Thanks to my charming wife, my blog has been redesigned to be somewhat more appealing. I have noticed that many of the techno-babble blogs or personal websites look bad. Usually – black on white at most. Sometimes, some awful design.
I am proudly not part of *this* group anymore 
And my “lab zone” needs to be packed up. I’ve closed the lid of some of the computers in the lab, and piled them up. Got about 27 computers, some of them in working order, without counting my “Production” (yeah) computers, 6 computers acting as servers, two desktops and one laptop. Two additional laptops I did not count, don’t know why…
Of my non-”production” computers, One is P4, few are P3, many are P2 and P1 (or equivalent, of course). Two Apples, one Sun. Used to have SGI, but it didn’t work, so I gave it to a friend to try and make it work. He failed, as far as I know.
I’ve taken few pictures of my pile in becoming. It is not all of the computers, but it’s a pile of 20 already. Check it out
Still got 12 or 13 more computers to add to the pile. Most of them being my “production”, I believe they will be treated better.
I’ve been under a huge trackback attack, and, to be honest, closed the whole comment mechanism by a mistake.
It is now announced as open.
I’ve noticed some of the later entries were to my ML110 and Linux post. Now, with comments available, you can feel free to ask for clarification, if needed.
Cheers.
I’ve been to our own little “August Penguin” just few days ago, and it wasn’t too good. I avoided the lectures (who needs secure rsync?!?), but sat and talked with friends about all kinda stuff. One of the advantages of such an event is that you get to meet lots of your linux-related friends, and you get to talk technicalities with whoever you feel like doing it. It’s the place for it. You speak of funny geekish things you had, and people around you laugh. You tell your saddest stories (how the storage went berserk, for example), and people understand what you’re talking about. That’s the fun part. Other than that, it wasn’t that good. Wasn’t worth the long drive, and the day off (well, the day off was worth anyhow, for what it is).
I didn’t do much since. I’ve refused a job offer, as the salary was too low, and the driving was too long, and I will be interviewed for AIX clusters soon, which I don’t like anyhow…
Our client, the one with the hosting server, got hacked. It was a minor thing, and some defacement, but he detected it a day too late, and we could not dig it out of the logs. Not only, we found out the hacker run sendmail, on some arbitrary port, and we just removed it, and tried to locate the hole in though he got in. It’s something with PHP. It’s always something with PHP. I have no idea as to what, especially when there are around 400 hosted sites on this server. We’ll know better in the future, when it happens again.
A server of a friend of mine was highly loaded in the last few days. It appears Apache was killing his machine. His Apache is supposed, in 90% of the cases, to respond once, and close the connection. I’ve helped him, and removed the keepalive, and although it decreased the number of running servers dramatically, there were few instances of apache still consuming high CPU. Using extended server status, and top, I was able to notice the high load was due to some specific PHP script, which got to wait for 10 minutes, each time. I was able to point out at that script, and he checked it, and found a bug. Small PHP bugs get to increase load on servers dramatically. One should be aware of it. Anyone can write PHP scripts, but only some can write it with performance in mind. Mind you.
