Kenplaysviola

I recently upgraded my Dell Precision 690 at work from 2GB of memory to 8GB of memory. After installing the memory, my Red Hat 5 would not boot up the X server and present me with the typical login screen. I noticed that my mouse cursor was moving against a solid black background, and it was moving very slow and choppy. I was able to SSH into the machine from another machine and noticed that the xorg was running about 90% CPU! Doing an strace on the processor ID, I found that there was a SIGALRM loop! It turns out it is exactly this
Red Hat Bug.

There isn’t an official fix for this problem, but what worked for me was to download the most recent ATI drivers and install it. With the new ATI video drivers, all was well again. I figure that the same solution would be true for Nvidia users. I’m not sure why upgrading my system memory from 2GB to 8GB would affect the video performance, but somehow it did.

Drupal provides a nice framework to building a website. People always mention that “there’s a module for that!” when you need to implement some kind of feature for your website. For example, a photo gallery or forum. This is nice and dandy, but the problem becomes that a lot of these modules lack customization and options. They are designed by the module designer in mind and NOT for you, specifically. I constantly end up finding myself saying, “That’s almost what I want, but I would like to add this and this in this module.” Good luck! Hacking the custom module and figuring out how everything is put together takes more time than to simply just write my own PHP code to get the functionality that I want. Drupal also isn’t very smart about creating its own custom VIEWS (SQL queries). It’s a give and take situation, but so far Drupal has been a crappy experience. I find myself banging my head and thinking, “Shit, I should have just written this in PHP myself and ditch Drupal!”

Mozilla blew it with Thunderbird 3. Here are the new changes which really suck:
1) “Better” search. Do you really want to sit and wait for Mozilla to index all of your emails? The search is damn slow and opens up a new tab and is hard to sort. No thank you
2) Indexing. The indexing just plain ass sucks! Even when you go to Tools->Options->Advanced and uncheck the Global Search and Indexer, it’s still doing something in the background. I see that Thunderbird still wants to download my 200,000+ emails in the “All Mail” box. WHY!??!?
3) global-messages-db.sqlite. This file can get INFINITELY big as it is used for the indexing and searching, I believe. As an individual user, you might not care, but in an enterprise level these files will consume so much disk space. Mine was reaching over 200MB+ and growing. I just have to shut Thunderbird down and delete it. I believe disabling the Global Search and Indexer will stop this file from growing big, however, this is a PER USER option. Any other users logging in the same machine will have to do this themselves. What a pain!

In conclusion, Thunderbird 3 is a piece of crap. I also don’t like Outlook, so what mail clients are left to use?

I had been a slicehost.com customer for over 1-year. I was paying the $40 plan for 20GB of disk space, 200GB transfer, and 512MB of RAM. I recently switched to linode.com after investigating other Virtual Private Servers. For the same amount ($40), I am getting 32GB of disk space, 400GB transfer, and 720MB of RAM. Also, I get to choose an x86 or x64 of my OS choice!

Slicehost uses an AMD Opteron (4 processors) on their servers. Linode uses Intel Xeon 5520’s @ 2.27GHz (4 processors). I don’t have any objective benchmarks, but I am finding that my performance is much better on the Linode server. I host a Left4Dead game server on it and it runs well with up to 8-players. Perhaps it’s because I get more memory, or that the CPU is better, or that I am running a 32-bit OS instead of 64-bit. Maybe it’s all three! Whatever the primary reasons, I am getting more bang for my buck!

Slicehost’s data center is out in Missouri. Linode has 4 data centers up across the US (California, Texas, Georgia and New Jersey). Since I’m in California, my latency and response time has been very low! When I play on my Left4Dead server, I get around 13ms latency. When I was with Slicehost, I was getting about ~100ms.

Slicehost had really good uptime. It’s too early to tell with Linode, but so far the past month has had no problems.

Slicehost did have nice tutorials and a good community forum, however, if you are a competent Linux systems administrator then you should have no problems setting up your virtual private server. Linode does have a help section and a community forum area, but I did not explore it thoroughly as I was able to get myself up and running without the helps and FAQ’s.

If I had to do it all over again, I would have chosen Linode. I hope that Slicehost will be able to competitively compete with Linode in the near future.

Just to be absolutely clear, I am in no way represented by Slicehost or Linode. This is all from my own personal experience and opinions.

Great Thai food! Two people for lunch with two lemongrass iced tea drinks = ~$24. Definitely will eat here again.

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Pineapple and duck curry - $10.50

Pineapple and prawns fried rice - $8.50

A couple of weeks ago, I got presented with the message that NTLDR IS MISSING when booting up the operating system on one of our Windows Server 2003 machine. First, I suggest you check out http://tinyempire.com/notes/ntldrismissing.htm. Did all those methods fail? Then read on …

For me, none of the “obvious” solutions for NTLDR IS MISSING worked, despite all the Googling I did. It turns out that I had inadvertently marked the wrong drive letter as the active partition, which Windows will now make as the bootable drive letter. When I popped in my Windows recovery CD, the drive letters were reversed. C: => D:, and D: => C:. That’s why my OS wouldn’t boot. The only way to flip the drive letters back while preserving data was to do a parallel install of Windows WITHOUT formatting or overwriting the old Windows. After you boot into your 2nd Windows OS, just go to the disk manager and right-click the REAL C: drive with the c:\windows on it, and mark that as the ACTIVE partition. Go ahead and reboot and all should be back to normal. C: => C:, and D: => D:.

Upon walking to work, I see another one of the giant inflatable rat! This time it’s some construction workers protesting about unfair pay, or something like that. This was on Center St and Shattuck Ave in Berkeley, CA.

rundll32 printui.dll,PrintUIEntry /in /n\\printservername\printersharename

The above command in Windows Server 2008 will allow you to add a shared printer. Pop this command in a batch file and put this on your machine’s local start up folder (c:\program data\microsoft\windows\start menu\programs\startup). Anyone who logs in with the appropriate printer share permissions will get the printer automatically mapped with their account. You could also put this in your start up scripts in group policy for your domain.

PandoraFMS is an open-source systems and network monitoring tool created by some Spanish folks with typos on their website. Sounds great! So why do I hate it? Because I can’t install it. Let’s go through my hoops.

1) Their newest 2.1 virtual image for VMware doesn’t work with VMware ESX 3.5. It doesn’t recognize it so it is worthless.
2) Their Perl CPAN requirements cannot be met with Fedora 10. Fedora10, which plain out sucks already for me, couldn’t even use CPAN. Some weird errors. Fedora 10 fails again!
3) I switched to ubuntu 8.10 x64. Everything goes well until I try to install the CPAN Net::Traceroute::PurePerl. Again, some more obscure errors pointing me to some stupid stats site.
So what the hell does the below mean? I have no idea. Good luck.
——–
cpan[1]> reports AHOYING/Net-Traceroute-PurePerl-0.10.tar.gz
CPAN: Storable loaded ok (v2.18)
Going to read /root/.cpan/Metadata
Database was generated on Wed, 15 Apr 2009 19:29:03 GMT
CPAN: YAML loaded ok (v0.68)
Going to read 33 yaml files from /root/.cpan/build/
CPAN: Time::HiRes loaded ok (v1.9719)
………………………………………………………………….DONERestored the state of 33 (in 0.2969 secs)
Distribution: A/AH/AHOYING/Net-Traceroute-PurePerl-0.10.tar.gz
CPAN: CPAN::DistnameInfo loaded ok (v0.07)
CPAN: LWP loaded ok (v5.812)
CPAN: File::Temp loaded ok (v0.21)
Fetching ‘http://www.cpantesters.org/show/Net-Traceroute-PurePerl.yaml’…DONE

0.10:
+PASS 5.8.8 on Linux 2.6.16.14 (x86_64-linux-thread-multi-ld)
+PASS 5.9.5 on Darwin 8.10.1 (darwin-2level)
+PASS 5.8.8 on Openbsd 3.5 (OpenBSD.i386-openbsd)
+PASS 5.6.2 on Linux 2.4.27-3-686 (i686-linux)
+PASS 5.9.5 on Netbsd 2.1.0_stable (alpha-netbsd)
+PASS 5.9.5 on Solaris 2.9 (sun4-solaris)
+PASS 5.8.6 on Freebsd 5.4-release (i386-freebsd-64int)
+PASS 5.8.8 on Linux 2.6.20-gentoo-r6 (i686-linux)
UNKNOWN 5.10.0 on Linux 2.6.22.10 (x86_64-linux-thread-multi-ld)
+PASS 5.11.0 patch 33684 on Darwin 8.10.0 (darwin-thread-multi-64int-2level)
UNKNOWN 5.8.8 patch 33662 on Freebsd 6.1-release-p23 (i386-freebsd)
UNKNOWN 5.8.1 on Darwin 7.9.0 (darwin-2level)
+PASS 5.10.0 patch 33921 on Darwin 8.10.0 (darwin-thread-multi-64int-2level)
UNKNOWN 5.10.0 patch 34065 on Darwin 8.10.0 (darwin-thread-multi-64int-2level) UNKNOWN 5.10.0 on Freebsd 6.1-release (i386-freebsd)
+PASS 5.6.2 on Freebsd 6.1-release (i386-freebsd)
UNKNOWN 5.10.0 on Solaris 2.9 (sun4-solaris)
+PASS 5.10.0 on Freebsd 6.1-release (i386-freebsd-thread-multi)
+PASS 5.8.8 on Freebsd 6.1-release (i386-freebsd-thread-multi)
UNKNOWN 5.8.8 on Freebsd 6.1-release (i386-freebsd-64int)
UNKNOWN 5.10.0 on Linux 2.6.24.3 (i686-linux)
+PASS 5.8.8 patch 34327 on Darwin 8.10.0 (darwin-thread-multi-64int-2level)
UNKNOWN 5.8.8 on Linux 2.6.24.3 (i686-linux)
UNKNOWN 5.11.0 patch 34383 on Linux 2.6.26.5 (i686-linux)
UNKNOWN 5.10.0 on Linux 2.6.26.5 (i686-linux)
UNKNOWN 5.8.8 on Linux 2.6.26.5 (i686-linux)
UNKNOWN 5.11.0 patch 34435 on Linux 2.6.26.5 (i686-linux)
UNKNOWN 5.8.9 on Freebsd 7.0-release (amd64-freebsd)
UNKNOWN 5.8.8 on Freebsd 7.0-release (amd64-freebsd)
UNKNOWN 5.10.0 on Linux 2.6.24-etchnhalf.1-amd64 (x86_64-linux-thread-multi-ld)
+PASS 5.8.8 on Linux 2.6.18.3 (i486-linux-gnu-thread-multi)
+PASS 5.8.9 on Linux 2.6.21.5-smp (i686-linux-thread-multi-64int-ld)
UNKNOWN 5.10.0 on Linux 2.6.26-1-amd64 (x86_64-linux-thread-multi-ld)
See http://www.cpantesters.org/show/Net-Traceroute-PurePerl.html for details
——
So why would I even remotely think about purchasing PandoraFMS Enterprise if I can’t even get the open-source version working? Time to check out Zabbix