May 2007 – Lefthandedlayup

I’ve always wanted to be a writer

Since I can remember. Which is why it was very difficult for me to make the decision to finally decide to forego contributing to the Philippine Daily Inquirer. Partly because I had been doing it off and on for five years, and partly because it is just time for me to do so.

Events of the past few months have seen my schedule reach toxic levels. Just last night I realized I was doing two different things on two computers, one of which was beside my bed as I lay down trying to keep from falling asleep. I did so anyway, and woke up at 1am and 3am to work on them even more. It has been that kind of busy for me for the better part of the last few months now, and I just cannot find the time anymore to do the necessary things to remain as such, which is primarily, attending events. Writing about these is easy enough, but all the necessary events and event – related stuff is just too much of a time – eater. Since I feel I cannot do a good enough job, I therefore feel it apt that this responsibility go to someone else. In my mind, someone younger and who’d jump at the chance to experience these, as I did when I started out.

And with that I close with finality an important chapter of my life. Mind you I’ve always known the time would come, and it’s one hundred percent clear to me that this is the best thing to do. I can’t say I don’t hope that others would feel the same, and sadly that is not the case. But having said that I wish they’d wish me the best as well, as I would always, always do for them.

Continue reading I’ve always wanted to be a writer

Server RAM Upgrade. Again.

From the server grease monkeys at my host:

Hi Gabriel, I logged into your server to investigate the problem and I’ve found that
you’re in dangerous territory concerning memory:
> root@exchange:~# free -m
> total used free shared buffers cached
> Mem: 256 250 5 0 0 1
> -/+ buffers/cache: 249 6
> Swap: 95 95 0
That shows you have 6MB of free RAM, but at some point you’ve exhausted
your entire SWAP Allocation (see last line). If the load had been any
greater, your server would have been killing processes (which would show
in /var/log/messages) in order to remain stable.

So to make the long story short, I had to buy 96mb. more RAM to handle the load. The load usually spikes around lunchtime, exactly when the office girls take a break to check out Kikay. I know that sounds funny, but it’s my best guess and historically, our stats support it. During weekends, hardly anyone views it, with less than ten views per hour. Then on weekdays, especially around noon, 30+ views per hour, viewing as much as 82 pages at the same time.

Continue reading Server RAM Upgrade. Again.

Trying to install USB NIC on PII Laptop (updated)

By a stroke of luck I managed to score a cheap, small and good condition IBM 600e, a PII with adequate horsepower for minor coding and quite importantly, writing. It’s got Xubuntu now, and I’ve found out a battery repack will cost approximately Php1,600 and I think it’ll be good to go. I won’t post the orig price because it’s just too ridiculously cheap.

Anyway, I bought a USB NIC for it, and am trying to deal with driver issues. Again, documenting here so I’ll remember. Here are the files contained in the Davicom driver for Linux 2.6:

dm9601.c
dm9601.h
Makefile
readme.txt

Continue reading Trying to install USB NIC on PII Laptop (updated)

Annoying WordPress Permalinks Error Since Server Move

Warning, highly techie post. All those looking for my usual touchy feely posts please move along now, nothing to see here. Just documenting a disaster of a Permalinks error on WordPress below, which I posted at the WordPress Forum. Posting it below again to document it, to help anyone who has to go through same and so I can keep a record of this sorta crap.

All my 2.1.3 wordpress sites, which had been around since wp 1.5, used to use the structure:
%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/
ever since a recent server host move, the sites have started to insist on the ff. structure:
/index.php/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/
Appending the ‘index.php’ to all my URLs is a complete disaster as I use the Click Counter by Ozh plugin to count my most clicked links. These all now go to 404 pages. I really wanna keep using this as it has been recording my hits since forever.
I tried putting it back to without the index.php but it doesn’t work out, resulting in errors.
PLease help!?

A Server To Move The World

Today’s the 3rd day after The Big Server Move And to those who don’t really know what I’m talking about, it’s the day I moved my domain Exchange.ph from just – barely – handling – it hosting at Mobilehive.com to hosting – for – the – big – boys Rimuhosting.com (I figured I had to explain that cause I read what I’ve written and realized I may have been fuzzy. Sorry about that, credit it to being overworked).

Ok here’s more details. Exchange.ph, due to the websites it contains (Kikay, Mom, Basketball, Mobile and Movie), was already suffering from extreme server loads, causing me to surpass my monthly download limits on a regular basis, sometimes 2x in one month. In total, the sites get up to 1,000 to 1,500 visits a day, averaging close to 30+ gb. a month worth of downloads. Actually, I wouldn’t know if that’s accurate, since everything stops when I hit 30gb. and any further requests would go to dev/null I presume.

I have documented (geeks like to document) most all my experience in The Big Move as I like to refer to it, in the past two posts. My main issues were importing my +-200mb. gz databases (each), the exporting and importing of which possibly developed a few white hairs, and causing me to actually get a zit on my forehead (that’s what happens when I get no sleep. Even back in high school.)

And now I can say with 90% surety that everything has gone well. Not bad for a first – timer, especially given the fact I had to do the whole thing six times over (because there are six sites total, including this). As a result I am now ready and far more confident that my sites are gonna do ok. No more 10 – 15 seconds to load a page. Kikay, by far the most popular, downloads in less than five seconds. I gotta tell you that is astounding. Well ok sure it can actually do better, but hey I think that’s pretty good at this stage, especially during the afternoons when an average 20 – 30 people are loading it at the same hour.

So what next?

Continue reading A Server To Move The World

Sunshine

Sunshine is a story about a group of scientists and astronauts sent out to space 50 years from now to fix the sun via exploding a bomb into it. First they have to get there of course, and no they don’t resort to doing it at night, so let’s get that old, old joke over with before you even start thinking it, and to those who wouldn’t have thought of it, my apologies, but consider my getting it over with as a favor to you just the same.

At any rate, the drama here is the actual getting there and ‘delivering the payload’, which we hear very often throughout the film. Cillian Murphy, the guy I suspect who’s gonna play the Joker in the next Batman series, plays a Physicist who has to decide if they should check out whatever happened to the first attempt 8 years before them, a similar ship named Icarus (theirs is Icarus II), whom they happen to discover mysteriously floating around in space – completely functional – along the way. These being the practical scientists that they are, they decide that two chances at exploding a bomb into the sun are better than one, and proceed to variate their mission into fetching it. But of course it turns out, as it often does, the mystery ship isn’t as innocent as they think, and it proceeds thereon to make their path that much harder as they go along their way.

Continue reading Sunshine

OpenDNS Rocks the Mike Right

John Roberts of OpenDNS was kind enough to drop by to educate my behind on OpenDNS’ ability to refresh their cache, and consequently pointed me to cache.opendns.com, where I found the culprit!

I cleared that out, and apparently only Kikay had that problem. Mom, Basketball, Movie and the rest were ok. After checking them all out, this is the page that says everything’s ok:

I gotta tell ya deleting that record had the same effect as stamping out a cockroach! Or deleting a virus that had a chance to propagate again once accessed.

Continue reading OpenDNS Rocks the Mike Right

Just a few quick thoughts before I hie off to ZZZ land

Day 2 of the big server move is highlighted by three issues.

Turns out php’s default 8mb allocation was the culprit when I was doing stuff like accessing wp-admin’s pages and it was returning white empty pages. I bumped it up to 16mb. and immediately, that wasn’t enough too. So I bumped it up to 24mb. and I haven’t heard a peep since.
Around this afternoon all the sites suddenly got MySQL errors of the highest order. Stuff I’ve never seen before, like tables loading but not fetching data (“mysql disappeared” messages) or the default “I cannot connect to the WP db are you sure your password / username is correct” sort of stuff, aside from getting bog slow after initially being lightning fast early on. After a quick support email it turned out the installed 160mb. RAM wasn’t enough to handle the load, and they offered me a 96mb. upgrade for a discounted extra $10.00 a month. I said YeeaAAayyy aLLelujaaaaAhh and they set it forth onto the server posthaste. Looks ok so far although I’ve received some complaints of slowness, so we’ll see.
Finally the biggest issue of all is DNS. And I mean 3rd party DNS and not my server DNS (thank God). After an hour or so of working on my sites, I try again and get 404 errors. After delving into it I realized I’ve been pointed back to my old server (!?!?!!). Yet another support email, and cause for alarm was raised, and they started asking me to check out stuff. After some settling down we both realized it was probably OpenDNS (which I use on my PC) maintaining an old record which pops up from time to time. Although I’m not particularly sure how and why that is, since I am dependent on that server it suddenly fetches the wrong record after the requisite 10 minute rotation. Now that is just plain weird. At any rate, the only solution is to just wait it out. I initially thought that it was some sort of failback issue, where it serves up a ‘second best’ record should the first one fail for some reason, but the tech support guys said DNS doesn’t work that way so that’s not it. I’m glad (although I was initially freaked) that it turns out the problem is confined to me. Which is freaky still in a way considering I’m it’s admin, and I’m the one having probs accessing it. Figures, right?

Anyway that’s it. I can’t keep my eyes open any longer. Tiring day, and the promise of another again tomorrow. Later then.

Today’s the Big Day

wish me luck!
update: as of 17:46 I’ve managed to upload everything, and finally changed the DNS entries to point to my new host. Although the recommended waiting period is 12 hours it should probably be ok before midnight. Meanwhile I’m gonna get a beer and rest a bit. That was a solid 8+ hours of work (off and on since 8am), delayed mostly by the length of time it takes to back up, transfer and activate my gargantuan databases. Crossing fingers.
update: woke up to work on it at 2am and at 4am, and finally 6am. By now, 835am, everything seems to be working normally. There were some issues with too little RAM allocated by php.ini. This did not allow some internal wp-admin pages to load, resulting in a white screen. I upped it to 16 which still wasn’t enough, and now to 24 and is now pending observation. LFTP’s mirroring was also not recursive, and did not migrate the directories write permissions, which is a drag, but not a complete disaster as there are only a few specific dirs that need tweaking. I needed to reload and re-cache my browser several times and reboot, and even removed the OpenDNS IPs which I use, then put them back again, and now finally I can see all the sites. Apparently I should have used rsync, but they (my host) put LFTP there for me so I thought that was the SOP. Anyway..

I’m really tired now. The sites look ok so far so I think I’ll go to sleep, after which I need to finish an article for SME Insight and get it in before lunch. I hope my editor doesn’t read this.

The last command I’ll enter, hopefully for awhile is:

ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/Asia/Manila /etc/localtime, which results in: Mon May 21 08:55:09 PHT 2007. Now to zzzz.

How I Moved Everything to Lefthandedlayup.com

If you entered Pisces-iscariot on your browser, or otherwise clicked a link going to Pisces-iscariot, please don’t adjust your sets. This is now my new blog, which I’ve moved to partly to separate my personal blog from the Exchange.ph domain and partly to practice the eventual migration of the Exchange.ph domain and subsequent websites to a new host.

So I’ve been busy practising a big move to a new server, and this is the first of many migrations I’m about to do in the next few days. Everything looks like it’s working fine now, so I’m pretty happy and hella relieved as well. Below is a shortlist of what I’d had to do to transfer Pisces-Iscariot blogposts, comments and pics lock stock and barrel to this brand spanking new one. This is so that I won’t forget when I have to do it again, with some extra details for whoever else might need the same information. Believe me I’d had to do a lot of groping in the dark (ie. searching in forums, sending tons of email to my host’s excellent support team, testing on my practice server, bugging the chief, etc.) to finally be able to do what I did, so if I’d have appeared extra nervous or cranky these past few days, now you know. At any rate this’ll help anyone who’d happen to be in the same boat I’d be happy. Read on:

Continue reading How I Moved Everything to Lefthandedlayup.com