VMWare 1.0.5 Server patch for 2.6.25 kernel – April 18, 2008 (read more)
Maintenance Update – April 05, 2008
I had hoped that this blog would be used for more interesting things other than outage reports, but so far, that hasn't happened.
This morning a circuit breaker blew at the ISP, causing one of the servers (containing one customer) to go down for 30 minutes. The power switches are probably going to be reorganized today, and all of the servers might be rebooted at some point, not exactly sure what the status is at this point. If that outage occurs, it should be for a minute or two for the affected servers.
The good news is that the last outage was in August of 2006, so we are doing pretty well. I recently discovered a company that is reporting statistics on the uptime of our first server, so that is kind of neat. They don't appear to check very often, so I am not sure if the statistics can be counted as that accurate, but for now, having them report 100% uptime shows that I am not making it up.
LifeType 1.2.7 released – March 31, 2008 (read more)
After a slightly hectic day yesterday, when I noticed some strange behavior on one of my servers, we released a new version of LifeType. While I am not impressed that the bug existed in the first place, I think it is pretty neat that a development fixed was released within 4 hours of the bug being discovered, and an official release within 36 hours. The last time we had a security issue, we released the fix in less than 24 hours, but it is harder on a Sunday.
The security issue itself wasn't all that interesting - we were checking a blacklist in a case-sensitive manner, and so filename.PHP was incorrectly allowed to be uploaded, and filename.php was correctly blocked.
Debian Installed Relatively Painlessly on my Sony Laptop – March 28, 2008 (read more)
I am sure this will excite many of our normal readers, but I have finally (after four years) switched my laptop to Linux. Now that I am using it everyday, it is much nicer to be in this environment, instead of having putty windows all over the place. Perhaps if I had a better window manager for windows, I would have been alright, but anyway...
I have a Sony PCG-V505DC2 for those search engines to help other folks trying to figure out any issues with installing Linux, and Debian specifically.
Note to Self – March 21, 2008 (read more)
When a customer says that he has a smaller project than the one I just did, don't pay attention, and think about the quote, rather than simply estimating the time as less than the previous project.
Yesterday, I did a project for a friend (one who let me have better access than average to the real estate listings) and it took an hour and a half and was 107 lines of code. He wanted to pay for that one, but I thought it was a fair exchange for getting the real estate listing access.
Today, I did a "smaller" project, that was 367 lines of code, and it took 3.5 hours. Hrm.
Parcel ID parser – March 18, 2008 (read more)
I don't know if it is only relevant to Allegheny County or if it is more universal, but a friend asked me to write a parcel id (parcel/block/lot) parser to help him out in his real estate searches. It was kind of a fun project (3 hours) and it was neat to see how well it worked out in the end.
It takes stuff on the right, and turns it into the stuff on the left:
0318-C-00080-0000-00 <= 318 C 0800387-S-00002-0000-00 <= 387-S-2 387-M-148
0160-K-00013-0000-00 <= 0160-K-00013-0000-00
0124-P-00095-000A-00 <= 0124-p-00095-000a-00
1213-F-00377-0000-00 <= 1213F00377
0180-B-00041-0000-00 <= 0180-B-00041-0000-00
0495-F-00201-0000-00 <= Lot & Block 495-F-201
0009-S-00305-0000-00 <= 9-S-305
0309-D-00100-0000-00 <= 0309D00100000000
Code follows below:
Perl Debugging – January 17, 2008 (read more)
Our photo album wouldn't publish on this last update, and it took quite a while to figure out what the problem was.
VPNC / Resolvconf / Set search string – January 15, 2008 (read more)
I found what I would call a bug in resolvconf today, though probably most people don't run a VPN server like I wanted to, so no one ever noticed before.
Bandwidth Limits Removed – December 14, 2007
I discovered only yesterday (despite suspicions for a month or two) that when the network was switched a while ago, bandwidth caps had been placed by our ISP. They have been removed, and I was able to hit 80Mbps incoming and outgoing - I don't have a faster connection anywhere else with which to test it. But, for those of you who had noticed the previous 1Mbps cap and not complained, or figured it was your connection, you can be happier now. By the way, this announcement blog has been less useful than I originally imagined, so I doubt there are many folks that read it, but perhaps as the business grows, there will be more information here.
I also suppose it is a good thing that there aren't more announcements here. It has been over a year since our last outage announcement, and there haven't been any unplanned outages in that time. I rebooted a couple times last Saturday to upgrade the kernels and the network, so all of our customers would have seen a couple minutes of outage, and a couple customers would have seen a twenty minute outage (one machine decided to do a file system check during one of the reboots, causing it to take a long time to reboot). I am not particularly happy about that, and most of the customers only saw a couple minutes of outage this year, so it is a lot better than a lot of other hosting places I hear about (and gain customers from).
Fun with Spam – December 13, 2007 (read more)
I have been getting a bunch of spam through my contact form over the last couple of days, so I thought I would check out what they are trying to do. The domain's contact information is protected by privacyprotect.org, so we can't know who they are, though I filled out a form showing them their customer is a spammer, we'll see if they actually do give me the contact information or not.