Posts Tagged ‘server’

I migrated our the last of our clients’ sites onto the new server this morning, so now that’s out of the way I hope to find the time to finish off World of Badger very, very soon ( as handy as this spell-check-as-you-type feature in Firefox 2 is, it’s not very self-aware - it’s offering me ‘Firebox’ and ‘Fire fox’).

Although work’s incredibly busy at the moment, Rob and I did take yesterday afternoon off to pop along to the Mac Expo at Olympia. There was definitely more of interest there this year, although admittedly of a personal rather than professional nature. Google had a big stand there, but as we have no particular interest in putting our content on Google Earth, we gave their presentation a miss. Also new this year was iStockPhoto; we had a brief chat with a photographer on their stand (she’s making money from it, which is good to hear, and was kind enough to let us have a pile of free credits) before went to have a play at the Wacom stand. My Wacom graphics tablet is 9 years old and showing its age, so I’m tempted to replace it (sadly I think the £255 Intuos3 A5 Wide is more realistic than the rather impressive Cintiq 21UX at £2116).

Last year’s ‘gadget of the show’ was definitely the Solio solar powered iPod/phone charger. This year two products stood out: the iTango dock and the GEAR4 BluEye.

The great thing about the iTango range of docks for iPods and nanos is that they’re designed to allow you to dock your iPod without removing it from any silicone or hard case you may have it in (Apple’s docks are too snug a fit). Arguably the curved iTango docks look nicer than Apple’s own, plus they let you store unneeded cable inside it. Unfortunately they were launching the iTango at the Expo, and didn’t actually have them on sale. Think the chap said they’d cost about £14 though.

The other product that caught our eye(s) was the GEAR4 BluEye, another gadget for iPods. It looks and works very much like the standard Apple iPod remote, but in addition to volume and playback controls, it features an FM radio and can be used to make and receive calls using your iPod, via a Bluetooth connection to your mobile. The remote has a built in microphone, and will pause your music when you make or receive a call. Caller ID is displayed on your iPod screen, as are recent numbers for when you want to make an outgoing call (or you can voice-dial). So, keep your phone in your pocket or bag, and not have to worry about missing any calls when you’re nodding along to the Best of Wings. Yours for about £50.

For once I actually have a decent excuse for not having posted lately — work has been completely hectic, and to be honest I’ve felt totally drained.

A couple of weeks ago, in the early hours of the morning, there was a big power outage at the data centre that’s home to our main server (and this site). Unfortunately, rather than the UPS taking over until the backup generator kicked in, something fried/died, and it took the hosting company — DSVR — nine hours to get everything up and running again.

Even once DSVR had got all the servers back online, web and FTP were crawling, and mail was totally dead (something on the internal system was utterly screwed, quite possibly related to DNS).

The problem meant that not only were we without our main email accounts for the best part of two days, but so were over a dozen of our clients. As you can imagine, this didn’t go down too well, and when we weren’t sat watching the queue of emails growing in Exim, we were trying to placate clients.

Luckily we have our .com domain mail server hosted on a completely different server, for contingencies such as this, so at least we had some way of getting emails out. Nevertheless, it took until after the weekend for the backlog of emails to clear from our main server.

It wasn’t always like this with DSVR; when we signed up with them some years ago, we chose them because they had what turned out to be a well-deserved reputation for excellent service. Yes, they were more expensive than some, but the good up-time, versatility and great support was well worth the money. Support tickets were answered quickly, and the staff took an active role in discussions on the customer forums.

On the rare occasions when there was a problem with the service, DSVR’s status page would contain detailed explanations of the problem, and the steps being taken to rectify it and ensure it didn’t re-occur. The support staff would also happily discuss the problem in the forums, often with a refreshing honesty.

Sadly DSVR were bought by Legend Communications (formerly Business Serve, subsequently bought by Thus) in 2004, and the service has been going downhill ever since. Earlier this year there were big problems when they moved data centres, and despite lots of promised improvements, things just seem to be going from bad to worse. There aren’t any of the original DSVR staff left either.

Leaving aside the point that a power outage shouldn’t be able to screw up the servers for a couple of days, to add insult to injury the communication from DSVR/Legend/Thus has been almost non-existent. Little more than “Blah, blah, power outage, some customers experiencing problems with email, engineers working to restore service as soon as possible” on the status page for a couple of days. Certainly nothing like a decent explanation.

Rumour has it, because Legend/Thus are a PLC, any communication (including the status page) has to ‘go upstairs’ for approval by management in case if impacts on share price. Hoorah for capitalism!

Legend weren’t any more forthcoming when the Register reported on the problems:

They gave us a standard “we apologise for the inconvenience”-type response which, after days of their customers losing business, is unlikely to smooth relations.

They added that the email issues were caused by high volumes of traffic. Now, we’re not systems engineers lads, but we thought your business was all about dealing with high volumes of traffic.

Indeed. Except that the email issues weren’t caused by high volumes of traffic, they were a symptom of it. The problems seem to be related to their DNS system getting hosed, which is pretty worrying.

Sadly this is the large bundle of straw that’s broken the camel’s back, and we’ve decided not to renew our contract with DSVR at the end of October. It’s a real shame, but with the unreliability of DSVR’s service reflecting badly on us to our clients, our loyalty has been stretched to its limit.

So we’ve now started migrating our clients to our new server, which means lots of extra work — moving databases and domains, changing secure certificates, getting new IP addresses, updating payment gateways etc.. We’ve been pretty snowed-under with work lately anyway, so the extra hassle of moving servers is something we need like a hole in the head (we haven’t had a weekend off for a few weeks now). Anyway, enough self-pity….

I was planning on switching from b2evolution to Wordpress soon anyway, so the move to the new server seems like as good a time as any to convert. I haven’t yet finished the new look for World of Badger, which does mean I might have to go with the default Wordpress look until I’m less exhausted. Do not be alarmed though, the drabness won’t be permanent.

Unfortunately the database server fell over on Saturday afternoon, and had to be restored from an old backup from last week. Consequently the last few posts and comments have vanished into the ether. I’ll try to re-enter what was lost manually ASAP, if I can remember. Sorry.

The situation wasn’t helped by the fact that I went out on Saturday evening and got horribly, horribly drunk celebrating Sophia’s birthday. Sunday was pretty much a write-off due to my hangover.

Oh well, normal service will resume shortly.

With my purchase of an iBook looking imminent, I’ve started thinking about Mac equivalents for some of the software I use on a regular basis. There’s no problem as far as PHP is concerned, as Zend IDE is available for the Mac too, as are the usual suspects from Macromedia and Adobe. However for MySQL administration and development I use a nice, simple GUI front-end called SQLyog (free), but that’s not currently available for Mac.

After a bit of Googling, I got somewhat sidetracked by EMS MySQL Manager (free trial / $134) which, although only available on Windows, is a fantastic program, packed full of nice features and tools for MySQL development.

I did find Navicat (free trial / $95) which is available for Windows, Linux and Mac. Although not quite as feature-laden as EMS MySQL Manager, it’s not too far behind, and includes lots of similar tools (such as a visual query designer).

On the subject of applications, here are two free programs I recommend to anyone wanting to analyse their Apache logs offline rather than on the server.

Funnel Web Analyzer by Quest Software is available for Windows, Linux and Mac, and produces really comprehensive, attractive reports (and graphs) on just about every aspect of visitor activity. Also worth a look is Relax, a free log analysis tool for referrer information processing.