Steve Dougherty's Blog

The power outage made for a very interesting problem. I had inadvertently broken PHP by turning on compression in php.ini when apparently I wasn’t supposed to. This was back when I was trying to get the WordPress compression working. I didn’t know PHP’s configuration wasn’t working until the server was forced to reboot due to the power outage. The initial problem was that the server was not set to turn back on automatically after power loss, which I had set intentionally fearing damage if it attempted to turn on during a brownout, but perhaps I should enable that ability. Even once it turned on, after a fsck (over 330 or so days of uptime I think) it hanged on setting the clock and needed a hard reboot, which necessitated that I go over to the server physically and reboot it. Before this I set the DNS entries to my dad’s house so that I could display an explanation of what had happened, and I changed my password for my DNS service as it had gone too long without being reset, and subsequently forgot to correct it in the call to the update script. I managed to get the DNS fixed, then I found PHP was broken, then in the course of my attempts to fix that, lighttpd refused to start at all. I was unaware that I could only declare one error.log, so it appeared that it was not giving any error output, but it was writing to the last error log I had declared, and I was checking the wrong one. Thanks to incredible help from the folk in #lighttpd on freenode, it’s working again.

In other events, I set up Skype on my Grandma’s machine, and I hope she finds it useful. I’ve been working on Breakout in AP Comp Sci and physics collision is interesting, but I think if I end up making a game I’ll be using a physics library for sure. MIT didn’t accept me, as I anticipated. I’ll be going to University of Michigan, but I still have work to do and forms to fill out on the way.

The site was down due to a power outage. I took the downtime as an opportunity to move the shelving the machines are on a foot or two away from the wall so I can get to the back of them. One of the zombies’ networking didn’t come up properly, even with a /etc/init.d/networking stop and restart, but upon reboot it worked correctly. I wish I knew the underlying cause of that.

I upgraded to WordPress 2.7. The admin interface is now really slick. It’s gotten an overhaul and is now a pleasure to use, although it seems like it’s slower.  The main page just took an ENTIRE MINUTE to render! This is unacceptable, and hopefully I can get it sorted out. [EDIT: I enabled WP Super Cache, and it seems better. That's odd because it didn't seem to enable last time.] Unfortunately, I forgot, although I understood I was supposed to, disable my plugins before the upgrade. Result: white screen of non-loading death and me panicing. Luckily, Google revealed a very helpful page on how to disable plugins by editing the MySQL database, so now the site is back up.

I was hoping to get into RSI, which is an MIT research program. The first sign was that it wanted people who already knew what they wanted to do for their PHDs. (I seriously almost wrote “PDFs” there.) I checked my PSAT and ACT scores and they didn’t meet the minimum. Even though they said that lower scores could be balanced with strong recommendations and whatnot, I decided not to continue the application process. That saves my teachers writing recommandation letters then. It made me feel strange to request an essay from a teacher.

I’m holding a LAN with 8 people on January 2nd. I say 8 because we would need that many for a full game of Versus Left 4 Dead. Pat might not be able to come due to a New Years thing, but I hope it works out.

EDIT: Hmm… The delay in response time looks like it’s limited to default_socket_timout in php.ini…

My network at mom’s is now running off pfSense! I took Zombie 6, gave it a second ethernet card I bought from the school, and installed from the LiveCD. Fairly simple, it even let me figure out which card was which by plugging it into the switch! That was cool. The install was uneventful. It started working! I configured the port forwarding and even some fancy DNS options I’d been looking forward to. The domains I host now go straight to the LAN IP of the server when accessed from within the LAN. I think before that it was going out to AT&T and back. DNS seems much faster, although I haven’t put it through a scientific test, nor do I intend to at this point. I set the pfSense box to query the AT&T DNS servers that the modem was querying, although I’m not entirely sure if it’s doing that. Then it broke. I spent what I’m pretty sure was hours going over the configuration of the modem and pfSense box. Then I turned on the monitor, and it was spamming errors which I now unfortunately cannot remember. Google revealed that it was a problem with the PCI bus and ethernet card I bought from the school. (10/100 Mbits, WAN side, a Gigabit card is LAN side) I took down the machine and moved the card to another slot. It started working again, then failed in the same way. I swapped it with the ethernet card in my sister’s machine. It worked instantly in the pfSense box! After another reboot and some nagging, the other card started working on my sister’s Ubuntu box. I then, after some effort, set my Linksys router to be a switch and wireless access point. I had to set the advanced routing option to router instead of gateway, disable its DHCP server, assign it an IP out of the router’s DHCP range, and plug one of the LAN ports (not the uplink!) into the pfSense router. Hooray! The only problems out of all this are that Xfire file transfer didn’t work when Brad tried to send me a file, although it worked a few minutes later for Pat, so whatever, and that for some reason my SRCDS server can’t be seen from the Internet now. I’ll have to check the pfSense forums when I get time, and if worst comes to worst there’s always commercial support… Zoneclient is awesome. I was able to just point it at the modem connection status page, from which it found and used the IP. Surprisingly easy.

I read a large part of the feature list. This part made me sad.

Limitations

• Only works on primary WAN interface – multi-WAN support is available in 2.0.
• Can only update one account with a single provider. 2.0 enables the use of unlimited accounts.
• Only works when pfSense has the public IP assigned to one of its interfaces. If you have a modem that obtains your public IP and gives pfSense a private IP, the private IP will be registered with the provider. In 2.0, there is an option to determine your actual public IP and correctly register it.

Given that I do have a modem that assigns a private IP to whatever is connected to it, I’ll either have to use the unstable version if this stuff has already been added, or just stick with what I’m already using, which is really messy and involves duplicate python scripts in cron. If I get the time and will to do so I might hack the script apart so I only need to run it once and it searches the router more efficiently, but… EDIT: D’oh. I can set the script to check multiple domains. I now only run one instance of the thing.

The server has now been moved to the Pentium 4 box! It was a surprisingly easy move. All passwords and data should be preserved. Let me know if there are problems, all the data remains on the former server as well.

RSA key fingerprint is now:

3f:04:a3:9e:d5:c2:77:9a:f1:ef:56:43:6c:4c:b2:ed

I tar’d up my main web directory, tar’d one other person’s stuff, and just moved another’s one at a time. (Only 2 files, so…) Moving them over network was okay, although maybe not as fast as I might have hoped – going from the P3 to the P4 was about 6.5MB/s. Tar preserved the permissions. Then I moved over the MySQL databases using PhpMyAdmin. I needed to move the MySQL users too, so I exported the users table of the database “MySQL” and restored the lines I needed. I hope I got the system user passwords moved successfully as well – I recreated the users, then moved the /etc/shadow lines for each user from the P3 to P4 box.

Robert Langdon and I wrote a poem about my mom’s carpooling consistancy:

Sometimes she’s there at 3:20,

Sometimes she’s there at 3:10.

Sometimes she’s there at 3:40,

And sometimes not even then.

Pat’s map that I was working on wasn’t done after I left it overnight and waited until after school. This is insane. I guess I’ll have to read up on level optimizing.

EDIT: Looks like the first step will be making all the columns func_detail, then once I learn more about area portals and hint brushes I could try those as well.

I found out that my Fluxbuntu-Gutsy-powered box with 256MB of RAM had to use swap to play a sound file. This was upsetting. I uninstalled Xorg and Fluxbox and slim, (login manager) but couldn’t figure out how to add virtual consoles, which Fluxbuntu sadly seemed to lack. I somehow failed to install the standard C++ libraries, (I was too fed up to try to fix it at that point) and just installed Debian Etch. I installed BOINC and ALSA from repos, along with libasound2-dev (needed to compile Mplayer to use ALSA) and was pleased to find I could now run Seti@home, transfer files in over sftp, and play an audio file all within 256MB. (With around 4MB to spare.) Hooray!

This one is for the Linux geeks. Save the following file:

#!/bin/cat

Heh.

Then:

$ chmod u+x myscript #adds executable flag for the user that owns the file

$ ./myscript