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).

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 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>

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.

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'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.

My server is a very strange fellow. At 6:26 on some mornings the web servers stops and has to be restarted. I wrote a thingy to check it and restart whenever it needed it, and I started to notice that it happened at exactly 6:26. It isn't every morning. But sometimes it is several mornings in a row. But since it's only once a day I guess it isn't the end of the world. I'm trying to think what one minute a day of downtime does to the to the implicit SLA I have with blogfeed readers and bloggers.

footboot.net is broken because its zone file got broken by someone. It may broke for the next day, or less if your machine updates the DNS things quicker.