stressfree - website

Site upgraded to Drupal 5.1

David — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 02:39:04 +0000

This morning I finally got around to upgrading the website from Drupal 4.7 to 5.1. The upgrade was relatively smooth and hopefully nothing is fundamentally broken. The update took a while to happen because many of the modules used to provide specific site functionality had not been upgraded to be 5.0 compatible.

Over the next few months I plan to make some aesthetic changes to increase usability and the general aesthetic. If you experience any issues with the site please contact me.

website

Two happy months with Media Temple

David — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 11:21:47 +0000

It has been just over two months since I signed up for a Media Temple Grid Server Web hosting account. All in all this time has been almost painless and (touch wood) all is going really well. So far I have consolidated three independent servers worth of websites and data around the hosted account. This has significantly reduced my administration worries and freed up hardware for other duties (or the scrap heap). Currently the grid server is hosting 14 different websites ranging from static html right through to complex Web applications, the StressFree email and Subversion repositories. Currently this amounts to 43GB of data and about 10GB of bandwidth per month so I feel like I am getting my money's worth out of the service.

Performance-wise the Grid Server could be a little faster but it is pretty stable and the troubles they are experiencing are well publicised. Worth every penny is the SSH access which makes site management so much faster and trouble-free for someone like myself who is used to having the server at arms reach. The Media Temple blog is also a good read even if you are not a customer. It provides insight into the difficulties and frustrations of running a truly massive hosting operation with the 'Anatomy of MySQL on the Grid' post being a particularly interesting and honest read.

So the short of it is I highly recommend Media Temple's Grid Server plan to anyone looking for a stable and feature-packed hosting solution. If you only have one website you need hosting then they probably aren't for you. However if you can get a few friends together who also need hosting Media Temple's plan suddenly becomes very attractive when compared to more conventional, single site hosting.

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Snap Preview Anywhere: Bling up your blog

David — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 10:41:35 +0000

Ever see a link on a page and wonder whether it is worth actually clicking on it? Chances are you have zero interest or have been there already and a little visual clue would help you make up your mind. Snap Preview Anywhere provides this visual prompt by way of a nice looking Javascript pop-up window. Snap is an Internet search engine that creates an image preview of all the sites it indexes. The Snap Preview Anywhere plug-in for your website leverages this database of preview images to give you a quick glimpse of where you could potentially go in the future, kind of like a Web travel brochure. Installation is straightforward especially if you run a template driven website as all it requires is a couple of lines of code in the <head> section of the HTML. Okay so it is not 100% practical but it gives your website a bit of bling and does save needless clicking to websites you have already visited but haven't recognised from the hyperlink.

The move to Media Temple

David — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 10:03:11 +0000

Over the weekend I went away for a few days and halfway through the mini-holiday the web server decided to stop working, resulting in a couple of days downtime until I returned to Wellington. After this little incident I decided it was best to bite the bullet, pay the extra money and rent a hosted server. I had heard of Media Temple's GS product from a TechCrunch posting and it sounded very interesting. Rather than purchasing space on a server or operating a dedicated box your money bought you processing cycles on a grid-based server farm. This means that if things start to get busy the website does not stop, which can happen on a shared host environment if one site gets Dugg or Slashdotted.

The GS Administration interface (click to enlarge)

The service costs US$200 per year and for that money you get practically unlimited bandwidth (1TB), 100Gig of storage space, MySQL and Postgres databases, FTP and SSH access plus email (which currently I am not using). All this is controlled through a very intelligent administration interface and for the really nasty tasks you can always SSH into the server and perform a wide range of shell-based tasks (the Grid appears to be running Debian 3.1). Overall setup and migration was smooth and I am pleased with the sites performance and the flexibility of the solution, I was particularly impressed by the single click backup tool provided. Hopefully this will mean the site is up 99.99% of the time and operating at a nice speed for anyone using it.

The easy to use backup tool (click to enlarge)

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Site migrated to Media Temple GS Server

David — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 08:16:31 +0000

Today the website was migrated to a Media Temple GS hosting account. For the next day or two things maybe a little unstable as the DNS changes get propagated.

website

StressFree website migrated to Drupal

David — Sun, 27 Aug 2006 11:41:49 +0000

Over the weekend I have migrated the StressFree website across to the Drupal content management system. The move was spurred on by the shortcomings I kept finding in Joomla, the desire to be able to tag content and the knowledge that the next upgrade to Joomla 1.5 would require almost starting from scratch.

I have tried my best to maintain all the legacy links so hopefully the old Joomla and static file links should resolve okay. Overall it went really smoothly, Drupal is a little bit more difficult to get your head around compared to Joomla but now that I've made the switch I am very glad. There has been limited loss of functionality in the switch but a tonne of new features are now available:

Firstly I can now tag content and there are tag clouds available. This should make finding content a lot easier though in the future I wouldn't mind finding a 'related tags' type module for Drupal.
Also it looks like Drupal's content search engine actually works (compared to Joomla/Mambo's effort).
On the administration side I now have an xmlrpc interface for writing content which will mean I can finally give Ecto some real use instead of always working through a web browser for publishing content.
The new comment engine looks a lot better than the Joomla version as it supports html comments and replies.
The 'printer friendly' option is far superior than Joomla's. Not only is it tidier but it also has the ability to extract hyperlinks from content and print them below the article as footnotes (which is very cool).

One piece of functionality that Joomla has over Drupal is their {mospagebreak} tag and its ability to auto-generate table of contents for long articles. It does make navigating larger documents a little less user-friendly but it is a small price to pay for the extra functionality gains.

Migration-wise it looks like content has come across okay. Some of the comments are a little messed up due to the significant formatting differences between the two systems. Over the next week I'll go through all the comments and tidy them up so there is no confusion.

TelstraClear problems solved

David — Fri, 09 Jun 2006 11:59:03 +0000

After yet more outages and phone calls to helpdesks I finally have my Internet issues sorted out. The helpdesk guy was pretty stumped on what was causing my outages but I managed to convince him that it was due to another computer on their network somewhere competing for my static IP address. Once he had come around to the idea (and talked to his supervisor) I soon had a fresh static IP and a working Internet connection. Throughout this time I was quite thankful I had recently moved my email hosting onto Google's hosted services. It meant that even though Internet was down for most of the day no mail was lost but it did result in no StressFree website for a while :-(

Weird TelstraClear Internet outages

David — Fri, 09 Jun 2006 03:55:11 +0000

I've been having weird Internet outages today. The Internet will suddenly just drop off for twenty minutes and then mysteriously come back. I called in the morning to report the fault but they had a 40 minute wait for service (probably because others were experiencing similar issues) so I gave up. However after the fourth such outage this afternoon I rang TelstraClear and this time someone answered straight away.

I told them that my Internet was down and that it was not an issue with my internal network because I had checked it all. The guy replied that it was probably spyware and that I should get my computer seen to. His hopes were dashed when I told him it was not spyware because a) it is effecting all my computers, b) none of my desktop computers run Windows and c) the device that 'talks' to the Internet on my network's behalf is a NetScreen and even this can't communicate with the outside world.

He said that it was not their problem because the online light was happily lit on my TelstraClear supplied modem and to his knowledge there had not been any Internet outages today (leaving me to guess lots of people like ringing Paradise in the morning just to catch up on Coronation Street). So I hung up and plugged my OSX laptop directly into the modem to triple check it was not a problem with my Netscreen (or the network cable running to it). I configured it with the Internet details provided by TelstraClear but on pressing Apply was told that it could not connect to the network using the supplied static IP because it was already in use by another device. Just to be extra helpful it told me the MAC address of the device already using my address. I checked my internal network and was unsurprised to find this MAC address did not match any device I owned.

So I rang TelstraClear again, this time armed with the rogue MAC address and all the MAC numbers of my devices (just in case they questioned whether I knew what I was talking about). Again my call was answered straight away which was very good. I explained the situation again and provided the helpdesk guy with the MAC address and he started going through their logs. There was a long period of silence so I tried once again to connect the laptop to their network. This time I was allowed on the network with my static IP but routing seemed to be screwed up. A reset of the modem fixed this and I was back on the Internet.

The helpdesk guy said he couldn't find any trace of this MAC address in their logs (but he did come across a number of incorrect logins to my account which was weird). It was very strange however that my outage corrected itself very soon after I contacted them with specific proof of the problem. I guess I'll have to wait and see how things progress this afternoon as to whether the issue has finally gone away. I only wish when calling their helpdesk it was not so difficult to point out that the issue was not at my end and something was fishy about their network....

Server upgrade to OpenSUSE 10

David — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 04:17:04 +0000

With Emma away on holiday I took the opportunity to update my server to OpenSUSE 10 (from SUSE 9.2). I did a fresh install rather than an upgrade and it all went relatively smoothly. In the process I have moved from a software RAID setup to LVM as it provides a lot more flexibility and the option later to play around with Xen if I want.
In the future I am planning on migrating from Hula to Scalix or Zimbra (at this point I am hovering towards Scalix).

Here's a rundown of what is running on the server:

Hula (email)
FreePOPs (hotmail/yahoo pop3 getter)
MySQL (database)
Apache (http server)
OpenLDAP (user accounts)
Subversion (sofware development)
CUPS (print server)
Samba (Windows file server)
Sane (Network scanning)

Linux software RAID housekeeping

David — Sun, 29 Jan 2006 22:19:38 +0000

I performed some operating system maintanence this morning with the resizing and recreation of a few software RAID disks. It did result in some downtime whilst the mirrors were rebuilt but it was only for 30 minutes which is not bad. Overall the operation went pretty smoothly and I found the following two references very useful:

Google Experiment

David — Sun, 29 Jan 2006 18:12:54 +0000

I am experimenting with Google AdSense adverts in the bottom right corner of the screen to explore for myself how effective and inappropriate they can be. So far the setup has been painless and only the occasional random advert has appeared out of the blue. This is not intended to be a big money earner but I am curious as to the income rates that are achieved.

Google Search Added

David — Wed, 25 Jan 2006 11:04:58 +0000

I have been having a bit of an aesthetic cleanup of the website for the New Year. Part of this has involved the inclusion of the Google Search box rather than a Joomla search tool. This was for two reasons, firstly the Joomla search functionality is only slightly better than useless and secondly I wanted to experiment with Google AdSense after reading the Google book.

Setting up AdSense as with Paypal has been surprisingly easy, it is no wonder the company is worth so much when they can provide simple yet effective advertising space with almost zero configuration. I know I will not earn any money from the search tool but even then the statistics on the Google AdSense site are useful by themselves. I am still not sold on the Google text/image ads on the website however just because they are so busy. They could easily fit down the side of the screen but a nice bit of whitespace is a relief for the eyes especially after visiting many sites which are literally covered in text adverts and images.

PHP/mod_rewrite issue fixed

David — Tue, 13 Dec 2005 09:44:09 +0000

A keen observer will notice that search engine friendly url's are working again on my site. Whilst the SUSE bug concerning PHP/mod_rewrite is still not fixed at least the SUSE security guys have a work around: just place the rewrite LoadModule statement before the PHP one in the Apache config file. As simple config change, restart and everything is back to normal.

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Site Upgraded to Joomla

David — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 22:12:51 +0000

Of late I have been pretty busy and have not been able to do much maintenance on the website. For some unknown reason the comments function stopped working and thanks to a renegade SUSE PHP security update the mod_rewrite Apache extension stopped working (resulting in a lot of dead links).

This morning I upgraded Mambo to the latest version (4.5.3) and found things were going so well that I did a full migration across to Joomla 1.04. This migration turned out a lot easier than I first expected which is a welcome relief. Now the comments section works as expected and I have put in place some Apache redirects so that the more popular mod_rewrite links continue to function as normal. Hopefully Novell/SUSE will sort their PHP package out and get mod_rewrite working again (it has been a good week since it broke so hopefully it will be any day now).

Revit Tutorial Fixed & Other Updates

David — Tue, 11 Oct 2005 20:13:03 +0000

It was brought to my attention that aspects of the Revit tutorial (which at the moment has had over 7,000 readers) was missing the roof section and some images. I am not too sure exactly where they disappeared to but I have fixed up these bits.

On an aside downloads of the Webmin theme are going very strong, there has been over 500 downloads already and it was only released a week ago.
Just of out curiousity I have turned on annonymous comments again as an experiment. Feel free to comment on anything here.

website