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BSD/Linux DrupalRecover Tech

FreeBSD, ZFS, Rackspace, and to Debian

So the old server has always crashed quite a bit and been a bit slow for no obvious reason otherwise. So I spent some time trying to optimize the server with various things but then it occurred to me to consider this message on login:

### ZFS Tuning ###

ZFS is NOT tuned for instances with less than 1GB RAM.

For tuning 256MB and 512MB instances, the following link is recommended reading

http://wiki.freebsd.org/ZFSTuningGuide

Now the image I’m using has less than 1GB RAM so I went to that wiki and tried to do some stuff and totally messed up the performance. At least that somewhat proved to me that it was ZFS and low memory causing the random hangs. The wiki notes the ‘bursting’ behaviour of the ZFS filesystem sometimes. That’s what the server had been doing! Trying to tweak it a bit I just made it worse. There was nothing in swap and any disk based activity was REALLY SLOW. Just tarring things up after my tweaks freezes the system… Darn fancy filesystems. Combine that with I was starting to get some package issues with a mixture of compiled packages and trying ‘pkgng’ I thought I’d given Debian a try again.

Debian has no slowness issues! I’m 99% sure it was the ZFS and low memory. So as much as I like FreeBSD this I’ll use Debian. I do like apt better than pkgng anyhow, much more refined. I was almost getting into a version of RPM hell with FreeBSD there… (At least it’d never ruin the whole system with BSD though)

Anyhow switching to Debian worked fine, I can’t get the SMTP server working for some reason but everything else was easy to port. And there is no more random hanging. Also  no swap space is used at all for the same configuration, so either it very likely was ZFS that was the issue on FreeBSD.

Categories
Computer DrupalRecover Tech

CSS Fun

Thanks to Codepen for the fine CSS that inspired the new header above. Very nice. Lots of neat things you can do with CSS and Javascript at Codepen. Here’s where I got the fine CSS for the above:

http://codepen.io/boldfacedesign/pen/EoGgD

Categories
Computer DrupalRecover Tech

Net neutrality and hypocrisy

Thanks to net neutrality fine internet content like this can exist and anyone can get to it for free. What a lucky dog you are! However recently a court struck down the FCC’s attempts at net neutrality.

The Republicans truly are Orwellian 99% of the time. Here we get our most recent example in a court’s recent striking down of net neutrality they claim victory for innovation and the free market.

This is what could happen if net neutrality fails and the ISPs can decide what we’re allowed to see for what cost – so much for freedom and innovation – more like cable and money:

Thanks to whoever created that image which is here: http://imgur.com/5RrWm

How is internet not just part of infrastructure? And we need the infrastrucure protected so that everyone can continue to have access to it. We don’t let water companies shut off the water if they feel like it. We expect electricity of the electric company. We regulate those to make sure they stay available to all. Anyhow if you are reading this presumably you like using the internet (regardless of whether you like this post, you do like the internet) and should want it kept accessbile for all without limit or extra fees for something that was free.

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BSD/Linux DrupalRecover Tech

Fetchmail and SSL certificates

I have to search for this periodically being sites like to change their SSL certificates every once and a while. So here’s another place to look for it!

If you don’t know what Fetchmail is its a little program (maybe its gigatic, I don’t know) that fetches email for you from many different email servers. This allows me to have one place where I store all my email across all my email addresses and then I can use an IMAP email server to view it all in one place. Very nice if you’ve many different email address.

In order to do this magic you have to tell fetchmail how to login to your email accounts and its always better to do this securely over SSL. To do it over SSL you have to tell fetchmail the site’s SSL certificiate (or you could weaken fetchmail to not care to validate the certificate but that seems silly). And to do that you have to tell it in hex or other computer sprach.

So first you need to get the SSL certificate in computer sprach:

openssl s_client -connect pop3.live.com:995 -showcerts | openssl x509 -fingerprint -noout -md5

Running this will get you the certificate computer sprach entry itself that’ll look something like this:

91:63:CF:6F:DF:03:3C:B9:3E:19:B3:1C:FF:EB:3C:25

Second you need to tell fecthmail to use this id when it connects to the server in the fetchmailrc file:

poll pop3.live.com uidl protocol POP3 user “xxxyyy@live.com” there with password “ohSuchASecurePassword!@#$” is xxxx@tttt here ssl sslfingerprint ‘91:63:CF:6F:DF:03:3C:B9:3E:19:B3:1C:FF:EB:3C:25

There you have it! That’s almost a good memorable, secure password I just made up there.

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BSD/Linux DrupalRecover Tech

Port forwarding VNC connection

One sad day our old modem failed. The phone company gave us a new DSL modem/router. I had figured out how to setup portforwarding and such on the old modem. I can’t get into the new one at all! After briefly attempting to get info out of the phone company about how to access the new modem’s admin interface to no success I gave up on all my nice old port forwards.

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BSD/Linux DrupalRecover Tech

Notes for a general webserver

I’ve got a pretty nice free setup for a webserver I’ve been taking for granted now. So for anyone starting off wanting to setup a server with email, webserver, and database here are some applications I’ve found reliable and somewhat easy to figure out.

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BSD/Linux DrupalRecover Tech

Pi bits

A couple of really handy things that may not be obvious when using the RaspberryPi.

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BSD/Linux DrupalRecover Tech

Rackspace and FreeBSD

(2016 note – Debian ended up winning!)

This took me a bit to figure out and almost had me switch away from FreeBSD to Debian! Oh my! Exciting I’m sure. Briefly this site was completely down due to this.

Categories
BSD/Linux DrupalRecover Tech

RaspberryPi wifi restart

(2016 update) I actually wondered where this one went!

I’ve got a Raspberry Pi that keeps losing its wifi connection whenever the microwave runs too long. Here’s at least one way to get around this since the wifi doesn’t seem to rescan on its own.

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BSD/Linux DrupalRecover Tech

Arduino Project #1

Recently I discovered the Arduino. Its an open source microcontroller that makes playing with electronics more fun for the computer programming savvy. Rather than having to find all sorts of components and understand a bit too much of how they all work, you can have the little microcontroller do it for you. Great! I’ve a couple of “experiment with electronics” sets to compare against and the same projects are 1000000% easier using this whole new fangled ‘computer’ thing. I’ve got many projects planned now.

The first is just scary eyes it being Haloween. Nothing fancy but they are actually a bit creepy from the outside.

Here’s the Arduino and breadboard – pretty easy: