Every now and then I surf over to Verizon’s FiOS page to see what their latest speeds and rates are. It turns out that they have upped their speeds yet again, this time to either 50 mbs down / 25 mbs up or to a symmetrical 35mbs up/down. I love high upload speeds so I decided to upgrade from my 20/20 plan. The cool part is that this new plan is actually around $15 a month cheaper than my previous plan that was half the speed. Now I can run my Tor node at the same speed as my old plan and still have bandwidth to burn. Verizon may be doing some questionable things as a corporation by selling off their rural DSL lines, but I must say that I’ve never had a problem with my FiOS connection since after it was installed.
Computers, This Site
My area is suffering from snow and high winds, so power may not be very reliable at the moment. Although I am using my Deuce and a Half as a backup power system it can take some time to switch things over from regular house wiring to backup power. If the site goes down it is either in the process of having the power source switched or my internet connection has been physically separated.
Fun fun fun.
This Site
I’ve set the LAN Party link at the top of the page to redirect to a subdomain I just setup: party.sudoseth.com From now on this is where I will update changes to the roster, what games we will play, when, and where. If I get bored I might even add some web forms so that people can RSVP via the site itself.
Computers, This Site
lan, Party, Warcraft
I’ve made a new page on my blog for listing information about upcoming LAN parties. If you’re a friend send me an email with details (or otherwise contact me) and I can add the get-together to the list.
Computers, This Site
This is exactly why I backup as frequently as I do. During this entire process no data was lost.Yesterday my webserver starting acting very strangely. I attempted to upload some photos to my photo gallery. It would not let me create any new content, but I could still view all of my content that was already posted. I SSH’d into the server and found that my system load was at 280 (!!!) and growing by about 2 points per minute. I checked some logs and couldn’t really figure out what was going on. No process was showing a major increase in resource consumption and there were no signs of extra traffic. I tried to close out all of the terminal windows I had open, but two of them would not lose, no matter what I tried (killing processes, etc.). After 225 days of uptime, I figured I should just reboot the system.
I waited a few minutes but the system never came back online (not even enough for me to ping it). I waited untill about 10 minutes after I gave the shutdown command and then forcefully turned it off. I brought it into my room to work on it and plugged it into a monitor to see where the problem was (I usually run my servers headless). I turned on the power and… Read more…
Computers, This Site
Fail, MYSQL, server, ubuntu
I think the graph of my internet connection speeds over the past year speak for itself. FiOS is 10 times faster than my cable was, which was 12 times faster than my DSL, which was more than 2x the speed of dial-up. Other than the TERRIBLE instalation experience I had with FiOS, I love it. Once working properly Verizon’s fiber internet service is wonderful. I’ll be posting a writeup/rant about actually getting it working shotrly.
Side note: This site is now hosted on business FiOS on a 20×20 Mbs connection. The migration was successful.
Computers, This Site
I missed the screenshot for the bigg one-oh-oh, but the above screenshot gets the point accross. I personally like the easter egg that htop shows when you reach the 100 days of uptime. Notice the (!) to the right of the uptime readout. This is one of the many reasons I love linux…
Read more…
Computers, This Site
htop, server, uptime
Today marks the first time I have had a computer reach 100 days of uptime. This same system had once made it to 94 days of uptime, but I had to physically move the system to it’s current location. The above screenshot was taken a few minutes ago from my IPCOP firewall/router and demonstrates just how reliable linux can be. My webserver that is hosting all of my websites (and physically located imediately bellow my router) is on it’s 88th day of uptime. I’ll post again when my web server reaches it’s first 100 days of uptime as well. I wonder how much power it has consumed in those 100 days…
Computers, This Site
ipcop, linux, uptime
After several complaints from my family about not being able to access the local network file shares while I was playing video games on my computer, I decided to put all of my data onto the new server “DuckTape”, and move the website back to the old web server. This makes my family happy and really shouldn’t effect the website unless I get hit by digg, but even then it shouldn’t make that much of a difference.
What really prompted moving the hard drives over to the other computer was the fact that due to a hard reboot I lost all data contained on my RAID5 array. Apparently RAID5 is awsome at protecting data from hard drive failure but it absolutely sucks at dealing with power outages and the like. Luckily as a good sysadmin I keep regualr backups. After 17 hours of transfering 1.5TB of data onto a new RAID0 array on DuckTape, I was back in bussiness. The only thing that got lost from the failure was a small portion of an Ubuntu 8.10 Beta .ISO file that was only partaily done downlading when the backup was run. THIS is how easy it is to restore data when you KEEP UP TO DATE BACKUPS.
Computers, This Site
backup, RAID, server, ubuntu
The new quadcore parts have arrived and have been assembled. The new webserver is now running an Intel Q6600 Quad core with 4GB of DDR2 RAM. I took the liberty of overclocking by 25% from 2.4GHz to 3.00GHz. I have also transfered this site over to it already, so load times on this site should have decreased. This site should now be abble to withstand the Digg effect. Reliabilty for the next coupple of days is going to be a bit lower than I would like because I’m still in the process of transfering the domains. I’d like to be able to consolodate both of my sites onto one server, but so far I am having minimal luck with virtual servers in apache.
Computers, This Site
q6600, server, upgrade