Category: nuxx.net

Loud and Fast

April 26, 2008

Yesterday I received very kindly sent FedEx package containing some spare computer hardware a friend of mine had, a pair of Opteron 885 dual-core 2.6GHz CPUs and 8GB of registered RAM, to be used in my new server.

I’ve been having some problems with it all, but I’m not quite sure what the cause is yet. With all 8 DIMMs fitted the machine kept hanging while installing FreeBSD 7.0. Per my friend’s suggestion I’m trying the install again with only one DIMM per CPU installed, as he said he’s seen problems with a fully kitted out machine installing some OS’, for som reason. For the first half of the memory things have gone just fine, so I’ll finish running through the pieces two at a time. After those tests I’ll run Memtest86+ on discreet pairs of DIMMs, then on the full 8GB.

I might also install XP on it so that I can run SiSoftware Sandra on it for a while, as it’s really good at eating a machine alive.

Unfortunately I can only run these tests during the day because the server is simply too loud to do otherwise. I measured it at 74dB while standing next to it at the keyboard, and the noise seems to be three distinct tones (low, mid, and high) caused by the different fans in the box. It’s really not much different from a siren. The noise is enough to bother me a bit while just sitting around the house doing other things, so trying to sleep while it is running would be just awful.

Oh, and some quick testing last night showed that it ran most things in openssl speed faster than my Mac Pro (photo gallery retired). Hopefully I’ll be able to run the whole DB from RAM.

Hmm, I just dropped the full 8GB back in there, turned on PowerNow! and ACPI 2.0 and I’m building ImageMagick to see how things go. While that runs I think I’m going to go for a bike ride.

Tyan Transport GX28 (B2882)

April 22, 2008

I just hit submit at Newegg.com to complete the purchase of a Tyan Transport GX28 server with a Tyan Thunder K8S Pro (S2882). As item number N82E16856152008 the barebones server was only $409.99, with $31.24 shipping. Thanks to a friend helping me out with some RAM and some disks which I’ll be able to make redundant I’ll likely end up with a 1U server with a pair of Opteron 800-series CPUs, 8GB of RAM, and mirrored 500GB SATA disks.

This all brings about an interesting question of where to host the new box. I’ve discussed this before, and the more I think about it the more I want to get my box out of Waveform. Things are working fine for now, but I question what will happen if or when the box does start to have problems. The provider I’m most seriously looking at would run $100/mo

So, now I just have to wait for things to be shipped and delivered and then I can start assembling it all. I imagine I’ll let it cook for a few weeks to a month before installing it. It’ll be running FreeBSD 7.0, likely with a custom kernel and world rebuilt specifically for the CPU. I think I’ll also want to give the new ULE scheduler a go, particularly after seeing this presentation (PDF) about where FreeBSD is going.

I’ll continue to stick with lighttpd, although I hope that the OpenSSL bug in 1.4.19 is fixed in ports soon. Disks will likely be mirrored with gmirror, although I will investigate the on-board hardware RAID. I’ll probably also stick with MySQL for the db and Postfix for mail. Basically, nothing will change in that regard.

I may opt to eliminate some individuals I currently host from the box, mostly because I never have contact with them. I don’t mind hosting people, but when the sites sit mostly unused and I have almost no contact with the individuals who use them (except when there are problems, of course), it’s a bit frustrating to keep up maintenance on apps running on the sites. Also, this new provider has stricter limits on bandwidth (1mb, 95^th percentile), and I need to be a bit more careful about how it is used. Anyway, if I’m opting to remove your site from hosting I’ll contact you outside of here and provide you with a chance to get your data.

For now I wait, then build. This could be pretty nifty. Oh, and the colocation provider offers IPv6 at no extra charge, so that ought to be fun to play with as well.

computers making things nuxx.net

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 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.

computers nuxx.net

Good Customer Service

April 9, 2008

Those of you who know me know that I’m not particularly shy about complaining about poor products, poor customer service, or other things which I’m not too happy about. While I also will mention products and companies I’m happy with, I don’t make particularly permanent record of it.

Recently I’ve had a couple good customer experiences and I wanted to make note of them, so I started a page on nuxx.net called Good Customer Service. The three which I currently have listed are Cateye (replaced a broken part, although it’s arguable if this is good or just acceptable), VG’s (who put in a bike rack on request), and Cequent (who sent me a new bolt after I stupidly broke the last one).

On a slightly related note, I received a fastener kit from Cequent today which included the U bolt I broke, and I had no problems fitting it on to the car. I even torqued it down with the questionable wrench, but only after first exercising the wrench to be certain that it’s appropriately clicking when reaching the desired torque. Now that I understand it and it’s shortcomings, it’s a reasonable, but cheap torque wrench. I don’t think I’ll be returning it.

automotive cycling nuxx.net

First Multi-Blog Post

March 31, 2008

Well, here’s my first multi-blog post. I’ve been wanting to move more content over to nuxx.net, so I set up a blog here to do so. However, as discussed here I didn’t really want to move away from the social network aspects of LiveJournal, where I’ve been posting things for six or seven years.

So, what did I do? I set up a copy of WordPress at https://nuxx.net/blog and took the Fluid Blue 1.0.1 theme and changed it to better match the rest of the site. I used this AdSense widget for the side bar. To tie it all in nicely with LJ I first took ljxp, the LiveJournal Crossposter, got it working with WordPress 2.5, then stripped off the crappy (ala pikuorguk) automatically inserted header.

As part of using the crossposter, and this is the biggest part of continuing to use LJ, I’ve left comments enabled at both locations. This means that the social network is still wholly in place at LJ, but the blog posts will also exist for more… general consumption.

I’ve also implemented LJ user ex so that I can still use <lj user=foo> tags in both places. (This plugin is going to require a bit of tweaking, but it shouldn’t be too difficult to do. I don’t like how particular it is for the tags…)

I’ve also put WP-Cache in place, just in case of a Slashdotting or Digging or something like that, and Google XML Sitemaps is running because… Well… Sitemaps are a good thing.

Currently I’m thinking that I’ll only use this dual-posting system for the more technical / photo oriented / non-personal content, while posts which talk about what I’m thinking, politics, memes, and other crap like that will remain solely at LJ.

Well, here goes… Time to hit publish and see it all in action for once.

livejournal nuxx.net

Cateye Update

March 31, 2008

Oh, I forgot to mention something. Remember the Cateye bike computer bracket problems I had? Cateye has replied to my email message saying that they’ll send me a new bracket as soon as they get in stock.

Also, the Sequentix P3 that I’m building on contract has been delivered. I think I’ll have something to do tonight.

Oh, and here is where I’m working on the theme / stuff for a blog over at nuxx.net, if any of you are interested. I think I have an idea for what I’m going to do…

(I’ll crosspost important/technical things, and for more personal-ish stuff I’ll just post directly here.)

cycling electronics moved from livejournal nuxx.net

Move to WP?

March 28, 2008

So, for eight months or so now I’ve seriously considered moving posts from here to an actual hosted blog install. I’ve always been rather against email and photo hosting which I don’t wholly control, so why should I keep a blog here, where I can’t control it?

This post here seems to show how easy it would be to move to a WP install… I might set one up on dingleberrypie or something as a test, just to see how it goes.

moved from livejournal nuxx.net

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.

computers moved from livejournal nuxx.net

Greylisting

February 28, 2008

My received spam counts have been exploding lately, so I’ve enabled greylisting on nuxx.net via postgrey. It’s too early to tell, but looking at mailgraph shows that delivered message counts are WAY down, spam detections have almost gone away, and rejection counts are way up.

The way this works is by telling mail coming from unknown places to go away and try again later. Most spamming software doesn’t bother trying again later, but proper mail servers do. After the proper mail servers try again the mail is delivered, and that server is noted as being safe. So, because of this, mail coming to those I host from new destinations may be delayed for 5-15 minutes, but it’ll eventually get through.

If I host you and you are suddenly not getting mail which you expect to get, let me know and I’ll sort it out. It should work fine, though, just be patient. I’ll post more in a day or so once I know for sure how much counts are down.

For reference, I personally have been receiving 300-500 pieces of spam (with most of it flagged by SpamAssassin) per day, and it was just getting to be a bit much.

computers moved from livejournal nuxx.net

nuxx.net Back Up

February 23, 2008

Well, even though rowla.nuxx.net made it to an uptime of 500 days back on the 11th, that didn’t last. Today Waveform unexpectedly moved my box to their new data center, causing a bit of an unexpected outage. As you can see in the bandwidthd graph above there was a period of time during which the server was unreachable.

I was ssh’d in at the time talking to people on #llamasoft when things just up and went away. It seems that Waveform simply pulled the plug on the boxes and moved them. Thankfully mine came back up safely.

computers moved from livejournal nuxx.net