Recently in Whole Site Development Category

Well I have been busy with other pursuits and have not had the opportunity to do much on my systems except very late at night. Late nights aren't always good when you have other things pending in the early morning.

I'm posting because Autostatic (whoever you may be) posted a comment “http://www.dhoytt.com/mainblog/archives/2008/05/packagekit-new-default-manager.html#comments” to my initial post about “Pirut” being removed on how get the “Pirut” install bits and install Pirut of course.

Link to Pirut FC9 : http://ia64.koji.fedoraproject.org/packages/pirut/1.3.30/2.fc9/noarch/pirut-1.3.30-2.fc9.noarch.rpm

Well I installed Pirut from the link posted and it is working just fine.

Packagekit's Flaky Operation on New Fedora 9 Install

Since my initial post I had also installed “Pirut” on my backup web server because outside of “Packagekit's” lack of features I liked Fedora 9 and there was a version of a software package that came with Fedora 9 I really wanted.

On this second install of Fedora 9 Packagekit exhibited behavior I did not see or could reproduce on my first Fedora 9 install.

On the second Fedora 9 install Packagekit would show it had updates I would then go click on the Packagekit icon on my toolbar and it would flash for a second and go away.

I even ran the Packagekit debugger I got from “http://packagekit.org/pk-bugs.html” and looked in my log files every time this happened and I couldn't find the reason why Packagekit would flash and go away without letting me interface with the GUI.

This behavior did not occur on my first Fedora 9 install and went away after a reboot on my second Fedora 9 install but after the initial usage after a reboot Packagekit would once again flash on the screen and not let me interact with it's GUI.

I finally left Packagekit alone to deal with time sensitive non-computer issues. I was still deciding however to possibly go back to Fedora 8 or hope someone came up with a nice update of Packagekit or the Pirut Fedora 9 bits or start using the Fedora 8 Pirut bits.

Thanks to the post by Autostatic pointing to the Fedora 9 bits I can patiently await the new Packagekit when its fully functional

Pirut on Fedora 9

Pirut seems to be working fine in Fedora 9 so far. Pirut asks if you want to install source channels for Fedora 8.92 (beta sources possibly) but I said no. Pirut works fine after that and of course you can edit out any sources later in “Software Package Manager”. I have been unable to get this version of Pirut “Software Package Manager” to show available software from the repositories though.

Synaptic Package Manager

While looking for Pirut/Software Package Manager in the programs section I found “Synaptic Package Manager”! The “Synaptic Package Manager” GUI looks just like the Pirut/Software Package Manager I just installed but also shows the available packages.

Applications Locations

You can find Pirut Software Package Manager after the install:

Applications -> System Tools -> Software Package Manager

You can find Pirut Software Updater after the install:

Applications -> System Tools -> Software Updater

You can find Synaptic Package Manager:

Applications -> System Tools -> Synaptic Package Manager

Well looks like I will be using Pirut/Software Updater to update my system for now and Synaptic Package Manager to install any new packages while I await Packagekit's growth. I'll keep playing and see what I run into next!

Due to the nasty weather here today that featured high, wind and rain my site was down briefly after UPS power went out.

As you can see though the site is once again up after several power outages my site was down for a very short time as the last outage finished diminishing my UPS’s power.

Once again the UPS proved their worth giving me time to let geographically distant colleagues know I was without power and gave me ample time to shutdown and prepare.

I was also able to keep my site up through the first two power outages as well as keep working the job.

Just wanted to say Happy New Year for 2008 from the Capital of Cali, Sactown, and the West Coast and all over the world!

I will have my new site which I have mostly built up on my other system soon in 2008 so check back.

I will have my full E-commerce store shared out, some games you can play on my site, shoot-em ups as well as some other games.

I will have my music site http://www.dhoytt.com/snake-ice-radio-blog/up as usual with some local artist I currently have in my mix and more others hopefully with forums.

As far as the forums I will have them for the music artists and the games and possibly the E-Commerce site.

Right now I'm just writing up some FAQ's and site usage tutorials etc...

See ya in 2008!

I had to finally move back to my 7 foot 19 inch rack for my systems from my 3.5 foot 19 inch rack system. I needed to regain some needed floor space and the shorter rack took up more floor space and didn’t allow me to have organization of my routers and switches.

The smaller rack was longer by 13 inches (39 inches front to back) and 3 inches wider. That length was cutting off my room too much and my network and power cabling were harder to follow when trouble shooting and nearly impossible too keep organized.

I was going to buy a relay rack to sit over the smaller rack with some modifications. Good thing I decided to look at my previous rack that was in storage first. After taking measurements I determined it was what I was looking for and weighed a lot less as well. That small rack is built like a tank!

Well I still have to get the wires straight and a few other items and then I will update the content on my sites!

Short Rack

Tall Rack

I am back on my former ISP Surewest.com with 20mbps upload and download capabilities. Since I host my own website and Internet radio station at home (http://www.dhoytt.com/snake-ice-radio-blog/ ) it is extremely important to have not only a good download speed but a good upload speed for my site visitors.

My radio station has been choked off the last few months while I was with the other ISP. Why in this computer/telephony driven world would an ISP who has fiber to homes only offer .786mbps upload & 6 mbps download over fiber at higher prices is beyond me.

Upload speeds have become very important for even the casual user as they place images on photo sharing sites or send them to friends and families around the Internet. There is the proliferation of chat and online classes at work and schools that need better upload speeds.

People are streaming video and playing games that require more two way communications so a decent upload as well as download need to be used to judge ISP speeds and usability.

My continuous lobbying of my Home Owners Association paid off and we now have a nice alternative in our community that I had previously been with since their initial inception when they were called Winfirst telecommunications. I had Winfirst/Surewest in my former residence and the last few months without them have really made me appreciate them. Surewest is not perfect but they try to give the best service they can which is far superior to other ISP’s.

Surewest’s prices are substantially less for a lot more product. Having Surewest is like buying Internet bandwidth wholesale, not to mention they have video on demand for their TV product and their phone service is just as good if not better. Their support, installers and field personnel are customer friendly and know what they are doing. They don’t charge you every time you switch your service either. Like I said not perfect but this is what we call old fashioned good service.

In the Sacramento/Roseville, California area people actually mark their calendars for the day when Surewest will be coming to their neighborhood! People in areas without Surewest fiber service actually have committed to memory the date Surewest will begin fiber connectivity construction in their neighborhood. Even my super technology challenged parents query me about when Surewest will be in their area.

No I don’t work or have any other affiliation with Surewest or anyone at Surewest but I like their model and hope they keep it up and wish that other Telco’s would follow their lead.

I’m actually seriously contemplating moving but the ISP issues in other parts of the country concern me and with my involvement in technology that is a serious concern. Not many ISP’s have fiber to the home and even if they do they offer copper bandwidth at outrageous prices compared to what I have.

Bottom line I’m glad I have my 20mbps service back and I will soon be making other serious changes to my site to take advantage of this bandwidth.

I’m up on my site after totally moving off of my previous ISP Surewest due to my moving out of the area they service. I am missing them already.
I had physically moved a couple of months ago but had not rented my previous house yet so I decided to keep my music server, my web server and another computer at my previous residence until I rented the place out for the outstanding and superior Internet service that Surewest provides.
I am now paying more money for a lot less. With Surewest (surewest.com) I had 20mbps up and 20mbps down for 49.95. With Comcast I have 8mpps download and 786kbps for upload for $52.95. Do the math and the upload speeds are 25 times slower with Comcast than with Surewest and this is important since I host my music and web servers at home! The downloads from Comcast are only 2.5 times as slow as with Surewest.
Now Surewest has fiber and that’s why they are so fast and now offers even 50mbps and soon will offer 100mb per second! This is where I get very upset in the new housing development I moved to Comcast as well as AT&T have fiber lines but still offer only copper wire packages and speeds.
Who in the world cares if you have a fiber cable offering but cannot offer fiber speeds and packages? Then when you call them they brag they have fiber but whoopee who cares I’m not benefiting from it and neither is anyone else with fiber connectivity! I get the same speeds as a person on their copper infrastructure.
Then to get a static ip.address with AT&T I would have to purchase 5 static ip’s with a starting price of $85.00 @ 3mps download and an anemic upload speed I cannot recall. With Comcast to get static ip’s you have to go to their business package that starts @ about the same price as AT&T’s static ip offering. Plus each company buries this information in hard to reach areas of their sites. Surewest only costs $2.95 for their static ip.address.

Tonight unracked the systems so they can be moved to th new place keeping only the web server, music server, my main desktop system and a system I use as my TV in my computer room, even though my main system and other systems have that capability.

Now its time to move but the music server and web server will stay up for a day or so more then I'm gone to figure out my new situation for while and be offliine a while probably.

Yes I had been living with a sendmail hang on my web server since I removed my second NIC (network interface card). I do not reboot much but I had some time and thought it would be nice to insure that my web server boots up quickly and with the sendmail hang of several minutes it was not a very fast process.

The first thing I had noticed was that the second NIC eth1 was still being called upon during the boot up process. I had removed the entry from /etc/hosts, /etc/sysconfig/networking/devices, /etc/sysconfig/networking/profiles/default but it was still being referenced somewhere.

After looking in /dev & /proc for references of eth1 I finally saw a directory in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ and found a reference to eth1 with all of the settings of the removed NIC.

I removed the eth1 script text file from /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ and rebooted the box and no longer had eth1 referenced only eth0 the only physical NIC on the system.

Now even though I no longer had eth1 showing up during boot I still experienced a hang on boot when the system started the sendmail server and client daemons.

Well obviously there was another reason and I found that reason in /etc/hosts. It seems that /etc/hosts did not have my local loopback defined any longer I corrected my local loopback, using one of my other Linux systems as reference to look like the following:

localhost.localdomain localhost

I did the reboot on my system and it came up so fast starting the sendmail daemons along the way I was barely able to see them referenced on the screen during the boot process.

Now that the sendmail issue was fixed there had to be other issues associated with the system resolving correctly and I soon found the issue. Now I could not log into my mysql database instance for my blogs.

Trying to login to my blog I got the infamous Bad ObjectDriver config: Connection error: Access denied for user 'NNNN'@'ip.adress' (using password: YES).

I wanted to write this post and could not login initially. This became an issue because I used to have the two NICs and pointed separate databases to be accessed off of the two different NICs but I used the same username but different passwords for that username depending on the NIC you were accessing the database from.

So for this Mysql login issue I went and deleted the Mysql user pointed to the now removed NIC and changed the user to access from the NIC now on the system and changed the file on Movabletype to the password of the username on my current NIC eth0.

Now I can login ok to my blogs as you can see and sendmail no longer hangs on boot! Now its time for me to check my other database instances to insure they work ok as well

Well my power just went out so now to see how long my UPS' will keep my systems for my sites up and running.

I hope they stay up long enough for the power to come back on. Time for me to log off and shut a few things down to conserve power.