Linux Hosted
Over the weekend with some holiday time I’ve been back to my home town for a little break from city life. I went back Thursday night and came back to Birmingham very late monday night/early Tuesday. I was late as I had randomly ended up in Leicester with one of my good friends and we had gone to see Alice in Wonderland, which was pretty good.
It had been quite an eventful but great weekend, saw the family and friends, witnessed a car crash in which the offending party hopped up and drove off and moved my website to my linux host. I’m trying to make room for another server so I’m consolidating various services so I can free up an IP address but a new virtual machine running exchange2010.
The move didn’t go as smoothly as I had planned, the application I used to create a dump of the DB has filled it with random text doubling the file size and caused lots of issues when I went to load it up. I instead reverted back to using MySQLDump on the Windows command line console.
Didn’t have many issues with the new setup, Apache 2.0 didn’t like the previous .htaccess and reported an “Internal Error Page” was quite annoying as I didn’t know what was going on until I checked the logs. After loading up the proper .htaccess file I just needed to enable mod_rewrite using the following command.
a2enmode rewrite
I’m pretty happy everything is working now, one thing that did annoy me running WordPress in ISS 6.0 is that the WordPress iPhone apps did not work but now that do as I’m back on linux so look out for a few more picture uploads.
Just one more site to move and I should be able to setup Exchange2010.
Up To Date
I’ve just done the rounds installing all of the various updates to wordpress and its plugins. I manage two main wordpress installs and a couple of others that are not currently in full operation but they still get updated. Now everything is fully up to date and secure on WordPress 2.9.2 and it didn’t even that that long. I can really notice a difference on this site since I’ve moved it to its own server rather than using my reseller package. Looks like I’ll be moving the rest from the reseller package.
70202
I’ve just spend the last 15 minutes looking at how to setup the VOIP buttons on my Logitech MX3200 keyboard. It has a nice green phone button for answering calls but at the moment its not working.
Not had much look to be honest with various forum posts from 2007 saying click here to which I find that the website has been moved or no longer hosted. Anyway I did come across a post that told me how to display the character count on the front panel of keyboard. At the start of this post it was 70202 but now appears to be 72922. Thats alot of key presses. What a useless but awesome bit of information.
Back to fixing these VOIP buttons.
Placement – Going Great!
Well I am currently sat next to the rack at Bluesquare. I’ve finished my list of jobs in which I have had a couple of setbacks. Mainly that one of the server’s hard drives pretended to die while I was here. Just waiting to make sure the raid array sorts its self out and I don’t have to replace the drive, so I thought I’d do something constructive and write a post on my placement so far.
I’m at Bluesquare today installing a server that died over xmas. It was a weird one. The server’s motherboard had died, it lost its network ports a while back but it has finally given up. It took a memory stick and two hard drives with it. The memory stick was a new one for me, I had never seen a duff memory stick before but the hard drives where a common model to fail so they are no surprise. Also xmas a dual (supposedly redundant) power supply also failed in another server. That was a quick fix and I replaced it when I was here last. Although two other servers were complaining about losing power supplies, I’ve had to replace 3 PSU modules now.
Today has been a long day, I arrived at about 10am (Note to self: Destroy the satnav) it’s about 6.30pm now. I installed the server this morning which took about 2 hours as I had picked up the wrong rack rails. They are not compatible with the server case. The holes on the rail are too small for the screw holes on the case. I thought this was all standardised but obviously not.
We’ve had quite a lot of hardware failures lately including a cisco switch. I’m taking it back to HQ to investigate it more but it is sending scrambled text over the console connection.
Update: I didn’t post this on the day so it’s a little delayed. Also back at HQ the cisco switch weirdly fixed it’s self :/ *Scratches head*
A Sign Of Speeds To Come!
Just been reading a few interesting blog posts on BT Infinity and as a networking student quite excited of the speeds BT could be selling. Soon to be available but only in some areas of course BT are offering 40Mb download and 10Mb upload speeds (here). I’ve thought for a long time that ISP’s need to be increasing uploads speeds. It make sense. So many people are now uploading digital content to sites like YouTube and Facebook. Although they can download websites super fast uploading those pictures from the night before can take hours! Virgin Media have said to be testing a 200Mb package but seem to have run in to issues when finding a domestic router that can handle these speeds.
Although I would be very happy to have a 200Mb connection to the outside world I have to wonder if I’d actually use it. There are little or no services that would max out that connection or even use a substantial amount, it does open up a whole new doorway though as services and websites once bogged down by slow Internet speeds could benefit drastically. COD6 / Xbox live comes to mind as IW has dropped dedicated server support for the latest COD. I suppose I could quickly find a certain protocol to max out the connection.
I think a lot of business with lots of users would benefit from these speeds. As the connection is shared and they’d be able to host quite a lot of services internally. Instead of having to pay and arm and a leg for a leased line which sometimes isn’t all that fast or even data centre space which is quite expensive.
Xtreamer, No More Issues
I’ve noticed over the weekend that since I fitted the add-on cooler to the Xtreamer I have not been having any issues as I had described when I first purchased the little media streamer. This is quite awesome as I did start to wonder if I had just wasted £109 on a new heater.
The only issue I have come across is when I replaced the router with my D-Link Dir-655 as the old router had started to randomly drop the connection to the Internet. The dir-655 was setup as an access point for the Xtreamer on Wireless-N to get the best speed streaming downstairs to the TV. When I came to swap the routers I completely reset the d-link to factory settings. I suspect I didn’t setup the wireless on the same settings as before as now the Xtreamer fails to connect to the Wireless-N network and get an IP address. However the old router which is Wireless-G still has some life in it to act as a access-point for the Xtreamer. The laptops are on the Wireless-N network which keeps the airways clear enough for the Xtreamer to stream HD surprisingly!
One day I’ll end up fixing it as it was connected to the d-link but if it isn’t broken don’t fix it. Right?
