Category nuxx.net

All,

I’m doing some more mail work on nuxx.net. This time I’m going to courier-imap 4.x with FAM. (Read the FAM section for info…) This will hopefully help resolve any of the mail notification problems.

Secondly, I might be implementing DRAC, which will allow me to do POP/POP-SSL/IMAP/IMAP-SSL before SMTP as opposed to simply POP before SMTP.

So, mail might be iffy again today, but just try and see. If there’s any problems, let me know.

To all who I host on nuxx.net:

I’m going to be upgrading the POP3/IMAP server on nuxx.net in a bit. So, you might not be able to check your mail periodically… Regardless, the mail is still coming in. Just wait and check later.

If this is a problem, you know how to contact me.

Local system status:
3:01AM up 369 days, 14:15, 0 users, load averages: 2.88, 1.18, 0.73

Woo! bornslippy.nuxx.net (the webserver that I host bunches of people on) has been up for more than a year…

Oh, and those loads are because this uptime was emailed as part of the daily jobs running at 3am. I get a bit of a load spike there.

If things go according to plan, I’ll be replacing this server within the next few months. I’m just taking my time to ensure that the new one is stable.

The newer machine should be a considerably faster dual-CPU machine. This would speed things up bunches when using things like… Gallery v2 and the image transforms (rotations especially) from v1. (The one I currently run, like at my gallery.)

For what it’s worth, that well-performing webserver that currently hosts… Oh… 17 domains and a number of subdomains and pushes out ~2GB of traffic per day is a Pentium II 450mhz (development sample running at 5x 100) with 384MB of RAM. As of right now, that motherboard/CPU has been powered on for all but six months since November of 1998.

Not bad… Once it’s retired, that motherboard will definitely go up on the wall as a piece of memorabilia.

So… I’m trying to figure out what disks to use in my web server when I upgrade/replace bornslippy.nuxx.net.

I’m going to do RAID 0+1, so I need four disks. 80GB disks are $60/ea. 160GB disks are $89/ea. (Both prices are for Western Digital Special Edition 8MB 7200RPM 3-Year warranty disks.)

So, for $240 I can have 160GB total space, or for $356 I can have 320GB. The 320GB option would allow me to back up all the data I have to the webserver… Plus $44 for the pair of disk controllers and a few dollars for some brand new round cables.

This could potentially be good, because it’d give me space for absolutely completely offsite backup.

That said, do I really want to shove all my personal data up to what’s essentially a public server? I guess it’d be all right if I did it via an encrypted filesystem that I mount only when doing backups… That would get the data backups completely out of my house.

This space is definitely not used for the existing content of the site, which I believe currently clocks in at around 15GB – 20GB.

Ideas? Ideas?

Any of you out there who run webservers… Have you ever seen anything like this? It appears to be grabbing lots and lots and lots of images. In tailing the nuxx.net log I haven’t seen it grabbing anything else yet.

207.155.199.163 – – [08/Feb/2005:23:28:38 -0500] “GET /albums/wallpaper/collectiveextension_1024.sized.jpg HTTP/1.0” 200 32768 “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.0; Windows NT; ……/1.0 )”

It’s a really weird referrer, and I’m getting it from a bunch of IPs all at once. I’d normally say it’s someone indexing my site, but some of the IPs it’s coming from are:

207.155.199.163 (UUNET)
12.17.130.27 (AT&T)
65.164.129.91 (Microsoft Sprintlink)
208.252.91.3 (UUNET)

None of those reverse, and the addresses aren’t allocated to any customers, they are just held by the big ISPs.

Seems kinda weird to me…

UPDATE: Upon more digging, I’ve found this:

207.155.199.163 – Concentric Dialup, run by XO.
12.17.130.27 – Traceroute seems to just stop, like it’s part of some absolutely massive netblock.
65.164.129.91 – Similarly weird traceroute result. Weirdness after Seattle.
208.252.91.3 – Another oddly terminating traceroute. Weird stuff starts happening after Seattle.

Sounds like someone is trolling through my site looking for addresses. Possibly from stolen netblocks? I haven’t bothered to look up weird routes because it’s bed time.

UPDATE2: It almost seems to be coordinated… Check this out:

65.164.129.91 – – [08/Feb/2005:23:46:34 -0500] “GET /gallery/livingroom_speakers HTTP/1.0” 200 15551 “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.0; Windows NT; ……/1.0 )”
207.155.199.163 – – [08/Feb/2005:23:46:42 -0500] “GET /albums/livingroom_speakers/speakers_hung.highlight.jpg HTTP/1.0” 200 6193 “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.0; Windows NT; ……/1.0 )”
12.17.130.27 – – [08/Feb/2005:23:46:50 -0500] “GET /gallery/livingroom_moulding HTTP/1.0” 200 15701 “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.0; Windows NT; ……/1.0 )”
65.164.129.91 – – [08/Feb/2005:23:46:56 -0500] “GET /albums/livingroom_moulding/DCP_0920.highlight.jpg HTTP/1.0” 200 6225 “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.0; Windows NT; ……/1.0 )”
65.164.129.91 – – [08/Feb/2005:23:47:05 -0500] “GET /gallery/livingroom_painting HTTP/1.0” 200 52236 “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.0; Windows NT; ……/1.0 )”

It’s like a distinct set of addresses are rummaging through my site, one request per second.

Hmm, here’s a question. It seems that my new camera does a resolution that when resized to 25% of it’s original size, it’s 648 x 486. My gallery currently resizes photos to 640×480 for their normal, standard-viewing size.

I’m wondering if I should change it so that the photos are done at 648×486, because resizing to 25% original size could possibly produce a better resized image, as it’s exactly 4:1 instead of 4.05:1. I’d think that sampling exactly four pixels down into one would just be better and less likely to induce moire.

Thoughts?

So after eating today’s lunch over at Somerset Mall (sorry, The Somerset Collection) we took a walk through the Apple store. Turns out they had a demo Airport Express for $99, so I picked it up for the living room. Not a bad deal, I don’t think, seeing as student price is $119. It’s a little scratched up, but it’ll be tucked behind the stereo, so that doesn’t matter.

Also, all my email has been moved in to nuxx.net and is being accessed via IMAP. I’m still trying to figure out a good mail client to be used from home. Squirrelmail isn’t bad for web-based stuff, but it has two problems. One is absolutely massive CPU utilization when opening a large mailbox, which may be tweakable by either adding an SSL accelerator to the box and/or a Squirrelmail setting to have it cache stuff. The second is that (as far as I’m aware) I can only send email through it using the account which I logged in with.

I’m also wondering if moving the mail to a database instead of the filesystem would make sense. This will be a more drastic change, though, so I’m not so certain I want to do it.

The last idea is to upgrade the mail server, but there’s no reason why a P2-500 (which is what bornslippy.nuxx.net is) can’t push big quantities of IMAP. I think the clients are a problem.

Oh, and yes, I’m looking into using mutt. That’s one of the things on my plate to get working today.

Hey everybody… Due to a whole bunch of linking to a video on my site by complete strangers (normally I don’t mind this, but it’s used almost 5GB this month alone) and a desire to clean things up, I’ve moved all the videos that had been found in http://www.nuxx.net/files to http://www.nuxx.net/files/videos. So, if for some reason you are looking for something and it seems to have been moved, that’s where it was moved to. :)

Well, I just emailed the Shelby Township Historical Committee to offer them some free webhosting. Currently they have their site hosted at Tripod, with the rather unprofessional URL http://shelbyhistory.tripod.com. The photos for the site are also hosted at an ImageStation URL which requires you to log in. Interestingly, the login they provide for you has rights to add/change/delete photos. Not good.

I just offered them some free hosting, a copy of Gallery, email, etc. You know, the normal.

I sort of hope they take me up on it, as it’d be neat to host something on that scale.