Computer Genius Blog :: aka “TheGarage”

I noticed over the weekend that my domain dcdo isn’t working. The tip off was that I wasn’t getting any spam in my inbox. How likely is that not to happen, really? Ping returns the new IP address but doesn’t reply. Probably some further adjustment to the DNS records needs to be made.

I haven’t taken the time to mess with the DNS issues because I haven’t been here much except for on weekends and this past weekend I was busy trying to figure out how to run WordpressMU; the multi-blog, mult-user version of the software I am running now. This is a key step in the process of changing my infrastructure from Domino to hosted WordPress. It wont be any fun maintaining and posting to a half-dozen or so blogs that each have a seperate installation.

Like on the other thing I got it working half-assed but then I had to keep tinkering with it to make it work how I want it too. The closest configuration I found as a model was from Dan Frey at the Office of the Provost Web Team blog at the University at Buffalo:

“Our situation is interesting, but I would not call it unique. We have a server that has multiple domains pointed at it. We installed MU in a directory off of the root of our server, /wordpressmu. Our default domain name is ugly - the idea was that we wanted folks to be able to go to nicedomain.buffalo.edu/myblog and get to their blog on our server.

Easier said than done…

Yep pretty much what I’ve found out. My situation is the same except I want to point any domain to any blog regardless of where the blog is and regardless of where the domain is. This is what I have so far:

I know the symlinks are the way to go and that’s how I found Dan Frey’s article–by Googling wordpress mu symbolic link. I’m pretty sure Dan has it figured out I just have to tinker with it some more.

But dang I can’t mess around with it forever. It’s one of those deals that I’ll have to revisit after I get a few other things worked out, like my damn mailserver at dcdo.

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And don’t we know to whose advantage Windows Genuine Advantage is. But what happens when Windows Genuine Advantage doesn’t work?

Late last night we started receiving reports from readers experiencing problems with Windows Genuine Advantage authentication. Users of both Windows XP and Windows Vista were writing to say that they could not validate their installations using WGA, and one user even said that his installation was invalidated by the service.

We contacted our sources at Microsoft, who told us off the record that the company is aware of a major WGA server outage affecting users across the globe. The Windows Genuine Advantage support forum has exploded with complaints, as a result, and Phil Liu, WGA project manager, says that he won’t sleep until the problem is fixed. Windows Vista and XP are affected, 32- and 64-bit versions.

I bet Phil Liu is one very tired son of a gun.

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I still have some work to do on the infrastructure changes I’ve been making over the last several weeks. First, let me recap what I’ve done so far.

I bought a hosted account where I have ample space on a Linux server. I can use the provider’s packaged services or I can load my own. I am using the MySQL service and phpMyAdmin utility which is provided with the account, including up to fifty databases. Each database can only be 100 MB so that may have to be upgraded eventually.

I passed on the blogging software offered by 1and1.com and loaded Wordpress for my content management system. As a test I saved several categories of technical and business related blog posts from incongruities as .xml files that I could then import into Wordpress. Wordpress did a pretty good job of importing those articles considering I know the xml was not well-formed.

After the import process worked so well on the test I decided to move my blogs and point my domains to 1and1.com. I activated this blog first and it was a simple affair because I bought the domain name from 1and1.com.

Then I set out to move incongruities from Domainsite’s DNS servers with as little work as possible. The first idea, which was the simplest and one I should probably have skipped because it didn’t work, was to forward the domain name to 1and1 with a masked URL, meaning that the URL would still start with my domain name after the request was forwarded to the new address.

I got that configuration working but only half-assed, then I somehow trashed it completely. At that point I went back to what was probably the best simple option which was to change the DNS entries of incongruities to point to 1and1. After doing that I set up a virtual host entry in my apache configuration at 1and1 and pointed it to my webspace directory holding the Wordpress installation for incongruities.

All the while this is going on I am switching my internet provider here at the house. I finally have a high speed cable connection that knocks the old DSL in the dust which means I have a new IP address here in the garage. To complete that change I had edit the A and MX DNS records for doncallaway.org to point to the new IP. My web server and mail server here in TheGarage will still be handling http and SMTP requests for doncallaway.org.

In summary, so far I have installed Wordpress ona remote host, converted and moved two blogs and one website to the remote host along with the MySQL databases that go with the blogs, and I have switched Internet service providers at the house. Though it doesn’t sound like much, it has taken my spare time over the course of several weeks to accomplish.

FINAL GOALS:

I still have at least three blogs and a substantial photo gallery to move to the hosted environment. One of the blogs is in Blogger and the other two are here in TheGarage. Of the two here in TheGarage, one is a photoblog so I have to figure out how to move all the images with the appropriate linkage.

After I finish all that I will have totally redone the way I operate my vast publishing empire. Only archives and backups… and a sandbox, oh and a mail server will remain here in TheGarage. Everything else will be hosted off site.

I will have bandwidth. I will have uptime. I will have industry standard software. I will be taking a big doo in high cotton.

One of the by-products of this move is that I will be able to decommission a few pieces of aging equipment that should have been put to pasture years ago–most notably the relic Dell Poweredge 6300 workhorse. Even though the Dell would make the perfect sandbox it is just too big, too noisy, too hot, and too expensive to operate. In other words it will make a perfect boat anchor as well.

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It’s snappy, that’s for sure.

CMA never did correct the problem. I’m sure once they get it corrected my gear wont work anymore. Turns out they bind the MAC address of the device connected to the cable modem with an IP address and even though I purchased a static IP that will never change, my router still has to use DHCP to acquire the IP from the provider. No problem. The problem is that they set up the wrong MAC address so the cable guy calls in and has them change the MAC address to use which would fix the problem. Then I’m told changes to the MAC addresss can take up to 24-48 hours. I’m like what?

Anyway it still wont work with the settings they emailed to me yesterday (like I am supposed to get an email on Internet that doesn’t work) but I have rigged it up so it will work.

I was able to plug the cable modem into a network port on a PC and let the cable modem automatically configure  the network connection. Then I looked at the properties for the connection and wrote down the IP configuration, notably the MAC address that was being reported.

I then plugged the cable modem back into the router and instructed the router to use the MAC address I specify when communicating with the cable modem.

Bingo. So when, or if, they ever change the setting at CMA, my connection will go dead and I’ll have to change my router’s configuration again. I bet a dollar it never gets changed. They was just gonna leave a brand new paying customer without service until I raised hell. All because they don’t really know what they are doing.

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The Internet is Dead. So says Dallas Mavericks owner and erstwhile internet tycoon Mark Cuban.

We have reached a point of diminishing returns with today’s internet. The speed of broadband to your home won’t increase much more in the next five years than it has in the last five years. That is not enough to work as a platform for new levels of applications that will require much, much higher levels of bandwidth.

I think we may have a slight case of sour grapes here and what Cuban really means is that he has come to the realization that his business efforts surrounding the Internet are dead. Ironcically, later in the article we found out the Internet is about as dead as the telephone:

Answering questions by email from the Cayman Islands, where he was vacationing with his family and recovering from hip-replacement surgery, Cuban also shared his views on Rupert Murdoch’s acquisition of the Wall Street Journal, Yahoo versus Google, day-trading, his personal investment strategy, and why he won’t pull the plug on his much-criticized business journalism operation, Sharesleuth.com, in which he shorts companies that the site plans to trash-hoping to turn a tidy profit on his pre-publication insider knowledge.

Yes Mark, there are other things to do with the Internet than make Billions of dollars on a gimmick. I could have told you five years ago streaming hi def video to the home was not going to be doable any time soon. Not because I am so smart or anything, but because it is just common sense to look at the size of file that contains a full length movie and then look at the pipe available to shove it through and anyone can see that it will take forever.

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It was all just a wet dream. What was I thinking; it’s August, not December.

The cable guy finally showed at about noon yesterday for the “easy install”. He did a good job hooking me up from the pole but left me hangin’ three hours later with me waiting for a phone call from the office letting me know the configuration has been corrected. It was a phone call that never came. Sometimes after four I dozed off for abit while listening to John Gibson drone on about The Big Story. By the time I called CMA Cable, whose number I had to look up in the regular paper-based phone book, I was informed by the answering service they close up shop at 4:30.

That’s damn inconvenient.

Like I trusted the cable people to be able to roll up in here and deliver high speed cable Internet on the first try. Finally giving up on cable for the day I switched my router back over to DSL. It didn’t work, of course, but it didn’t work the same way it always doesn’t work so I knew I would at least have connectivity to the Internet this morning because in the morning my DSL miraculously starts working. Then like clockwork it goes out every evening. But there is nothing wrong with it I’ve been told.

Anyway, I’m rehashing. Maybe CMA gets it figured out today, maybe not. So far their customer service rating is not looking good.

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It seems me SSI is not working properly on cgwwff. Suddenly my footer with all the nav buttons and sitemeter and whatnot isn’t showing. Dammit it’s always something.

UPDATE: It was the old XBitHack trick. My .htaccess file was”renewed” somehow in the process of all the domain changes and blog reconfigurations and the problems therewith. I was using the XBitHack for cgwwff to implement server side includes for my footer without having to change the file name of all the pages to an .shtml file extension, which is required for the server to process includes. XBitHack tells the server to scan all pages with the executable bit set so I can just chmod +x *.html and presto all my web pages will be scanned for the include footer directive.

It’s important to enable this for only those pages that need it as a slight burden is placed on the server for each page scanned for includes. No since in incurring an unnecessary burden on the server for pages that don’t even have an include, eh.

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…only better!

Waitin’ for the cable guy, my heart pining away for what he is bringing for me. I can hardly wait. I know it is going to be sooo good. I have been on his schedule for over a week now and he is finally coming to my house; it’s my turn for service. Bring it on big boy!

I’m talking about high speed cable Internet, of course. If it is all of what people who have it say it is, I know I’m going to be creamin in my jeans. No more blackouts, disconnects, slow transfer, kids screaming about the crappy internet. Here is the background on my Kids computer:

I’ve had worst case scenario DSL for quite a while, getting 128K/bps up and way less than 384 K/bits down. People with low cost DSL and cable get three times that bandwidth and those who pay a bit more get Megabit throughput up and down. SWBATTCingular… acknowledge the problem but wouldn’t even consider lowering my monthly rate even though I was paying a premium already for static IP addresses.

But a couple of months ago the service went totally to hell. It would basically go off every night around 6:30. Sevenish sometimes. But sure as hell it goes off every night. When you are only home in the evening that is the equivalent of having no Internet. The kids are upset–at me no less, thus the not-so-subtle message above– that their day long gaming has been interrupted while I am basically unplugged from the Big Brain for up to twelve hours. Talk about kicking heroine and nicotine being difficult…

Oh well, I did call SWBATTCingular… and gave them the opportunity to address the problem but a man named Gilbert–or was Gilbert with the Internet host company? Anyway they both sounded like their name probably wasn’t Gilbert and he said there wasn’t anything wrong and I would have to call back when the problem was actually occurring. Damn inconvenient.

Kinda like how it is damn inconvenient for me to be sitting on my ass here at the house waiting on the cable guy to fit me in to his busy schedule sometime between 8:30 and noon instead of sitting on my ass in Texas City where they pay me a decent hourly rate to do so. The catch is that I have to go to Texas City to do basically the same thing I do here.

Like I told the nice lady who took my order for high-speed cable internet this is going to be an easy installation. Since we had cable service here at some point in the past the coax cable is already run up to the house right at the spot where I need it shoved inside. Shove the cable through, plug in the cable modem, verify connectivity, give me my IP address, and thank you very much. Wam bam thank you ma’am.

I incorrectly figured they would knock out a couple of easy ones first thing but more likely they save the easy ones for the heat of the day. No sense being in an attack at noon when you can be standing in the A/C bullshitting with an old school technology hack.

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Microsoft shill and PC Magazine’s editor-in-chief Jim Louderback says about Windows Vista:

I’ve been a big proponent of the new OS over the past few months, even going so far as loading it onto most of my computers and spending hours tweaking and optimizing it. So why, nine months after launch, am I so frustrated? The litany of what doesn’t work and what still frustrates me stretches on endlessly.

I could go on and on about the lack of drivers, the bizarre wake-up rituals, the strange and nonreproducible system quirks, and more. But I won’t bore you with the details. The upshot is that even after nine months, Vista just ain’t cutting it. I definitely gave Microsoft too much of a free pass on this operating system: I expected it to get the kinks worked out more quickly. Boy, was I fooled! If Microsoft can’t get Vista working, I might just do the unthinkable: I might move to Linux.

Not that it will make any difference for Microsoft, but any other company that did not hold a monopoly on it’s market would be rightfully concerned. It doesn’t matter how bad Vista sux because at some point all Microsoft has to do is turn off support for XP and Vista is the de facto standard.

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This seems like a big deal.

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