Archive for the ‘Tech’ Category

I’m currently in the process of testing out the new Worfolk Online Backup System which will automatically back up the sites in the network. It’s taken quite a bit of development but hopefully it should all come together now and it’s reasonable swish.

It supports daily, weekly and monthly backups all of which is done automatically. The system goes through the lists of sites and sends a request to cPanel to package everything up nicely so it can be easily restored in case of emergency. It also sends cPanel details of my off-site FTP server (the one I have here at Burchett Place) so cPanel can directly upload the backup via FTP.

Then later on the system logs in to my FTP servers and validates that the backup has been generated and logs the filename that has been generated. It then logs said status. You can then access the web based control panel, check to make sure everything is working via the log and see what backups are available for each site and download them if you wish.

I was reading a topic on Cozy Campus (an adult webmaster forum) earlier today about the gossip blog PerezHilton.com.

Standard ad (150×200):

One week: $9,000
One month: $30,000

Hi rise (150×600)

One week: $16,000
One month: $44.000

And before you say, “Yeah, but how many of those ads is the selling at those prices?”, take a look at his site and count them.

I count 15 standard size ads and 5 hi rise.

That’s over half a million dollars a month. I always said there was qood money in gossip blogs.

I’m currently trying to report an issue with my VPS. I can’t though because ServInt’s support site is down.

Seriously, why is it so hard to find a reliable host?

I was moving away from PowerVPS as I’ve had a few problems with them recently including hostnames and root passwords mysteriously changing in the middle of my trying to set up my new VPS. But I’m not getting any further with ServInt. Bare in mind that these are the two most well respected VPS companies in existence. So it’s hard to draw any conclusion other than than I am cursed.

Consider some of the fun problems we’re currently tackling. Most of the websites in the network use nsx.mazedev.com as their nameservers. These are registered with the domain registrar and so are seperate to the server which hosts mazedev.com itself. Yet if you take that server offline, all domains that are not .com or .net (such as .co.uk, .info and .org) stop resolving. Yep, get your head around that one.

Meanwhile I still can’t get any work on my project done, run my website backups or generally access anything at Burchett Place because of our connectivity issues. The replacement modem was supposed to arrive today, after all I ordered it middle of last week and payed for next day delivery. It hasn’t turned up. I can’t phone City Link because eBuyer haven’t given me a consignment number and I can’t phone eBuyer because they are closed for new year.

This results in me not being able to go home and do some revision because I need to be here with internet access to resolve these issues I am having with all the websites which is now starting to cost me lots of money, money which I don’t have. Still, who really wanted a degree anyway?

Many people are probably in bed by now.

After all it’s 1am on Christmas Day morning.

Of course most people didn’t have to drag their ass out of their nice warm bedroom at 11pm Christmas Eve to go spend 2 hours trying to bring the internet back online so that they could get on with doing some of their final year project for their degree which requires remote access.

As it turns out, I’m not in this group of most people. Nor have I actually got anywhere with the time I’ve spent unless you class ensuring I don’t get enough sleep before getting up tomorrow as getting somewhere. Personally, I don’t. But maybe I should as it would ensure far more victories in life for me.

So there is some quality time down the drain now it’s just a case of waiting to see how much money goes down the drain as well. Of course that’s a joke – it’s going to cost far more of my valuable time to sort it out than has been taken up so far. Happy holidays everyone.

On a morning I wake up and flip open the laptop screen. I VNC into my desktop and turn off the movie I had playing last night. To take myself up I turn on some rock music at a decent volume. I then proceed to check my email, check Facebook and get a few other jobs done.

The problem is, where do I go from here. If I’m getting up at a decent time it’s still gloomy outside and I need to turn a light on. But this requires getting out of bed before I really want to. I then need to get dressed too.

With all our advanced wireless technology I feel these are problems I shouldn’t have to deal with. How can I further automate mornings so I don’t have to deal with them by getting out of bed? USB desk light perhaps? Do they make ones you can control from your desktop? That would solve step one. Now I just need some kind of robot…

My server has been suffering quite a lot of downtime recently which on top of the less of revenue and amount of hours I have had to spend fixing it rather than doing uni work has had a far more important consequence – I have been unable to rant on my blog!

In order to solve this sites are getting moved around to new servers including my personal site which is now located on Jennifer.

Having read Kieran’s post which in turn leads on to Dan Zambonini’s post about which programming language gets you most sex it got me thinking. While it does, as Dan correctly points out, vary from situation to situation, you really don’t seem to be able to go wrong with Dot Net.

Think about it. People like myself and George we’re Python FTW. I generally use Python for my “real” programming projects (generally I just script so something that runs on my desktop is rare :p) because it’s fast. Just like me in the bedroom. While I doubt the same is true for George we both share the commonality of singledom. Admittedly George fairs much better than my own barron wasteland of a romantic life but bare with me.

How about say Kieran and Raby? Well Mr. O’Shea sold his soul to X-Lab for the summer writing in Dot Net (because secretly he’s just a big Microsoft fan boy :D) and is currently in a long term relationship with Heather that has gone as far as mystery weekends away so you know it’s serious. Meanwhile Raby is currently working for a year at CSC who code a lot in Dot Net after doing a summer intership of C#. The result? No shortage of ladies. Let’s just say, the girl in his profile pic isn’t his girlfriend ;).

Lessons learned? Getting laid starts with the Dot Net framework ;).

Having given up on getting my £25 KVM switch working I then spent more than double that on getting a new and better one. Does it work? Of course not.

It all plugged in file and seemed to work. The lights light up on the front when I eventually got it plugged in (it look me hours as I had to go to the Riley Smith Hall to reclaim a multi-socket) but when I began typing I noticed that it was dropping key strokes.

Try and write a sentence when connected to a Belkin KVM. You’ll have trouble. 20% of the letters will be missing. What are you supposed to do with that?

It also suffers from Windows thinking you are connecting and disconnecting hardware each time and making annoying noises because of it as well as failing to do whatever it does with regards to my Razer software that normally appears in the system tray. Oh it doesn’t work with half of my function keys just in case I wanted to use them which I will when I get back into WoW too.

I called Belkin and they said what they always say. Try rebooting your machine. Genius. That is what you get for employing non-English speaking idiots in your call centres. They said check if the keyboard was recognised by the BIOS when in the KVM which it was as it obviously was when I plugged it in or it wouldn’t have booted. It was still dropping keys though. They had given me a reference number to ring them back on though. So I did. “Belkin is closed” said the automated voice on the line.

Is anyone else having problems with Facebook’s AJAX? Not that it isn’t working and this doesn’t just apply to the AJAX, it applies to pages as well but you can’t just click refresh with AJAX, the point is, I end up on clicking things like event confirmations and poke back links and the AJAX isn’t loading in the details, presumably because it lost the connection with the web server. As previously mentioned this is a much bigger problem compared with normal pages when you can just click refresh. Generally though, I just think Facebook’s servers have been a little unresponsive lately.

Aztec is now in bits on my floor having had the floppy drive taken out of it. I plug it into Olmec and boot up this time using my Ubuntu Server 7.10 alternative install CD in it. It goes through the normal stages. I manage to find a floppy disk, stick it in my desktop, stick my USB pen in the desktop and copy the driver over to the floppy disk. I then take the floppy disk out and put it in the floppy drive now attached to Olmec. Meanwhile Olmec decides it can’t find any hard drives and asks me if I want to load a driver. I say yes and trawl down to the bottom of the big list of drivers it gives me to inform it that the driver isn’t on there. It then attempts to load from the floppy drive but in fact just stops with a blank blue screen at this point.

I’d actually given up on it loading and started blogging when I suddenly got a message saying it had failed to load any drivers from the floppy disk. It wasn’t like I was being impatient – we’re talking a 10-15 minute wait here. I tried it twice with no luck. I also tried loading the HighPoint drivers that come with Ubuntu (though not for my RAID card) with no luck.

Next plan – I insert the CD into my desktop and the floppy drive so that the setup program can create a Windows driver disk. I’m sceptical about doing this on an XP box for a Windows Server 2003 install but it doesn’t seem to make a difference as the program will create drivers for any OS including Linux distros and only had one option that seems to cover all versions of Windows. Except that now Windows can’t read my floppy. It says it isn’t formatted. Even though it was when I copied the file over 30 minutes earlier. Even worse, it says it can’t format the disk now.

I install a fresh floppy disk and this time Windows reads it. The CD however can’t. It just brings up an I/O error message. I insert the original disk and Windows brings up a formatting box. But then gives me a nerror saying it was unable to complete the format. I take the original disk out and but the second one back in. Having re-launched the HighPoint software it allows me to continue this time. It also appears to complete successfully.

Turns out the floppy drive in Olmec wasn’t actually working. I manage to get it working and go back to Ubuntu. This time Ubuntu detects it. But instead of loading the driver as it should have done it decides that the floppy disk is a hard drive and suggests I partition it to install Ubuntu onto. I eventually find a way round this but Ubuntu then just says there aren’t any drivers and refuses to do anything.

Back to Windows. I get as far as it asking me to load the extra drivers and insert the floppy disk in. It can’t find them. I try it again and suddenly it can find them. It finally picks up my hard drive and begins partitioning and then installing Windows. Finally we might be getting somewhere.