nuxx.net
Making, baking, and (un-)breaking things in Southeast Michigan.

Category computers

Time to Move Colocation Providers?

April 11, 2008

For a few months now I’ve been considering replacing the mid tower server currently hosting nuxx.net, rowla.nuxx.net, with a new 1U box. After Waveform moved my server between facilities, powering it off hard without warning, I’ve been thinking that I should really look for other colocation facilities in Southeast Michigan.

Thanks to some folks [info]niteshade introduced me to via IRC, I seem to have two options, both in Southfield. One of the facilities I’m looking at is a privately leased rack in 123.net‘s facility and would cost around US$80/mo for 1Mb, billed to 95th percentile. The other option is Clear Rate Communications colocation facility, and that would run $99/mo for the same amount of bandwidth and no-charge access during business hours.

While Waveform has generally been good to me, I have noticed some issues with customer service since I moved in there a few years ago. Response to support tickets is very slow, and it’s almost impossible to actually get someone on the phone. I’ve also received a handful (two or three, I believe) of unsolicited pieces of email from individuals who are looking for some way to contact anyone at Waveform. It seems that their boxes had gone down for whatever reason and they were unable to get a hold of anyone to reset them, ship them back, or even tell them what was wrong for multiple days.

This all brings me to my thoughts about a possible replacement server. Ideally I would buy a new 1U server, put that in the new facility, move the data away from Waveform, transfer all services, then shut down the box at Waveform. I’m fairly sure I know what I want server-wise, but I don’t know if I can (should) afford it. Ideally I’d get something like the following:

· Supermicro SuperServer 5015M-MT+ / 5015M-MT+B ($629.99 at Newegg)
· 2x Seagate Barracuda ES.2 SATA 3.0-Gb/s 500-GB Hard Drive ($131.99/ea at Newegg)
· Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 ($188.99 at Newegg)
· Supermicro AOC-IPMI20-E IPMI Card/BMC ($55.95 at Amazon)
· Crucial 2GB kit (1GBx2), 240-pin DIMM, DDR2 PC2-5300 memory module ($63.99)

This is $1070.91, plus around $35 in shipping and taxes. Of course, I could just move the box from Waveform to Clear Rate (or wherever). That would cause a few days of weirdness, but it’d be a lot cheaper. I could then wait until the current box becomes a bit more questionable and get a new machine at that time.

I’m just not really sure what to do for now, so I think I’ll just wait a bit. Hopefully Waveform (and my box) will at least remain stable.

computersnuxx.net

Time Machine

March 28, 2008

I’ve managed to break Time Machine.

How?

This morning I briefly woke my machine, ejected a flash drive, then put it back to sleep. When I came home it attempted to start a backup then declared itself broken. I think Time Machine was in the middle of mounting its sparsebundle, or something like that.

This thread suggests that DiskWarrior can be used to fix the problem. Unfortunately I don’t have a copy of it.

I guess I’ll just axe the file and let it recopy everything.

computersmoved from livejournal

Go Adobe!

March 26, 2008

Well, it looks like Adobe has rather screwed up the Lightroom 1.4 release.

Last week (or so) I fired up Lightroom and was asked if I wanted to install the 1.4 update. The change list looked harmless enough, so I went ahead and allowed it. Everything seemed fine, but I started noticing some oddness with the EXIF Date/Time stamps being exported.

Tonight I decided to look into it a little more and realized that all the files were being exported with the proper date stamp, but a timestamp of 00:00:00. This was confirmed with jhead.

I first went looking to Adobe’s support site, in the Lightroom forums, and one of the first things I found was a link to this post detailing problems with Adobe Lightroom 1.4 and asking people to revert to 1.3.1.

From the details of the post and replies to the comments by Tom Hogarty of Adobe who writes the Lightroom Journal:

...raw files consist of two essential pieces: the block of data that was captured by your sensor and metadata to describe that image data. In this case, Lightroom would incorrectly update the metadata when you explicitly update the metadata. If you're not planning on using Lightroom you can certainly wait for the subsequent update and install it over Lightroom 1.4 if you prefer. -TH

What. The. Fuck., Adobe? You change the original RAW files?

Yes, it seems that they do:

Lightroom has written the time stamp EXIF field back to raw files since the product was launched. This is intended to provide compatibility to other products that ignore the same field written to XMP metadata. -TH

Er… wow. It’s supposedly only the metadata, but still… Wow. This is kinda not good.

I can somewhat understand why they do it, as if a user changes the metadata of the file it gets written back so that all apps which use those raw files can see the changes. But still, that’s a bit odd.

I don’t think the result for me is too bad, except when you look at the metadata of images exported with 1.4, the timestamp is zero’d out. (Example)

This kinda sucks. Hopefully Adobe won’t screw this up again.

(There are quite a few angry replies about this here and here.)

computersmoved from livejournal

Do Not Want

March 18, 2008

Humax Series 2 80 Hour TiVo

Since my TiVo HD is working properly (seems to have been an update glitch) I grabbed a photo of my older, Series 2 80 hour TiVo to post along with this:

Would anyone like this TiVo?

It works great and is all set for you to use, you’ll just have to grab a network adapter for it, or plug it into your phone line and let it dial up. The firmware is up to date enough that all the supported adapters (including the quite nice TiVo-branded wireless one) will work with it.

You’ll also have to pay the monthly service fee to use it, but that’s only about $12/mo.

It’s available for pickup, or I’ll ship it, but you’ll pay shipping.

acquired thingscomputersmoved from livejournal

TiVo HD

March 18, 2008

Preparing the service update. This may take up to an hour, possibly longer.

After getting home and putting a frozen pizza from Costco in the oven, I turned on my new TiVo HD to find a plain, black screen. The format button on the front wouldn’t light anything up, so it seemed to be solidly hung. I powered it off and back on only to get that screen above, which reads “Preparing the service update. This may take up to an hour, possibly longer.”

Here I was ready to take pictures of my old TiVo and offer it up in a post here, but now I might need it. Guh.

Also, my pizza still isn’t done, and it doesn’t look as good as the picture on the box. Hopefully it tastes fine.

UPDATE: When checking on the pizza I heard sound coming from the basement. The TiVo is probably working. Hopefully it wasn’t stuck / hung all weekend, not recording things. At least it’s working for now.

Hopefully the pizza will work out too.

acquired thingscomputersmoved from livejournal

The Lives Of Others

March 8, 2008

Tonight Danielle and I watched The Lives of Others. There are two notable things about this.

One, it’s an excellent film. Probably one of the best I’ve seen in a while.

Two, this movie was rented via Netflix a week ago, but I ripped it using HandBrake because Danielle wanted to return it. Dropping it into ~/Movies and playing it on my Xbox 360 via Connect360 worked out very well. Ripped at an average bitrate of 1500kbps with 2-pass encoding, turbo first pass, and no deinterlacing (samples of the movie in the transcoder GUI showed this to be unneeded) they played just fine and looked to be of the same quality as movies played using my upscaling OPPO DV970HD (photo gallery retired).

computersmoved from livejournalmovies

PR #5732

March 4, 2008

See that Change the default console to zstty0? [no] line? That’s the result of OpenBSD Problem Report #5732 which I had submitted a few weeks back. Two days ago Ken Westerback, one of the OpenBSD devs emailed me a patch which was about to be committed in order to resolve the problem, and a request that I test it on macppc. Well, I did, and it works great.

In short, it looks through your dmesg for the console and sets up whatever serial port is used for that as your console.

This makes me happy. OpenBSD really is a great OS.

computersmoved from livejournal

OpenBSD Bug Fix?

March 3, 2008

Yesterday morning I received a patch which should fix OpenBSD PR #5732. It’s a patch for all platforms, which has (supposedly) been applied to the 4.3 family which should be released on 01-May. I’ve been asked to test it, so it looks like I’ll be doing a reinstall on my firewall this evening, this time from the latest snapshot. Hopefully it’ll all go well. Good thing I’ve got my pre-made config files files to base everything off of. I just hope I did them right. ;)

Oh, that also means I’ll be spending quite a while sitting in front of a cold rack in the basement at a serial console. Ah well.

computersmoved from livejournal

Postgrey

February 29, 2008

mailgraph.pl on rowla.nuxx.net after Postgrey
(Click for full report…)

As mentioned yesterday I set up Postgrey on rowla.nuxx.net in order to implement greylisting and hopefully address the spam problem I (and others hosted on my box) have been having.

Well, it’s still less than 24 hours out, but it seems to be having a really big impact on the spam levels, with my personal accounts receiving only seven pieces of spam (all of which were flagged by SpamAssassin hitting my personal inbox. I’ve had no false negatives, and I haven’t yet seen any false positives. (Yes, I’ve been testing this and checking… Everything seems to work as designed.) For reference, I’d normally receive 300-500 automatically flagged pieces of spam per day, with 3-10 false negatives slipping through.

From that graph up there, one can see that Postgrey really seems to be doing the job. What can be seen (in the second graph) is that the rejected messages are way up, flagged spam is way down, meaning that the messages are being rejected and then not retried. The received messages (in the first graph) are way down, which directly correlates with the rejections.

Here is a snapshot from this morning of the daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly graphs. If you’d like to see the mostly-live graphs, here is rowla.nuxx.net’s mailgraph.pl.

Oh, and that dip on Saturday? That was the aforementioned outage caused by Waveform moving my server unexpectedly.

computersmoved from livejournalnuxx.net