omz13

Today, I had a few hours to spare, so I bit the bullet and upgraded WordPress to version 2.3.1, which brings me, your humble scribe and site administrator, a few benefits (and also hopefully a few less security holes, etc.). The main benefits being native tag support and an inbuilt editor that now works with Safari and not just IE. As the server is running gentoo it was a matter of typing a couple of lines into the bash shell and the upgrade was almost done… a quick visit into the admin pages to upgrade the database, and the site was up again. When I need to make a few behind the scenes tweaks, with 2.3 I can now use the Maintenance Mode plugin, so this was installed and activated whilst I did things like import the article tags from Ultimate Tag Warrior so that they are now managed by the native engine, and upgraded the theme from Copperleaf Plus 1.18 to Fluid Blue. I hope everybody likes the new theme and layout. I have tried to keep the layout nice and clean, and the first page has been greatly simplified.

Those who subscribe to this site using RSS will notice that articles now have a copyright banner and a link to the original article.This is all being done by a spiffy WordPress plug-in called FeedEntryHeader.How did I discover this wonderful plug-in? As ever, it came from one of the feeds that I read: Column2. In an article called Fun with feeds, Sandy talks about FeedEntryHeader, and refers back to an earlier article (on how her feed was abused) which explains why these things are sadly necessary.

You may have noticed that this site and email have been down for the past six days; This was sadly due to a combination of hardware failure and configuration fubars.
Last weekend the main (public services) server started experiencing hardware problems and kernel panics… so the cold-standby machine was switched on, data transferred, and everything seemed to be ok. Unfortunately the network configuration of the standby machine was toasted and it ended up not having a default gateway address… the net result was that the Internet-facing services that it provides (like: mail, rsync, and web hosting) were down. The bad new was that I had already left for Amstedam and couldn’t get back here to diagnose and fix things before now (a week later). The good news was that the diagnosis and fix took only a few minutes, and everything is back to normal.
So, although the disaster recovery system almost worked, it just goes to show that you getting things right is not so easy! Plus there is nothing quite like pulling the plug and starting up the DR system to check that it really does work. Unfortunately, due to the nature of the misconfiguration, it was hard to spot unless coming in from the Internet opposed to the local intranet (and this is one time when it would be handy to have a network reflector… shell access into a remote machine to then probe from outside is on the shopping list).
Next week I plan to order components to build a more resillant server infrastructure, which is a way of saying that I will, finally, be playing with mini-ITX boards and 19″ racks… given the rise in utility bills, I am also looking have a very energy-efficient system, and plan to write an article or two about this.

This little gem was emailed to me today. I thought that I would share it with y’alls.

It all began quite innocently. Last year I was doing a lot of travelling by train and I needed something to blast music into my ears, and I got an iPod Nano. That’s right, me, the dude who has been using Wintel machines for years got a bit of, albeit, consumer-related, Apple kit. And now, from that innocent Apple-related purchase I have now gone out and got a black MacBook. Yes folks, not the white one, but the uber-cool black one (which has the added benefit that the dirt doesn’t show up as easily). Of course, now that Apple have bumped the specs of their notebooks my local premier reseller was offering the old models at an exceptionally discounted price, and so were also the AppleCare and memory upgrade… the icing on the cake was it was also iDays at the store so I got a €100 gift voucher too.

So, what am I going to do with my new MacBook? Probably spend weeks getting used to OS X, which is a tad different from Windows and Genoo/Linux which are my usual environments :-) Eventually I plan to start developing software for the mac, so stay tuned to see what happens.

Well the storms have now hit us here in Luxembourg.

Here in the northern part of Luxembourg we’ve had two blackouts lasting about 95 minutes and 60 minutes… the duration was longer than we had contingency planning for, so the batteries in our UPS were exhausted and everything safly shutdown and came back on again when the juice returned. This is only the second time that we’ve experienced a long duration blackout that’s exhausted the batteries, but it does show you can never have too much UPS on tap.

Many roads in Luxembourg have been blocked either by falling trees or flooding as the local rivers and streams have burst their banks; as of one hour ago the local authorities are reporting 324 incidents! Fortunately the trees on our land still appear to be intact, and we’re over 100m higher than the local river so no need to worry about being flooded out.

The wind appears to be lessening, so I wonder what the view outside will be like on the morrow.

p.s. I’ve been thinking of installing my own power generator, and beefing up the UPS system, and the recent weather is making it more of a priority.

When I flicked th switch to only allow registered users to post comments to this site, I though that the amount of spam I would have to deal with would stop. And, in fact, it has. Its been great not to have to deal scanning through and deleting hundreds of spam comments.

But, now, I’m starting to see pingback and trackback spam instead. Groan. So now I’ve enabled askimet, a wonderful service provided by the folks behind wordpress (the software that manages this site) to help keep this out.

The first email SPAM to be received arrived 23 minutes and 44 seconds into the new year (and was automatically sent to /dev/nul).

The first bit of email SPAM to be received and get past the filters was 17 hours, 58 minutes, and 39 seconds into the new year.. it was a nice bit of pump-and-dump:

Get in right after the New Year.  Those in the know have begun picking up shares before the big announcement.  This is your chance to get in while there’s still time! 

Physicians Adult Daycare Inc. (PHYA) is at $1.65  right now on solid volume.  Once the news is out we will see this one going to $4.00 in the short-term with much higher gains in the long-term. 

Do not delay.  Read the recent news and you will see that PHYA is in a booming sector with huge negotiations on the table.  Has the big we can say is that PHYA where you want to be! 

Its at this point that I think more and more that the current email system is fundamentally broken… however, since too many people have a vested interest in making money off the curent system (by selling anti-spam filtering services, etc.) I doubt that 2007 will be the year that something is done about it, sigh.

Due to the overwhelming amount of spam now being submitted as comments (about 100 per day!), you must now register and login before you can comment… I can no longer justify the time I spent screening spam comments out and this seems to be the easiest way to keep the spam out without draining my time.

Sorry for the inconvienence, but blame the morons who think spam comments full of links to their dodgy products will actually result in people buying their crap, or phishing their information, etc. Also blame the search engines who use link counts as a popularity guage, which just encourages people to spam their links all over the place.

A few people noticed that this site and rsync was down over the weekend.

This was all due to trying to install a new secondary hard drive in the server… which necessitated powering off the sever… during which the primary hard drive decided to go phutt and failed to update its superblock on the ext3-based partition.

So when the server was powered-up, it was not happy at all, and attempts to restore the superblock failed. After several frustrating hours, involving taking a backup server from storage, commissioning it with a spaking new gentoo 2006.1 install, recovering data from the now read-only primary hard drive, getting the new secondary drive installed, and doing a lot of data recovery, things were back to normal.

When some spare time and some more hardware appears, we’ll be building a high-availability system… which will be interesting since we also want to make our cvsnt server high-availability too… watch this space for details.