fatvegan

I've been using RevealCloud for about four months and it's pretty sweet. I've been through a few server monitoring tools over the last 10 years and all of them tell me there's a problem with the site when it's too late to actually fix it with SSH. Mostly it's because I've let the disk fill up or there's a memory leak in Apache (or more often silly old lighttpd), so it's good to know about stuff starting to break. Which is just what RevealCloud does. It runs a little process and monitors stuff, sends it to their server (so you get nice graphs of that stuff) and sends you an email when certain things are outside boundaries you set up. It works extremely well. And so far I've had no false alarms, which is so terribly wonderful.

I've started turning off my other monitoring software (especially Monitis, which I was actually paying for).

In lieu of the highly successful hacking of my previous server, I've decided to completely turn off FTP on sprint.footboot.net. I've updated SFTP (which is file transfer over the properly secure SSH) access for everyone with an account.

That's only really going to affect these folks:

• alicecommunitygarden.org.au
• wikileaks.org.au
• thirddegree.org.au
• riffraff.org.au
• ayni.footboot.net
• oma-fiets.com.au
• skymoney.org.au
• riverssos.org.au

You folks will have to use FileZilla or some such that supports SFTP. I've also installed SSH2 support into PHP so that WordPress will let you update it automatically from the admin area using your same login details.

Now we have gone back to one server. Everything has moved to sprint.footboot.net. The old sub.footboot.net got a little hacked two weeks back and had to be permanently shutdown. I've been restoring everything from backups on that server since then. That's mainly thoughtfulfoods.org.au, ksa.org.au, and a few blogs. I'm still sorting out a few things. There was some stuff on there which hasn't been looked at in maybe a decade.

It seems that some versions of Mac OSX have some broken sparsebundle handling over AFP (Apple Filing Protocol). Time Machine uses sparsebundle's for backups. The consequence is that using Time Machine with a network-connected external hard disk (like the Netgear Stora) fails. I've spent a lot of time on various forums, reading Apple support articles and reading Netgear support articles. None of the suggestions helped, with the eventual exception of some vague advice to create the sparsebundle file manually. That advice, in fact, worked.

I did something a little like this.

1. Open Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility.
2. On your local hard drive, create a new disk image with a large Volume Size (200GB in my case), Volume Format 'Mac OS Exended (Journaled)', Partitions 'Apple Partition Map', Image Format 'sparse bundle disk image'
3. Find out the name of the sparsebundle the Time Machine wants using the Time Machine Buddy widget. Start a backup and watch the log when it fails.
4. Move the sparsebundle on your local hard drive to your network drive. If Time Machine is saying it can't create '/Volumes/sharepoint/MachineName_0023ef94d1fc.sparsebundle' then move the file there.
5. Try starting the Time Machine backup again. You may need to mount the sparsebundle image first.

My log before this process...

Starting standard backup
Mounted network destination using URL: afp://user@192.168.1.102/share
Backup destination mounted at path: /Volumes/share
Creating disk image /Volumes/share/MachineName_0023df97d1fc.sparsebundle
Error 45 creating backup disk image
Failed to create disk image 
Backup failed with error: 20
Ejected Time Machine network volume.

My log after it...

Mounted network destination using URL: afp://user@Stora._afpovertcp._tcp.local/share
Backup destination mounted at path: /Volumes/share
Disk image /Volumes/share/MachineName_0023df97d1fc.sparsebundle mounted at: /Volumes/200GB

Backing up to: /Volumes/200GB/Backups.backupdb
Event store UUIDs don't match for volume: Macintosh HD
Backup content size: 81.5 GB excluded items size: 9.7 MB for volume Macintosh HD
No pre-backup thinning needed: 97.80 GB requested (including padding), 197.78 GB available

Can't account for difference between IP URL in failed backup and Stora.afpovertcp.local URL in successful backup.

With Telstra Next G™ Wireless Broadband you plug in your modem and will be connected to the Internet through a simple registration process in just minutes. 2880 minutes to be exact. Registration requires you to call Telstra, wait in their 30 minute queue and authorise them to run a credit check which may take up to 48 hours.

Sad times for the server. As always, whenever I get out of SSH range the smurf.footboot.net server decides to crash itself. This time it did it for about two solid weeks. 70% uptime for the last month. Oh dear. I haven't figured out why it was so unhappy. Perhaps it just missed me and was looking for attention. I feel like our relationship is a little up and down. Sometimes I do wonder if we'd both be happier without each other. But I doubt we'll separate. We've been two long together now I think.

I'll do a bit of an apt-get upgrade. Might make things better. Could make things worse. We will see. I'm going away for another two weeks on Friday. Poor old smurf.

I bought a totally sweet Acer TravelMate 8200 for $330 from GraysOnline. It's got 2GB RAM with an Intel Core Duo 2GHZ. It's super quick. Even has a dual layer DVD burner and a 256MB ATI video card.

I just put Hardy Heron on it and it all worked fine. Except for the wireless, which required me to apt-get install linux-ubuntu-modules-.... The wireless light still doesn't come on with the wireless button, but it does turn the wireless on and off.

I'm not even going to bother dual-booting Windows XP on this laptop. That's partly because I'm so amazingly elite, but mostly because all I do on Windows is play Rome: Total War and it's hurting my social/love life.

I get this problem a lot.

perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
        LANGUAGE = (unset),
        LC_ALL = (unset),
        LANG = "en_AU.UTF-8"
    are supported and installed on your system.
perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C").
locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_MESSAGES to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory

I think possibly this solves it.

$ sudo apt-get install --reinstall language-pack-en

It says comforting things like...

Generating locales...
  en_AU.UTF-8... done
  en_BW.UTF-8... done

Update: Except it didn't work. But maybe this will.

$ sudo localedef -i en_AU -f UTF8 en_AU.utf8

I've disabled image hotlinking on the smurf server because I didn't know how to measure what bandwidth hotlinked images were consuming and I suspected they were using a lot. It shouldn't have any impact on anyone unless you're hotlinking images. If you don't know what hotlinking is, then you aren't doing it.

Using Lighttpd and FastCGI for Rails you can use Lighty's HTTP Authentication to "protect" an application. But the equivalent doesn't work with Apache 2. Putting the Apache authentication stuff in a <Directory> block will protect all the styles and scripts but no the application itself. You need to use a <Location> block for that.

<Location /*>
    AuthType Basic
    AuthName "Beta Testing"
    AuthUserFile /path/to/htpasswd
    Require valid-user
</Location>

It took me a while to figure this one out, because I'm totally unelite.

Section "Monitor"
  Identifier    "Dell 2408WFP"
  Option        "DPMS"
  HorizSync 30-83
  VertRefresh 56-75
EndSection

Section "Screen"
  Identifier    "Default Screen"
  Device        "ATI Technologies Inc RV380 [Radeon X600 (PCIE)]"
  Monitor       "Dell 2408WFP"
  Defaultdepth  24
  SubSection "Display"
    Modes       "1920x1200" "1280x1024" "1152x864"  "1024x768"  "832x624"   "800x600"   "640x480"
  EndSubSection
EndSection

xorg.conf

I've finally ditched lighttpd + fastcgi and replaced it with Apache on smurf. Lighttpd was good, but fastcgi was a total dog. It broke all the time and it got to the point that I didn't want to host my friends sites anymore. Every time I went on holidays fastcgi seemed to fall over and all the sites would be down for a day or three.

So I've gone back to the stable world of Apache, although not on the important server. In all the years I used Apache and mod_php it gave me no problems at all. A total rock. I was seduced by lighty's memory footprint, but I was a fool.

I'll move the other server over to Apache as well at some point, the one with Thoughtful Foods and KSAsub.. I thought rewriting all the configuration files was going to be a pain, but it was actually really quick. RewriteCondition with -f is bloody marvellous.

For my birthday, Anmol bought me the most amazing toaster I have ever seen. It has extra-wide slots and high-lifter. And guess what – it has crumpet control! The best invention since the toaster. Thanks Anmol.

Perhaps everyone else has already figured this out. You can't easily get music onto an iPod, but you can get it off. And, at least in Windows XP, it's pretty straight forward.

Go to the iPod_Control folder on the iPod and then do a search in Music for *.mp3 *.m4p etc. You can add Artist and Album to the columns of a search results. If you sort by those fields you can copy just the stuff you want. Move the files somewhere and then import them into iTunes. The ID3 tags should mean it doesn't matter that the files have weird code names. If you have iTunes managing your songs it will rename them for you.

I have moved all the WordPress blogs to my new server at SliceHost. The server is called smurf. I don't think I screwed up the database or left it out of sync or forgot to change the permissions for images. But we will see.

If things are going wrong, it's probably not your fault.

Since moving this blog to SliceHost the page load time has dropped from over a second to 100-200ms. Sweet. I don't even have the cache turned on anymore.

I'm in an internet coffee in Kompong Thom. My computer has a little sign.

AQUA The brand of new trend for high preference 2030 go.

I've installed WordPress MU on my happy little server. So if any of those footboot.net folks languishing on Movable Type want to move their blogs you should let me know. If you want some theme it's easy to throw it in there too. There are heaps of good themes for WordPress.

I'm started renting a dandy server in America for $13 a month. It's pretty sweet. Full root access. 128MB ram. 5GB hard disk space. More bandwidth than you can poke a stick at. I moved this blog there yesterday, and it took all of about 10 minutes. I might move more important things there if all goes well.

One of the fun things is that you can install any of about 15 different Linux servers onto it with a little click. I've already been through two versions of Ubuntu and a version of Debian vanilla. I'm thinking I'll stick with Ubuntu Dapper now though. Seems pretty sweet. Lighttpd is finally in the repositories.

I've finally managed to install ISPConfig for Debian 3.1 on OpenVZ when 128MB of RAM and 8MB of swap. It took many attempts, and the ISPConfig installer doesn't exactly make life easy.

The trick was to stop all the services on the machine before starting the installer. That includes all the services that ISPConfig needs you to have - bind, postfix, courier, apache, mysql. The installer will start Mysql without asking part way through the installation and you'll need to stop it reasonably quickly when that happens, because not long after there's some fairly memory intensive compilations. Make sure you don't make any mistakes with stuff like passphrases for the SSL certificate, because you'll have to start the whole thing again.

Eventually it will ask you for the name of your Mysql host. I started Mysql again and gave it the details it needed. From there it should install by itself happily.

I wasn't very optimistic after seeing the installer but the ISPConfig application itself is actually pretty sweet and well-made.