Linux is Light and MS is Dark?)

I went to order one on apple’s store site last night, and unlike the day before (when it said “order now and receive it by January 22nd”, it now says “ship time: 3-4 weeks”. Ugh! Well, I guess I’ll be standing in line outside thePalo Alto or Burlingame Apple Stores come January 22nd, when they are supposed to be available.

So AAPL is sitting just below $70 right now, buoyed in large part by massive, almost impossibly good iPod sales last quarter–I think it’s got a little way to come down, but I feel the Mini is going to be a big hit (and although the iPod Shuffle seems kind of silly to me, I suspect at its price points they’ll sell a ton of those, too.) I’m predicting the stock to maybe hit $100 in 2005, and split. Of course, I’m the guy who thought “Webvan can turn it around!” and promptly lost over 99% of my investment, so my stock pick track record has its share of missteps.

I’m actually kind of sad I just bought my parents a new Dell, too. And had to spend 2 days copying over stuff from their old dead PC, and teaching them how to use stuff, especially digital camera image importing, etc. That kind of stuff is trivial on the Mac. If I end up loving the Mac later this year maybe I’ll send them one too, and they can sell the Dell. Sounds like a good Mac Mini slogan: “sell your Dell!” I am convinced a lot of people with iPods and PCs are going to get Mac Minis, love OSX and iLife, and buy more expensive (read: higher-margin) Macs. Even if they just encourage more developers onto the platform, it’ll be a win for consumers. It’ll be an interesting 2005!

Tags: apple, big_business

We are hosted at ev1servers.net, and generally I’ve been a really happy customer these past few years. However, we added a 2nd box for mysql, and got their private network (10.) set up between them, and had nothing but problems. Slow connection (typically 6mbit/sec, kind of lame for private network!) and lately, lots of dropped connections/routing problems/loss of connectivity. Bad news. You hate to see mysql queries doing “writing to net” for 5 minutes…! We’ve finally ditched using the private network and are going direct to the external IP on the 2nd box, which is much much faster and more reliable (that’s sad). (Setting this up safely of course involved lots of firewall rules…!) Anyhow, it’s working, but the one thing I’m worried about is that in theory we’re limited to X amount (1T I think) of traffic a month on the frontend interfaces (on both boxes). I don’t want to pay for overages because they can’t manage to get their private networking stuff to work reliably. The nagios graphs of uptime aren’t pretty

Between prince.org and a couple of the other sites we host, we do a decent amount of traffic, and it seems like it’d be a ton easier to just get some rack space and throw some machines at the problem, especially as we’re considering buying (renting) yet another machine… which would really start making the buy vs. rent situation look less viable. One of my big issues is that ev1 is super expensive to get a high-end machine (for example, for a DB server), especially with a lot of RAM. I want a big box to support fulltext searching in mysql, which requires oodles of RAM (the dataset is over 1G), but that is a fortune to rent. I’m going to price (again) local SF hosting providers that are flexible and dig helping out semi-nonprofits like us. And maybe price out an Opteron with 8G of RAM for the database… mmmm that’d be tasty…!

If anyone’s got suggestions about providers (I’m talking about up to 8U and maybe .5T/month transfer, and I’d really like 24/7 access but that’s not a dealkiller if not), let me know!

I’ve been getting a ton of comment spam lately–so, it was time to turn on the “no comments go public until approved” switch. I’ll try to give timely approvals to new comments, sorry for the inconvenience.

There’s a nasty phpbb2 security hole, and one site on my server is running that (one I don’t control directly), and it’s been exploited by at least two different people (judging by IP address) already. You can do some pretty nasty stuff with this hole, to the point where if you have a buggy kernel (one for which there is a local unprivileged user->root exploit), you can get remote root. Blah. Fortunately the script kiddies weren’t that smart, never got past the inital stages. But… worrisome. I always trust my code over other peoples’, even though it’s got a lot fewer eyes on it. I’m just super paranoid about user input processing and handling…

In the meantime (until I figured out exactly what was happening, for sure) I also upgraded PHP to 4.3.9, and mod_ssl to 2.8.22, and Apache to the latest rev. Went pretty seamlessly, but I suspect when I want to do an openssl upgrade it’s going to break everything. Sigh. Too bad no support for RH7.3 anymore! Or, at least, too bad the dedicated box is 1,500 miles away and I can’t just sit at console and upgrade it to something newer…

I was looking for some old photoshop images I had made and stumbled across some pretty ancient stuff. Once upon a time I ran a BBS (or “bulletin board system” for those of you born post-1979) called “Tog Dog: the Evil Clown of Pork”. I apparently actually still have a DOS .com file advertising it (it would get zipped up into archives available for download.)
Here’s a “screenshot”:

Pretty funny: up to 28.8kbps, and a whopping 420 megs of storage (which if I recall correctly, was spread across 3 harddisks!)
The .com file is dated 4/1994, but I’m pretty sure that was just when it got copied onto the drive… I think the dialup site was pretty much dead by then.

Tags: nostalgia, software

(From Apple’s new iPod pages):

Slideshows Anywhere
Mesmerize friends and family with a glorious multimedia experience, offering them a breathtaking slideshow accompanied by the music you already have on your iPod Photo.

I don’t know about your friends and family, but I don’t think mine are going to be “mesmerized” by a 16-bit, 220×176, what, 2″ diagonal screen…? Breathtaking? Hmm.

My camera can do slideshows, hooked up to a TV, also. No music to accompany it (although I certainly can plug in my ipod to the tv at the same time). I dunno. It seems like a nice incremental add-on to the iPod, and how they’re actually getting an extra 3+ hours of playback time (I think my iPod claims 12 hrs, color ones 15) I don’t know… but that’s a nice improvement. Definitely not enough to plunk down another half-grand or so, though.

In fact, I typically take my laptop with me on trips where I’m likely to encounter a lot of family… and viewing photos on a 14.1″, 24-bit screen (or on TV–it’s got composite out), is easy there too. Actually, the 60GB iPod Photo costs $600–about the price of a really nice, used, or new entry-level laptop. But I guess you don’t get the pocket-able form factor: bad for typical mp3 usage, but I’d argue better for photo usage. I guess that’s the rub: is this device trying to do too much? For me, I think the answer is yes; but I think it’s likely to be a success, based on the reputation and cool-factor alone. Apple generally makes really well designed hardware and software… so I wish ‘em luck with it. It’s better than supporting a lot of the mediocre stuff so many other places put out!