Welcome to MekTrix 4.0

It occurs to me that in all the time I’ve been here, I’ve never written about Dorris. The most probable reason is that I only met her recently.

Doris is my shopping partner; we walk around Sainsbury’s together, and point things out to eachother. She’ll say something like “ooh, look at them apples. Aren’t they nice and shiny?”, and I’ll say “ooh, they really are. If I were here to shop for food I think I might get some~”. Then walking past the cosmetics isle I’ll find some new smelly soap and say “ooh, Dorris, have a sniff of this!”, and she will, and she’ll think it’s lovely. “Never had that sort of thing when I were your age” she’ll say.

We never arrange to meet, but she’s always there ready to lend a hand, whenever I go to get something. She practically lives there, except that would be an inappropriate way of describing who passed away a few years ago. She died doing what she loved, smelling the scents of the fresh vegetables — in her old age most of her senses had faded, but her sense of smell was as strong as ever. She was just walking along the fruit section one day when she fell, and never got back up… But enough of the depressing stuff. She’s quite happy now; she gets to spend all day walking around, chatting to anyone who comes by, helping them to find the loveliest products, and learning about all the new ones as they come out. It’s nice to have someone like that there, who really knows the shop inside out.

I asked how long she’s planning on staying; “I don’t know”, she says, “but I’ve got a good few years in me yet”. “Don’t worry”, she continued, “I shan’t leave without saying goodbye to all my favourite shopping friends; just promise you’ll come say goodbye if you leave first, y’hear?”. I agreed, of course.

Alas, like all mortal shopping trips, this small description must come to an end~ If you want to know more about Dorris, you shall have to come and meet her for yourself; I’m sure she’ll be glad to meet you, it’ll be a lovely experience for you too ^_^

Iron Man’s beta test flight sequence has joined the list of “Things so awesome I cried”. It occurs to me that I’ve not kept track of this list, so off the top of my head:

• Farb Raush’s .das .produkt; 15 minutes of pretty in 64k
• The uprising scene in V for Vendetta
• The Sylvia Cannon trailer from the Korean pangya site
• The FFVII trailer on of the OPM demo disks
• Planetarian deserves an honourable mention; it would probably have made me cry with awesomeness if I hadn’t already been crying with sadness :3
• I’m sure there are others, can’t remember right now though :S

I just woke up from dreaming about barbequeing a chunk of my own leg. It was tasty :3

The guide to Sarge I found here very nearly worked, but with some problems.

Quick summary of changes:

• where libpam-ldap and libnss-ldap suggest an LDAP URI of ldapi:///, ldapi://127.0.0.1/ doesn’t work — ldapi:// seems to be for unix sockets only. ldap:// or ldaps:// should work (I’ve tested ldap:// so far, as it was communicating with localhost)
• The /etc/pam.d stuff was screwy — where that guide suggests replacing your pam_unix.so lines with completely different ones, I suggest replacing them with copies of themselves but “required” replaced with “sufficient”. Screwing with my existing pam_unix.so config broke the ability to change local user’s passwords.
• In common-password, the “use_first_pass use_authtok md5″ after pam_ldap.so gave me a “passwd: Authentication information cannot be recovered” error when trying to change the password. Removing them (so that the line simply reads “password sufficient pam_ldap.so”) works.
• To clarify; the general idea of the common-* files should be “unix auth is sufficient, if that fails then ldap auth is sufficient, if that files then denying access is required”. I suspect that “unix auth is sufficient, if that fails then ldap auth is required” would be the same, but IMHO that’s uglier and more prone to breaking if people want more layers later.

Sorting through some of my old code, I found a link to one of my old websites; the site itself is long gone, though googling it did bring back memories; days of hunting down “host 1mb for free”, “get a free subdomain”, etc sites; hosting things on my 56k modem. Also, playing SMAUG and having parents yell at me because I’d been using the internet for a whole hour, and it cost a penny a minute! Then downloading 200MB of software development stuff in 1.4MB chunks that took 3 hours each…

Screenshot! Mektrix v2, in Mozilla (it was modern at the time), running on one of my first linux setups XD

Coniston’s network card died, and I was the nearest employee; thus, my turn to run up to the datacenter and replace it /o/

This would be easier if I had parts, or the tools to attach them -_-

Wilkinsons do screwdrivers though, which is useful \o/ Though they are cheap and bend when you attempt to unscrew things with them /o\ Even less usefully, it seems that wired networks are dying off — All the high street stores had shelves full of wireless cards, but at best 2 or 3 ethernet models, and those were 10/100 v_v

After trying a few shops and being pointed back and forth, I ended up at yoyotech, which seems to be a place of at least some clue; the sales dude (Brian, apparently) asked if I was using linux, and googled to see if the model of card was sufficiently supported~

Having bought it (and a second of another brand, just in case), I was off to the datacenter /o/ The trip was relatively short and uneventful, aside from a youth in a shopping center throwing a big enough tantrum for the police to take note :-/

The DC itself was relatively normal, with coolers and cables and such; the part exchange went well once I’d figured out how to get the side panels off, and what to do with the switch bolted to the side o_O

On the way home, the train was declared unfit for human transport, so we all had to get off and wait for the next, which was much more crowded :( But then I was home \o/

Shimmie now powers a site which gets half a million page views per day, serving 200GB of images :3

Re: Lack of updates, see Dan Kim’s blog for a far better illustrated parallel to my thoughts…

I don’t know if I’ve ranted on this last time, but it happened again with another site, so I shall rant again. For context, I’m the technical admin of a certain large site, which I won’t even name due to NSFWness — I’m just mentioning it here so that visitors from that site know who I am :) A brief timeline of events:

• 2 days ago, I move the database to a separate server, as MySQL grinds to a halt when the database is too big to fit in RAM.
• At around 11pm yesterday, the site suddenly dies, printing “500 Internal Server Error” in response to all requests
• Restarting the web server fixes it, but the old PHP processes don’t die, and the new ones lock up pretty quickly too
• PHP isn’t actually printing any error messages, it’s just locking up; LigHTTPD only prints “All PHP processes are busy, try again later”; MySQL logs show no error messages.
• It seems that the site is fine for as long as nobody tries to post new content.
• I try stopping and restarting the database, it says “Can’t stop database”
• I finally realise what happened — the disk with the database tables filled up, then MySQL crashed and died horribly, corrupting chunks of the tables. Then when PHP asks the database what’s up, and the database says “error”, it doesn’t print “there’s a database error”, it just dies horribly and locks everything up, causing ISE’s and using up all the ram until everything around it dies too.

In contrast, my preferred database server, Postgres, ran fine throughout the incident — read-only requests were served as normal, and if anything tried to add data it would be told “the disk is full”; no crashing, no corrupt data, no problem. Also, it seems to scale better, currently dealing with a database of 8 * the size of RAM quite happily.

It’s 7am, so I’m going to bed now; first thing I do when I wake up will be start work on giving this app Postgres support; then I can uninstall mysql since nothing else needs it \o/

Things of Note:

• bicycles!
• chocolate
• tasty foods~
• their milk has gauges :O
• “http” and smiley buttons, which don’t seem to work…
• On the way back we were driven off the motorway by the french police, taken to a warehouse in the middle of nowhere, and some of us were taken to some random room for an hour of questioning o_O

The first in a series on conversations that never actually happened:

— Conversation That Happened —
Car: *beep*
Guy: *wave*
— What Happened in My Head —
Shish: *wave*
Guy: Oh, you know Tom too?
Shish: Tom? I thought that that was Old Farmer Joe, sitting on his tractor, taking his apples to market o_O
Guy: … you need glasses ._.
Shish: That I do, lassie. That I do…