You may have noticed that the blog and everything else was down for a few days this week. If you did, you may have wondered what happened.
Did we close? Obviously not. But since you’re curious enough to have read this far, I’ll lay it all out for you.
Even though this blog is run by me personally, the company I’m President & CEO of graciously allows me to host it on the company’s server and using a company subdomain. It is, after all, nice to be the king. That server has been hosted by a provider in Longview, Texas, owned by the father-in-law of a friend of mine. The server is old. When it was bought, it came with RedHat Linux 10 installed on it. Yeah, it’s that old.
On Sunday evening, the server essentially froze. I could ping the IP address and I could traceroute to it, but I couldn’t get a response from it. It was restarted on Monday morning but froze again a few hours later. It was restarted again and froze again at 4:26 a.m., Tuesday morning showing that the swap partition was completely full.
Now, as it happens, I have another server here at the house. So, I slapped a brand new install of CentOS 5.3 on it, copied over the relevant files and databases from the nightly backups that we keep here. And drove the server to Longview on Tuesday afternoon.
After I installed the server and got back home, it began to suffer from I/O errors on its disk drives and it froze as well. Total time up: four hours.
Tuesday evening was spent examining the original server to discover the source of the failure. I looked at what I could and came up pretty empty. Eventually, thanks to the help of Steve Atkins, it was decided that the cause was likely to be the death of either the RAID controller or one of the hard drives. The suggested solution: ditch RAID and copy the filesystem to an IDE drive (remember, the server is old enough that it doesn’t have SATA ports) and just use that.
Wednesday, my wife took the server back to Longview and to a computer store. They took the data from the drives and copied the data onto a new 500G EIDE drive. In theory, she was going to just take the server from the shop to the facility and we’d be done with it. But, when they did a test boot, they got a screen which said, and I quote: “GRUB”. I was told that the server booted “to grub but no further.” Since the repair folks were Windows weenies, they were at a loss. I wasn’t willing to pay them to research the problem, so I did some research and found a potential solution while my wife brings the server home.
Wednesday night I get my hands on the server at 9:30. That’s when I discovered that it got to the word “GRUB” not to the grub splash/menu screen. My researched solution (basically: rebuild the initrd) went out the window, but hey, if I found that solution, I can find another one! So, back to research.
About an hour later I discovered the answer: re-install grub. So, that was done and the machine boots. To bed!
Thursday morning, I get up and take the machine back to the facility where it lives (after getting appropriate approvals from my boss at my day job). After dealing with a couple of configuration issues, I leave and come home.
Thursday afternoon, server load climbed to 25 and swap space was getting really low for some reason, but we were able to get in a reboot command before it froze completely. Things have been stable since.
As I write this, the server has been up for 1 day, 2 hour, 25 minutes. It only needs to stay up for about 6 more weeks. Then we’ll be bringing it home since we’ll have our own T1 line into the home office.
MickC @ July 17, 2009
At The Moment..., General, National Politics, Personal, Politics Comments (0)
Here are some quotes for your 4th of July:
The liberties of our country, the freedoms of our civil Constitution are worth defending at all hazards; it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors. They purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure and blood. It will bring a mark of everlasting infamy on the present generation – enlightened as it is – if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle, or to be cheated out of them by the artifices of designing men.
-Samuel Adams
Liberty has never come from Government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of it… The history of liberty is a history of limitations of governmental power, not the increase of it.
-Woodrow Wilson
MickC @ July 4, 2009
Email Hall of Shame, Humor, Technology Comments (0)
Well, maybe that’s a bit of an overstatement.
“Astroturfing” refers to “formal political, advertising, or public relations campaigns seeking to create the impression of being spontaneous “grassroots” behavior, hence the reference to the artificial grass, AstroTurf” according to Wikipedia.
Since my last post on Tag44.com last year, I’ve gotten a few comments. One of them was from Arthur Rowa (who appears to be passionate about money). Arthur calls me ignorant stupid:
You know what’s wrong with the internet?
Smart people and stupid people get equal airtime. And since stupid people like you tend to shout longer and louder than people who have acquired wisdom and judgment, ignorance usually prevails.
Not generally something you want to call someone whom you’re trying most desperately to convince to hire the people you’re shilling for, but I figure he got the message from the post that I’m not going to be hiring their folks anyway. So, no harm, no foul, right?
Wrong.
You see, those two comments (and a trackback ping) aren’t the only things that have come in. There was more! I was debating whether I should write this follow-up until I saw (and decided to approve) Mr. Rowa’s comment. That comment just made up my mind for me.
[UPDATE: I went ahead and approved the comments in the other post that I'm writing about below so that people can see the level of workers that Tag44 is apparently trying to hire out.]
First, let’s have a look at a comment from Shawn. Shawn writes:
Hello Friends, No its not like that, they are not spamming for any jobs, they just select the right candidate for the right job. They call you, they email you but they never try to cheat you, fool you. I am saying that because i have past experience with them. They helps me a lot in finding the right job for me & because of them today i am at the position where i always dream to be. So please never ever consider there mails or calls, spamming. Regards, Shawn
Man, guys, if this is the level of professionalism exuded by the people you’re trying to get me to hire, I’m glad you felt the need to spam me, insult me, and do everything in your power to make sure I’d never use your service to make a hiring decision. Well, even that’s not completely true. I’ll make hiring decisions based on their service, it’s just that those decisions won’t go the way they’re hoping for.
Next, we have a comment from Joe, who says:
I don’t think so that they harassed people or spamming by sending mails.
I also got there call & its nice experience to talk with them. So make your mind & get ready for there call.
Joe, if you’re reading this, could you please write back and tell me how to make my mind? And where is there so I can make sure to miss it?
Finally, we have the thoughts of one Tofique Shaikh, who opines:
Its totally fake and against the reputation of the site Tag44.com as this site helps me lot in finding job in my area. So pls dont write anything wrong about it & if possible delete this post as been a Intellectual Intercourse you are writing such fake & spam.
Now, remember, I said that they’re failing at Astroturfing, not grammar and spelling (although they have tickets on the Fail Boat for that, too). Let’s have a look at the IPs they posted from:
Shawn posts from 59.145.227.24, and lists encircleps.com for his link. If you’ll remember from first Tag44 post, Encircle Payments and Tag44 appear to be the same company as the Administrative and Technical contacts are both the same person who is using an encirclepayments.com address for contact. So, Shawn may not be the most, shall we say, objective of commenters. In fact, I’m going to guess that the position that you “always dreamed to be” is with Tag44 or Encircle Payments.
I think that they desire for Joe to appear to be a manager who got a call from them that he didn’t mind. Goodness knows there are plenty of illiterate managers out there, right? Only problem is that Joe is also posting from 59.145.227.24. That’s right. He’s posting from the same IP address as Shawn.
Finally, we have Tofique Shaikh. Tofique at least lists tag44.com for his link, but hey, you can put google.com in there if you wanted to, and maybe since he’s shilling for the site, he just really likes it. So, let’s have a look at his IP address: 203.101.92.166. Oooh! Guess who owns it? That’s right, boys and girls, Encircle!
Three positive comments. All of which were made by mostly illiterate people from IP space owned by Tag44/Encircle.
Can you say “astroturf”? I knew you could. Only three posts is pretty lame yeah, but that’s what you get from spammers.
MickC @ June 1, 2009
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