DavidPierron.Com

I think this is the layout that I will be sticking with … I messed with the CSS enough that I like the way the text flows, and I re-arranged the order of the boxes on the left by updating the template … The colors are a mixture of grays with the ICUHost blue color for some of the text … I tried to stay relatively dark (for the eyes) but still keep it sharp …

The fires from yesterday … New iMac keyboard; I bought basically the same one, except I guess it’s a newer version .. It sits in its own little clear plastic tray … I am composing this entry using this keyboard, so I will see how many mistakes I make whilst typing this in … So far, so good … I got it at CompUSA and while there in the Mac section, I saw this book “Mac OS X Panther for Unix Geeks” so being that that’s where most of my Mac experience has gone to start with, I figured a book might be nice for some further direction.

Before heading there, I stopped by the local PC store and picked up a Radeon 9200 and an 80G IDE drive for the server that had its 20G crash … I tried installing the card last night and no go … It doesn’t work for whatever reason … So, I will go back and maybe try the 9600 … Didn’t get a chance to install the 80G drive, but I did see some 160G Seagates at CompUSA for $160 … Seems it’s about a buck a gig now … Crazy! Since I had my video card out, I tried an Nvidia card that has been laying around for a while, and that works, so I left that in for the time being …

You know, the more you mess with stuff, the more you learn … While I didn’t decide to pick today to design a new layout for my personal site, it just happened … Much the way I think most things happen … They just do … For example, when I came home from work Friday night, I learned that this kid who played on my Counter-Strike Server died that day … It started with a sore throat and no amount of penicillun could get rid of it. Finally diagnosed as Toxic Shock Syndrome … forget it, you’re a goner … and it happened unexpectedly … While the re-design of a web site layout is nothing compared to a death, it sort of is, isn’t it? Well, that’s stupid irony and probably a stupid way of thinking, but I guess all this thinking I am doing, I am doing in type. Regardless (irregardless isn’t a word), I have redesigned the layout and have been tweaking it, I will leave it as it is right now for another time … I must now venture out into the world and see about putting out other fires that exist …

Apparently this “Personal Publishing System” decides that my entries are too old and then starts to move them off of the page. Because it’s a CSS layout, it changes the look of the site which is my default web site … I have links here to places I frequent … There are other links I would like to have handy, but I don’t want them public … I haven’t had a solution to that .. yet …

What have I been up to? What’s been going on? Well, sometimes I wonder how much I should actually post on this here thing … I mean, it is public, and it could be accessed by anyone, so what to “conceal” and what to make public? How much of what I type in here has affects on other things? I honestly don’t know … So, I just type and see what happens …

The ENT guy that prescribed me to get bloodwork changed my appointment, so I am going back there later. Today has been rainy, so all day yesterday my sinuses already told me it was coming … I don’t think my antibiotic run did a damn thing, but hey, it’s good for practice. The blood test came back, and my family doctor said my blood was thick so I had to lose weight … So, next time I am going in there I am going to punch the doc in the nose, swipe some of the blood off his face and offer after looking at his blood that I think he’s bald and skinny. Call me fat will he?

Web hosting is now turning around and around … I created new DNS servers on FreeBSD … I put them in place about two weeks ago. Just today I close all DNS ports on the Windows servers. In fact, the secondary box for one of the name servers crashed April 26th or 27th … It also used to be the network’s MySQL server. Thankfully I had moved the MySQL serving to a FreeBSD Server in previous months, and I had just changed the DNS Servers, so the box wasn’t doing much of anything … Fate?

Customers are coming and going … In some cases, it’s a good thing to see some of them go … The people that I gave the world to, much time, and there was no sense of appreciation … Not that I necessarily needed that to begin with, but it’s just that some people don’t realize what the heck is going on out there/here … But, this brings my services into a specialized area … I feel that making my customers people who’re educated in the ways of the Internet makes the acceptance of my ideas or actions that much more justified. There are those that think a change is a hassle … I can see them rolling their eyes and saying “What now?” … but realistically all change has been for the good. Once everything is put in place, I don’t see much reason for change, only expansion …

All the “service” type servers have been moved to FreeBSD Servers … This is awesome … So now, Mail, MySQL and DNS are served by servers that will never go down and are updated much easier than a Microsoft server … I must say, as I always do after tooting FreeBSD’s horn, is that if Microsoft performed well, I would probably have never done this. But, MS Servers have to be booted frequently … and when they’re not booted on purpose, sometimes they decide to boot themselves … Whenever a MS Server boots, obviously DNS isn’t available … It’s one thing to boot from maintenance at 4AM or something, but the Microsoft servers like to boot during peak hours on their own with bugchecks … While this could be attributed to 3rd party applications, there is much money involved in those applications simpy because they’re MS applications … When using FreeBSD you have the availabilty of all the Open Source software you could ever hope for .. Not to mention that the FreeBSD operating system smokes Microsoft servers hands down …

So, I’m not necessarily here to judge the MS Servers or operating systems, I am simply reaching the goal of stability provided by the servers that provide the service that I “sell” … Making those services closer to 100% reliability meant putting FreeBSD servers in those places where MS has constantly failed me … Once there is a base of FreeBSD stability with the ability to also serve Windows type content (ASP, .NET), then we can certainly work towards a better recovery or backup type reliability in the way of data and power …

I appreciate the people who know what I am on the road to accomplish, and I appreciate that they understand the range of what why how and where … With sharing this development with me and by utilizing these services, they’re all molding this web hosting company into a solution for everyone … While I know that there’s a huge competition in the hosting market, I also know why … I spend countless hours reading documents and learning what it is that’s actually out there … PHP.NET has a link to the webhostingtalk.com forums at the top right of their page … I have simply read in there about all the nifty things that people are or aren’t doing … I have also had conversations on the phone with people who hosted with “big” hosting companies and much preferred my way of thinking … They just recently signed on, and they are going through the general learning that I think anyone should know being in the Internet business … This is something that non-RFC-compliant Microsoft people simply don’t know and have a user friendly operating system there trying to solve all the problems … Where I think they missed it was that instead of being user friendly and fixing things for you, they should announce the error and instruct the user on how to fix it … How will people learn if this isn’t done? They will have learned how to accomplish something the wrong way and poison all of those after them on how to accomplish something … Soon the solution will break (with an update or something) …

Well, enough of my rantings … I feel that I am in the right direction when it comes to the solutions I have decided on providing … For myself and anyone else who’d like to share these benefits with me (customers) … This is why there’s no nickel and diming of services or hidden gimmes or gotchas … Straight hosting with the availability of the world! I simply couldn’t justify charging extra for things when I don’t have all of the extras that “big” companies have … But, most of the time, they’re just words on a web site or another check to put in a display table … at least I’m honest about it … I’d say most SPAM’d hosting offers are from people who have colo’d a box with a 160G HD and installed CPanel (or similar) and pay $150/mo for the colocation … This one box does all their hosting/mail/database/billing etc … and when it breaks? Oh well … I think anybody could do this, but in the real world … All of these services need to be separated run and monitored individually on their own machines …

So, if anyone has any questions or anything regarding any of the drivel I have just composed, well before, but the stuff you just read, drop me an email or something … Thanks!

Happy Easter …

Not that anyone cares, but I got a haircut Friday night … well, really Saturday morning at about 3am … I have been so busy working that I haven’t had a chance to get a haircut … been missing the girl that cuts our hair cause she can only come by in the evenings … I only have a select few Monday evenings, and for some of those I have had to go out or work on other things … So, Friday night I asked a manager where a good place to go and get a haircut … He made a phone call and while the band was packing up Friday night, I was getting a haircut in the coat room … Neat!

Lost some business … I offered to do a web site for free a while back that I figured would be a high traffic site … I was never able to get to it, so the guy I was going to do this for decided he would go somewhere else … He never ever asked me what the hold-up was or anything, so I put up no fuss about it and figured I would just let that go … Again, things gotta change …

I am off this fine Easter evening, but it comes in the penalty of not having a paid holiday … oh well … I will either spend it coding some pages or watching some movies with the wife … The decisions are so hard to make … =)

So, the show tonight is canceled due to the weather … It’s really not even that bad … But, here I sit, working on another Out On the Town (well, in between my other stuff) and thinking about all the things I have half done, or three quarters done, or just started … or the things I say that I can do but never remember to do, or forget to do … This was part of the reason for a “project manager” application … Where I could keep track of all this stuff …

I told my father a year ago (or was it two years ago) that I could write something for him in 2 weeks … See? Isn’t that bad … I mean, I know that I could have had somethig working for him in two weeks, but the more I looked into it, the more involved it got, and where I know I could make it work much better as a web application, I was just overwhelmed with other projects … the little things I had to do to make other people happy … To make money to sustain whatever I have in the way of bills, etc … But, people are suffering … I’m sure my dad is suffering …

Now that I have the 6 night a week job, my work ethic is totally screwed up … By the time I get rolling in that programming mode, it’s time to either go to work, or pack up to go home from work (if I set up the laptop there and got involved). Now I have business coming in that I certainly don’t want to say no to, but I have said yes, and now projects sit not getting done …

This has to change, something needs to be done … I’m not really sure what right now, but I know I need to fix this …

Today, the big thing was the Steam update … I did both CS Servers and finally th client updated … At least now I know the game that I hardly ever play anymore is all up to date … The server usage has dropped off a lot too, since about last Sep/Oct … You can see the decline of the outbound traffic on the T1 connection statistical graphs here.

The other has been the flood of virus filled emails trafficing through the servers … The FreeBSD server is catching most, but the trick of the spammers is to password protect zip files, and this way the virus scanners can’t open them and identify them as virus emails … the latest one I have heard of is that they say something about ‘your email server having to do maintenance’ or something, or ‘due to the volume of virus filled emails’ you need to unzip this file with password ‘blahblah’ and apply the contained patch to continue to receive your email … It’s really disappointing what people will do just to cause other people grief … I don’t understand the motivation, because you’re not really even seeing the results of this …

A guy who resells through me asked to have a Ticket System set up that is Open Source … He was into the features, and I suspect the price wasn’t bad either … He wanted to utilize a FreeBSD server to accomplish this … The distributed version of this package comes in a SuSE RPM good to go … There’s also a RedHat one that they say isn’t tested (?) and there is a tarballed source that you would use for other systems (such as BSD) … I got the one working for him on a FreeBSD machine, but I thought it was pretty slow … So, I have SuSE 8.0 and 8.1 here in boxes (bought from store) and I installed an 8.1 box and brought this up myself … It runs much faster on the SuSE box (same hardware) … Why? I dont know … After trying countless ways to upgrade the 8.1 box to 9.0, I finally started a 9.0 install via FTP on another box … The reason I have another box is as follows …

Brought up another rack of computers … So, I hooked up another KVM and another switch … Got the crossover cable going over there and the boxes are responding nicely … <1ms ping time ... but weird, if I ping the switch directly I get varied results ... Switch has been sitting for a while as I didn't need it, but expanding into other operating systems, etc, I figured I could use some more hot machines ... Maybe Mandrake will find its way back? I always wanted to check out Debian too ... As I recall, the Mandrake version of proftpd supported quotas itself, so it didn't have to be compiled into the kernel ... Anyway, so that's what I've been up to ... Updating Counter-Strike, bringing up Ticketing systems utilizing FreeBSD and SuSE, and installing the power, network and KVM stuff for the new rack of machines ... They've just been sitting there a while too ... Not much time to get to everything all at once, but someday I will, no?

So I have to appear in court about my truck being parked on the sidewalk … I have parked my truck next to my house on the sidewalk for years … It started with the bread truck, and then when I got the box truck that took its place … Never had a problem except the occasional ticket that I paid and didn’t mind paying because I felt much safer with the truck parked right outside … When this CLIP program started in Philadelphia, one of my illustrious neighbors felt it was their part to call in my parking the truck on the sidewalk … There was even a period there where I got a ticket every day … I can’t remember if that was before the CLIP program, but we got word back that someone up the block had a bug up their butt about me parking the truck where I have for years … Eventually, I was served a notice that I had to “Cease maintaining a private parking area” and I had to move my truck … I had 10 days to comply or something … So for a couple weeks I parked the truck outside of my sister-in-law’s house … When that blew over, I just started parking the truck back where I always had, on the sidewalk … This last violation to “Cease maintaining a private parking area” was a summons to appear in court …

So I go to court … and explain all this … that I have not constructed anything to maintain a private parking area, and that I simply park on the sidewalk … I said that I would move the truck, and I paid $48 court fees … Our government hard at work …

The stuff I have been doing with the iMac is on its own web site at http://imac.icuhost.net … I also wanted to mention that I found a really neat thing via the iMac in iTunes … There is an iTunes Radio … and there’s all these Internet radio stations … I found one that plays all old blues tunes … It’s available to anyone at http://www.bluesonair.com. Check it out if you get a chance …