If you didn’t know, this has been a tumultuous week for clients of Westhost, my internet service provider. Their Primary data center is located in Utah and they share that space with a sister brand VPS.net. The datacenter is a Tier IV center managed by Consonus. Saturday afternoon there was a yearly fire equipment/alarm/suppression system test. The third party technician failed to follow procedures and one actuator remained on the output system for the gas that is designed to suppress fires in the building. When the system was re-armed there was a sudden release of the gaseous fire suppressant. At that same moment hundreds of hard drives died. Now, Inergen is what was used and the gases themselves shouldn’t be a problem. In this case, and judging from what I’ve read, the problem was with the sudden and intense change in air pressure caused by the release. That point is somewhat moot though, the end result is hundreds of dead and damaged hard drives.
Tag: vps
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Various Notes | Morse Code Ringtones | Java updates | More Pages on the Way
Sorry for the vague title, but there are various thoughts floating around at the moment. The first is a big thanks to the support at Westhost for recovering my VPS over the last weekend. I had started an automatic upgrade of wordpress in one of the sites hosted in this vps, it hung… so I ssh’ed in and found the vps was essentially ruined – it managed to wipe out quite a bit. I’m not sure if it was a coincidence or if the wordpress upgrade was really the culprit, but it managed to destroy quite a bit. The support at westhost though had things back up within 24 hours. It wasn’t just a matter of the site and database getting deleted, but files in /etc were gone (mail configuration hostname resolution wasn’t working, scp wasn’t working…. it was trashed in a bad way.)
Anyway, I’ve still been tinkering with the free morse code mp3 ringtones. In particular I’ve been tinkering with the Text to morse code mp3 generator. I’ve been trying to add utf support. The backend generator does interpret morse for utf characters, I’ve managed to get a way to decode the url encoding if they’re placed in the text box, my big challange at the moment is the file name. I have to truncate the filename so that it’s not too long, but most everything I’ve tried to truncate counts bits instead of characters. Some, even if I tell it to count characters will assume that 1 character=1bit and I wind up with some of the utf characters cut short which gives unusual filename results. In the testing version of the script I’ve just decided to sanitize things by replacing an extended character with an x….
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Bizarre Internet Explorer 7 problem – Several of my pages are not displayed AT ALL
I’ve been really itching to test this again since I first tried the Vista Beta. In my test of IE7 in the beta of Microsoft Vista, I found that this page came up as “Internet explorer cannot display the webpage.” The error page goes on to suggest a number of connectivity or availability problems. I even tested side by side with Firefox which WAS able to display the page and Explorer 7 which wasn’t. I thought it might just be a rendering bug of some sort, but today got a chance to try IE7 on Windows XP (RC1). So… the problem is still there, I can find NO other browser exhibiting the same behavior. It affects averyjparker.com, northcarolinagenealogy.net and southcarolinagenealogy.org, but NOT onlineradiotv.com (which all by the way are hosted out of the same VPS – so I know the VPS is up and the database server is just fine….)
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WordPress trackback problem FINALLY SOLVED….
For around 3-4 months now I’ve had a REALLY annoying problem with the wordpress install on this site. Trackbacks suddenly stopped working. Somewhere around my 800th post or so while the WMF vulnerability was circulating (between Christmas and New Years) and I was typing furiously – poof…. suddenly trackbacks stopped going out. (Incoming trackbacks seemed to work just fine…) What’s had me stumped for so long is that I host 2 (now three) other sites off the same domain and I haven’t had a problem with ANY of those sending pingbacks or trackbacks.
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Sendmail mail queue backed up
Sendmail is not my favorite MTA. I really prefer Postfix, but… I have to use sendmail in a few situations. I’ve run a little script on the web server for a good while to monitor the mail queue. I was running into a problem where I had LOTS of messages backed up. I suspected I had been hit originally by a spam onslaught which had flooded the server and it had been throttled (VPS) to prevent causing problems for the other users and things got backed up.
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WordPress 1.5.1.3 Security Vulnerability
According to the entry for WordPress 1.x at Secunia.com, there is a “Highly critical” WordPress vulnerability announced August 10th that affects all 1.x versions including 1.5.1.3 The details are in this advisory. There is not yet an updated version of WordPress to address the issue, but there is a possible workaround.