I was curious how much data I’ve had on my computer network over the span of its existence, so I decided to plug a few data points into open office in order to visualize it. This is what I came up with. I started when I got my first personal computer, a monster of a laptop that had dual hard drives, totaling 100GB of storage. I also had a 120GB external hard drive connected to my first Linux server, and then later attached a 160GB internal drive to it as well. Two 500 GB hard drives later I had a server crash, which caused me to lose just over 1TB of data. I jokingly refer to it as “The Great Server Crash of 2007″. Ever since then I always buy hard drives in pairs. One for actual data storage and the other for backup. If it hadn’t been for that crash, the trend line would actually be really accurate.
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Computers
Data, hard drive, server
It turns out that the power supply itself on the old server was not defective. The power cord was the cause of the problem. I plugged it into the wall with a different cable just to be absolutely sure… and it fired right up. I lost my “reliable” status, but I should have that back again within a few days. I’ve also upped my alocated bandwidth to a full 5 mb/s, so I’ll be helping out even more.
Computers
server, Tor
My Tor server just went offline(power supply failure). So much for the free Tor t-shirt 
I could probably repair the system, but it was made around 10 years ago. It’s served me well enough, but I’m not going to resuscitate it. On the downside, I now am basically required to build/purchase a new computer. I’m planning on using a Fit2 PC as the new Tor server, since it has more than enough CPU power for the job. All of my other spare systems are out of commission. Oh well.
Computers
Fail, server, Tor
I had some spare time today and decided to make use of my Cox internet connection while I still have it. Naturally the only thing to do with an unused connection was to put a Tor exit node on it 
The guide found at ubuntu-tutorials.com was very helpful. In short, simply use “apt-get install tor” to install the software and then edit /etc/tor/torc to change all the settings. It is required to give your endpoint a unique nickname. Read the config file and you’ll be fine. You can then use “sudo /etc/init.d/tor start” to start Tor and “tail -f /var/log/tor/log” to check the status.
If Apache is giving you trouble, or you should screw up the config files beyond recognition, it is possible to wipe Apache out completely and then re-install it. If you’re just playing around with the server this can save you a lot of time. The command to remove apache2 completely is “apt-get remove –purge apache2 apache2-common apache2-mpm-prefork apache2-utils ssl-cert” You can then reinstall apache using the default values with “apt-get install apache2″ It’s very simple once you know what some of the tricks are
Computers, How To
apache, Scripts, server, ubuntu
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 went to check on my server closet to see what would need to be reconfigured when I upgrade to fios. Keep in mind that this is the first time I have actually looked at the servers in about two weeks. Upon opening the door I noted some movement on my spare cable modem. “Oh %$@$” I thought to myself, since that is right next to my 900 watt UPS that powers my servers. Upon closer inspection I found that the cable modem was in fact full of eggs and ants. It’s amazing nothing had failed at this point. I quickly grabbed some ant posion and laid it in several inches in front of my ups as a peremeter, so hopefully they will leave the UPS alone.
Computers
Ants, server
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…
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Computers, This Site
htop, server, 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
I never really realized how cheap mainstream computer parts are now adays. After a bit of looking I’ve decided to go ahead and upgrade my web server to a Intel Q6600 with 4GB of ram, with the possible upgrade to 8GB. This only costs a little over $300. Parts list with links after the break.
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Computers, This Site
computer, new, server, system