Derek Bodner’s Blog

I watch 24, and more or less enjoy it. At the very least, I have worse ways to waste an hour of my time. Suspend your belief in reality and it can be compelling at times.

But my lord, do they need a tech geek. It’s not like they can’t still have outlandish, completely implausible scenarios. Just use the right jargon. Or, at the very least, don’t use the wrong jargon. I’d rather have them literally make up words than use real words in completely the wrong context.

Phrases like “they sent this video to our subnet”, which was said in today’s episode, should not make it to the final release.

[dbodner@ ~]$ free -g
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 247

(edited for formatting)

processor : 31
cpu : POWER6 (architected), altivec supported
clock : 4208.000000MHz
revision : 3.1 (pvr 003e 0301)

/drool

Many recommend disabling logging as root, but lot many commands ( service, adduser, ifconfig and …) are not working on the commandline under when logged as su. i feel like my hands are tied working as su root and many commands are not available.

I have a pair of VPS’s that I use for my personal sites. None of which are all that high traffic, so I host the sites off of one VPS, and that VPS also runs DNS. I have another smaller VPS setup as a secondary nameserver. Today I received this message from the one provider:

On Saturday, July 11, we will be moving the server hardware from the current datacenter to our new facility. The estimated downtime for this move will be 6 hours, and will start at 2 PM EST.

As part of this move, all customer IPs will be changing. We will be contacting each of you prior to the move with the new IP address for your VPS.

We do apologize for any inconvenience this downtime may cause, and we will try to minimize it as much as possible.

If you have any questions, please feel free to open a support ticket at

Thank you for choosing as your Hosting Provider.

(snipped because I don’t feel like naming names).

Ok, wow. Where to begin. Let me see:
- You gave me a whole 10 days of notice. Considering I’ll have to be making the DNS changes, it’s going to require my involvement. That timeframe stinks.
- You’re going to physically drive the server to the new location. It’s going to have 6 hours of downtime. This is the best plan you can come up with?
- In the middle of the day? 2 PM Eastern? Really? What, are you too lazy to come in and do it during overnight hours when traffic is down?

So I fired up an email. I was like “hey, the 6 hours is really too much, and with the amount of work I’ll have to do to re-ip, I’d almost rather transfer it to a new account. You can setup a VPS that I can transfer it to myself, then you could simply delete the old VPS. This way I can do so with no downtime. Is this something you would be amenable to?” Their response: “we don’t have any VPS servers setup at the new datacenter. We can give you an old server at the datacenter you’re currently in, and allow you to move to that, but then in two months you’ll have to go through this again”.

Wow. Alrighty, so now it’s time to find a new VPS provider. This will end up being more work for me, but I can do it with no downtime. Even more of a reason I feel like moving, if this is the best plan you can come up with on a planned outage, I’m extremely worried about the decisions that would be made in the event of a disaster. Besides, I’ve been wanting to go to a Xen based provider anyway, this is just the incentive I needed.

My position isn’t a desktop support position, and I’m thankful for that. That being said, we’re a relatively small company, and there isn’t anyone in the company dedicated to desktop support, so when problems arise, it often times lands on my desk. The lack of responsible computing drives me absolutely insane. I shouldn’t have to take hours out of my day because your spyware infested computer no longer functions adequately. Next time, please do not install the flashing christmas tree lights that illuminate your system tray. Thank you.

A while back I mentioned about how the webhosting industry scares me. It still does. Here’s some recent questions I’ve seen asked by people who actually sell shared/dedicated hosting plans:
—————————

change site`s ip from the ssh ?
hello

i wanna know how i can change site`s ip from there server

—————————

Hello,

We lost ssh access in one of our vps and we unable to give ssh access with putty.
How can rebuild ssh with yum? because we have console access to server.

—————————

Hello,

How can use scp for transfer a folder?
I have following error when try to transfer a filder via scp:
…
scp: /backup/cpbackup/weekly: not a regular file

—————————
Just remember. YOU MIGHT BE PAYING THESE GUYS TO MANAGE YOUR SERVER. If that doesn’t warn you to read up and use reputable hosts, I don’t know what does. That second guy was literally trying to sell VPS’s, and the level of troubleshooting he got to was “hm…can’t ssh in, can login at console, have no idea how to troubleshoot why I can’t login so maybe if sshd got lost and I need to reinstall it mmmkay?”. Not only was it sad that he couldn’t figure out how to use yum, the fact that that was his resolution to “I can’t ssh into my server” represents someone who started using linux within the, oh, I don’t know, last week?

Microsoft execs have made a number of comments recently about the open source development model, including Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie saying Open Source is a more disruptive competitor than Google, and most interestingly Sam Ramji on the problems with Open Source.

“The other thing I think is missing is implementation of a basic principle of economic fairness. Thousands of developers have put very hard work into building software used by millions of people and companies, yet only a fraction of these developers are rewarded financially. Currently there are perfectly good projects that have been abandoned by their developers despite being used by large corporations. Subsequently the projects fall out of use. This is unnecessary waste that would often be prevented by making it easy for companies to pay the developers directly. I think it’s important to solve this so that the sustainability of open source projects is improved.”

Oh where to begin.

Microsoft commenting about economic fairness. How cute. Microsoft is like a Dinosaur, and the more they try to price gauge their customers, the more they see customers looking for more attractive software options. Believe me, Microsoft is not deeply concerned about the long term viability of Open Source projects (which has already vastly been proven with successes like Red Hat, the Linux Kernel in general, Open Office, BSD’s, et al). And as Microsoft tries to sell 8 different versions of Windows to get the most out of each customer, they continue to miss the obvious feasibility of software as a service. The fear that another software model is succeeding eats at them. Is it really that hard to pay developers if you enjoy their work? No. Most Open Source apps have a donate link on their website.

And, you know, that whole thing about developing software because you love what you’re doing is lost on the corporate culture that is Microsoft. Development isn’t solely a cash cow for all developers. Some actually enjoy it as well.

More importantly, the FUD that he’s stating in there is undeniable. “Projects have been abandoned by their developers”, as if this doesn’t happen with proprietary software. Do we need to go through the list of Microsoft software that’s no longer supported by Redmond? Or that’s failed altogether?

I love when I hear/read people say Open Source will never be more than a hobbyists toy, or that companies will never trust Open Source software. It’s like people only pay attention to Desktop development, and ignore the multitude of devices they use EVERY DAY powered by open source software, including the millions of websites/routers/firewalls etc powered by Linux/BSD. Or the Handheld devices. The TiVo’s they use. Chances are, you use Open Source software every day without knowing it. Open Source software won’t succeed? Too bad. It already has.

Microsoft has announced that they will support ODF with Office 2007 sp2, due out in 2009. Typically this would be seen as a win for Open Source and Standards, but I’m a step past cautiously optimistic, well into the “I’ll believe it when I see it, and not a second sooner” category. Having seen their “support” for Java, or their implementation of Active Directory, I can’t help but think that they’re going to “support” ODF by allowing Office to import, and maybe if we’re lucky nag the user to save in their “better” proprietary format. I may be unfair in my skepticism, but that’s what 25 years of vendor lock-in by a company will do for ones trust.