With SkyBB? Can’t get online with your PS3?
It appears Sky BB’s updates to it’s services over the past few weeks have caused alot of PS3 interweb fans quite alot of anguish.
If you’re getting a DNS error when trying to connect to the PSN, then you might want to follow this link:
http://www.skyuser.co.uk/forum/gaming-sky/30222-ps3-dns-error-how-solve.html
Oh great, IE8 has broken pin placement in Google Maps API…
I’ve been doing some work with Google Maps recent, and a small part of it involves you clicking on the map to place a marker. Nothing too technical!
However, IE8 (rc1 atleast) doesn’t place the pin where you click it. There doesn’t seem to be any sequence to where it moves it to either.
After a bit of googling, I turned up the two posts below which seem to point to the issue being to do with how IE8 returns the position of the click event’s X & Y position.
The quick, dirty work around at the moment is to add:
<meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”IE=EmulateIE7″ />
to your <head>
http://code.google.com/p/gmaps-api-issues/issues/detail?id=1055
http://connect.microsoft.com/IE/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=362142
O2/Orange SMTP Problems
For some reason broadband from O2 and Orange both block SMTP access on the default port (25) to anything apart from their servers. You need to switch on the submission port on your server 587 and connect using that instead!
Photoshop failing to save to web
Had a little bit of a falling out with my PC yesterday (perhaps a later post), but today, I found that I could no longer save for web in Photoshop (CS2).
I was getting the following error “Could not complete Export command because of a program error”.
After searching for a while, I found that you can get Photoshop to wipe its’ preferences. To do this, once you’ve clicked on the icon, hold ctrl+shift+alt as Photoshop boots. You should get a message asking you to confirm.
This didn’t cure the problem, but was a useful note.
What DID cure the problem was removing “the Save for Web” options.
These can be found here:
C:\Documents and Settings\
Simply shut down Photoshop, delete the contents of the folder and restart Photoshop. Job’s a good ‘un.
Freeagent External H/D vs. Linux
I had a weird problem at work (going back quite a while now as I haven’t touched this block in months/years!).
We have a 750gb Freeagent Pro External Hard Drive (USB) which was connected and mounted correctly on our linux server. I tried, and failed, to run backups to the drive for a couple of days until I figured that for some reason after about 15 minutes of it being powered up, it would go dead, unmount itself and fall over.
Eventually I decided to have a hunt around on the internet and found that this specific drive has a sleep feature. Basically, after 15 minutes (i seem to recall) of no-use, it would go to sleep. It seems to have been configured to work on a windows based machine that may feed it some information or some such, as apparently when attaced to Linux, it didn’t care whether or not it was doing anything, it would just go to sleep!
After a while I found (stumbled upon) this article - http://alienghic.livejournal.com/382903.html and sdparam - http://packages.sw.be/sdparm/
Basically, all credit to Diane from there on. You use sdparam to change the standby flag on the drive, basically disabling the feature entirely.
Problem solved.
Server data management…
I don’t know about you, but data management can get a bit of a head-ache sometimes. At work we’re in a situation where our managed backups failed to back up MySQL databases, as it dictates that we need twice the filesize of the database directory to back them up (assuming it copies them, then compresses them, then copies them to another machine). This is quite annoying really, as if your databases take up say 10G, you need 20G free to back them up!
Obviously sites grow, as do databases. One of the main things that we like to clear out is error_log files. Some of the sites’ developers seem too lazy to turn error reporting off (or the site was built before we knew what error_reporting was!) and the files can get quite large when a site has been running for years even if its just logging that your favicon is missing, let alone everything else!
Anyways, back to the point!
How do you find files over a certain size that you can delete? Well, a little bit of research led me to this:
A BASH Script to Find Large Files on a Linux Server
Which has an SSH script from those server daddies over at Rackspace!
#!/bin/bash
# if nothing is passed to the script, show usage and exit
[[ -n "$1" ]] || { echo “Usage: findlarge [PATHNAME]“; exit 0 ; }
# simple using find, $1 is the first variable passed to the script
find $1 -type f -size +100000k -exec ls -lh {} \; | awk ‘{ print $9 “: ” $5 }’
Save the file (ex: findlarge.sh) and then make it executable with the following command:
chmod a+x findlarge.sh
Now run the script and send any output to a new file (largefiles.txt):
./findlarge.sh / > largefiles.txt &
Good stuff! The script can be easily modified to look for larger files. Currently it looks for over 100000k (100mb).
1and1 are a pack of *@?”s
I’ve always thought 1and1 weren’t actually all that bad, and, I recently recommended them to two friends. Their service is good, and as stable as I’d like for the most part, but their customer service just haven’t got the faintest clue on exactly that… “customer service”. No-one wants to help you. They only read from a script and don’t have a clue if you ask them about something mildly technical. Level 2 support seems to be slightly better, but I’ve only ever managed to get them on email, and not on the phone.
The out-look is bleak.
Here is my probably small tale of woe….
28th February - I get a bit of a frantic email from a client stating that their database is down. I look into it, in the process telephoning 1and1 for comment. They stated that I must have deleted the database through my admin control panel (simply not true). As the database is for an e-commerce website, I asked them to restore the database - which they stated they would do within 48 hours. I was a little annoyed that it should take this long, but admitted defeat as they weren’t going to do it any quicker. I went about restoring the previous night’s backup into a new database so that the site could get back up and running; minus a few orders in the db of course.
This seemed to get things going again, so I sat back slightly more than I normally would with a soft Indian voice in my head stating “it’ll be restored within 48 hours sir”.
Fast forward to 7th March. I received an email from “abuse-team@1and1.com” stating that the database (which had been closed for 9 days at that point) was pulling down the database server, and I was getting warned that if I didn’t do anything about it, they would. All well and good I thought…if I’d received it 9 days ago, before they closed my account. Why send me an email 9 days after? They surely can’t be saying that it is in use now could they?
Dear Douglas Radburn, (Customer ID: xxxxxxx)
It has come to our attention that your account database;
dbxxxxxxxxx
has been flagged up by the administrators for taking up too many
resources on the database server. Please note that being on a shared
hosting platform the database server resources are shared amongst other
users. There has been a performance drop on the server due to the
resources that are been taken up by your database.
rdb209:~# zgrep dbo158400782 /var/log/anna.log*
/var/log/anna.log:*** dbo158400782@infong315: 1124432 Queries: 1120026
Selects, 306 Ins, 3648 Upd, 452 Del, 19563 Connects
/var/log/anna.log.0:*** dbo158400782@infong315: 45996 Queries: 45526
Selects, 153 Ins, 89 Upd, 228 Del, 571 Connects
/var/log/anna.log.1.gz:*** dbo158400782@infong315: 83619 Queries: 82516
Selects, 368 Ins, 187 Upd, 548 Del, 731 Connects
/var/log/anna.log.2.gz:dbo158400782@infong315: 22404 Queries: 22181
Selects, 77 Ins, 40 Upd, 106 Del, 314 Connects
/var/log/anna.log.3.gz:*** dbo158400782@infong315: 27631 Queries: 27251
Selects, 128 Ins, 94 Upd, 158 Del, 192 Connects
/var/log/anna.log.4.gz:*** dbo158400782@infong315: 29709 Queries: 29243
Selects, 159 Ins, 95 Upd, 212 Del, 249 Connects
/var/log/anna.log.5.gz:dbo158400782@infong315: 20319 Queries: 19991
Selects, 109 Ins, 85 Upd, 134 Del, 245 Connects
/var/log/anna.log.6.gz:dbo158400782@infong315: 13260 Queries: 13061
Selects, 68 Ins, 50 Upd, 81 Del, 86 Connects
rdb209:~# myanalyser.sh dbo158400782
Analysefile /var/log/tmp/dbo158400782.log wird erstellt
Logfilezeilen: 25985
Connects: 208
Queries: 25153
Inits: 208
subjektive Belastung: 26746
Prognose auf volle Stunde:
Logfilezeilen: 97443
Connects: 780
Queries: 94323
subjektive Belastung (ab 25.000 wird es heftig): 100297
Please review the database scripts and make them more efficient.
Another possibility made available is to migrate the WebSpace to a
managed or dedicated server. You would have full resources of the
machine and would not effect other users.
We would also like to bring your attention to the T&C's that are in
place:
T&C's
--------
Hosting resources are limited due to the shared hosting nature. Our
terms and conditions(http://order.1and1.co.uk/xml/order/TcGeneral)
clearly state the following :
6.2
The Customer shall NOT:-
6.2.6
Arrange its home page(s) in a way that leads to a risk of or causes an
excessive load on the server provided by the Company in connection with
the Services;
11.1
The Company shall be entitled to suspend such access to the Services as
it deems necessary by the Customer or any third party to all or any
party of the Services if the Customer is in breach of any of Clauses: 5,
6.1.4, 6.1.5, 6.1.7, 6.1.9, 6.2.2, 6.2.3, 6.2.4, 6.2.5, 6.2.6 and 12.
This Clause shall not be construed in any way as limiting the
termination rights of the Company as provided by Clause 8.
Please note that the only solution on our services that is capable of
accepting such a load is one of our dedicated solutions, Please see the
link below:
http://order.1and1.co.uk/xml/order/ServerManaged;
--
Sincerely,
Michael Lazin
Customer Compliance Operative
1&1 Internet Inc.
I ignored the email, but forwarded it on to the website team behind the site, suggesting that this was the cause of the problem and that they look into refining some of their scripts.
Now fast forward to today. I phoned 1and1, it has been almost 2 weeks, and still no database has been restored. After ranting on the phone to them for the best part of 10 minutes, I got no-where. Apparently, the database had been blocked by the abuse team (funny that she only mentioned this after I mentioned receiving an email from them), and only they could restore the database. I’m sat here, frustrated, after nearly 2 weeks and still no database has been restored. I’m also sick of speaking to foreign people who barely understand what I say, whilst fully expecting me to understand their broken English replies.
I’d still recommend 1and1 to anyone who doesn’t actually want a website supported, they maybe just want to sit there and watch money trickle out their account whilst getting absolutely no help when the company they are paying, quite frankly, fucks up. I wouldn’t however recommend 1and1 to anyone who thinks that they might actually make USE of the server they are paying for.
