Shelving trigger.cdo.linux.org.ph

I am officially bringing down my old tech blog after Holy Week. It has virtually become a sinkhole for all kinds of spam links and I have barely done anything to keep it up-to-date.

Two of the milestones that I've unknowingly and unwittingly accomplished would include (in order, sorry):

1. PR6 (yea, before it went offline for almost a month, and before Google deployed new algorithms sometime in Feb)

2. 20,453 spam comments since I replaced my Wordpress.com API key sometime in Nov, 2006.

Beginning today, I will post techie stuff in this blog. It's the same ol' renamed-a-hundred-times Blogger account, but with a different twist, now that it's using a personalized domain.

Fear not, for my old Blogger URI will still work. I'm just not sure if you will be redirected or if there will be a rewrite. TODO: find out how Blogger does this.

The rush that's called graduation

I sometimes wish it were me. But I'd rather have my daughter bask in her moment. It's just that I clearly remember the feeling. You're all bubbly and excited, and you can't stop talking about it. My daughter's graduating from preschool tomorrow, and my wife and I are as much into the rush as she is.

1st grade, here we come. *groan*

Will code for hosting

Honestly, I haven't done any coding in the last 4 months, which is really odd, because I never thought I'd be this detached from programming. But I guess there's more to life than just developing or sustaining passion for singulars. So much for trying not to stay generalist.

So I have this personal domain now, and I'm just glad google apps isn't as stiff with the applications anymore. The new interface totally rocks too. I just need to host the domain somewhere, for sites and blogs and stuff.

If you're family, and you have a blogger account, I can get you your custom domain working. The default blogspot.com publishing URL will redirect to your custom domain, so I guess you won't be losing any visitors.

I'm not that sure about this, but I feel that there will be noticeable changes in how your blog fares with SE's. Some SEO stuff that I've picked up tell me you can't have same content in multiple sites, similar to double-posting. Seems like you can get penalized for that. Question is, will the application of this redirecting exercise on blog a (that has already been indexed) be seen as same content with blog b (which is where blog a will redirect to, if and only if you decide on a custom domain), from a search engine's view?

Anyway, I need a host. :) Ironically, I handle dozens of hosts; but I can't get anywhere close to those (all dedicated servers..boohoohoo) without first coughing up lots of cash. Yea I suppose I could just code for it.

Pinoy Big Brother 2

Forget the housemates! Mariel Rodriguez makes this reality TV show "watchable". Half past midnight since the new season launched and the server is already borked! Good thing I got to grab this pic of Mariel before it went down (it seems to be failing intermittently...but what can you expect from an M$ OS anyway?)

Here's the error I see:

Could not load file or assembly 'BizModules.UltraPhotoGallery' or one of its dependencies. There is not enough space on the disk. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070070)

Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code.

Exception Details: System.IO.FileLoadException: Could not load file or assembly 'BizModules.UltraPhotoGallery' or one of its dependencies. There is not enough space on the disk. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070070)

Source Error:

An unhandled exception was generated during the execution of the current web request. Information regarding the origin and location of the exception can be identified using the exception stack trace below.

An assembly load trace and a very long stack trace follows. To cap that is this:

Version Information: Microsoft .NET Framework Version:2.0.50727.42; ASP.NET Version:2.0.50727.210

Cheers!

IP-hijacking and then some

Almost a month of downtime. The servers were fine, but our IP addresses were not. Somehow, a system bug from one of the hosting companies caused our plan to include 14 other IP addresses, and we only maintained 6 as far as I am concerned.

So the hosting company eventually understood what was happening and started asking the right questions. The bug is that the system allowed network administrators to assign to new clients, the IP addresses that have already been assigned to a current client.

We spent crazy hours figuring out what happened. Since the domains were not loading our sites, and instead were redirecting to some domains we don’t own (real bad sites btw), we checked if .htaccess was modified and tested if it was working at all. I also did double checks on virtual host configurations and they all looked clean.

I started thinking that it was a routing issue. We were not using the publicly routable IPs for the virtual hosts; instead, we used internal IPs as mapped to the firewall hardware. A lookup on the domain/s that we were being redirected to reported different IP addresses, which didn’t readily confirm my suspicions, but stressed the possibility of IP-hijacking.

It’s not supposed to be taken in the context of BGP (border gateway protocol), as this is beyond me. Instead, think of your assumption over IP addresses that we’re using, to serve your websites. Sounds clear? I hope it does. I got pretty lost myself and it isn’t after deep digging at the hosting company’s end that their errors became apparent.

So in the light of this realization, I’ve already moved the domains to some other hosting. Way too much work and way uncool.

Using symbolic links for MySQL data files

Over a year ago, we had several servers configured for high traffic websites. A mispartioning resulted in /var becoming obscenely small, and it was only after MySQL crashed that we remembered this. We couldn’t afford more downtime if we dealt with the partition size problem, so I thought of quickly moving the data files into /home/mysql/{dbname} from /var/lib/mysql/{dbname} and create the symlink /var/lib/mysql/{dbname} -> /home/mysql/{dbname}.

I was not certain of the performance implications to this. I heard from a fellow Linux junkie here that there may be a slight penalties in terms of access speed, since /home was meant for generic read/write, whereas /var was accessed in a very quick manner. Gotta verify this. But for now, I dwell in the power of symbolic links.