Archive for the ‘Server related’ Category

The server was a little on and off today, sorry about that, I had to roll out an update that was long overdue and it didn’t go quite as planned.

A while ago, when I started this blog i used to rely on a couple of plugins to perform a few basic functions: Visitor statistics, Spell checking and a couple of other things. At some point down the road most of these got merged into “Jetpack”. Jetpack is kind of an official “megaplugin” that gives you access to a bunch of excellent features and let you piggyback on some services provided by WordPress.com. But there is a catch:

It’s extremely slow.

What you’ll actually use is in the glove box.

It might not matter on a professional, high capacity server, but the reality is that this is not what i have access to. I can “barely” run an unmodded Minecraft server. Jetpack introduced a huge latency both for visitors and for me when publishing, yet some of its features (Stats, automatic social media publishing, spell-checking, contact form…) where invaluable to me. Followed several years of damage control, trying to optimize the site’s response time with all kinds of caching and preloading voodoo.

Today somehow was the last straw, I say goodbye to Jetpack and hope that i will never have to come back. Now for those who are curious, here are the plugins i now use in replacement (subject to change), and YES it’s still faster.

• WordPress Contact Form Maker
• Google Analytics Dashboard for WP
• NextScripts: Social Networks Auto-Poster
• TinyMCE Spellcheck

Fuck you jetpack

As it turns out, when you try to use Twitter/Facebook and other social media APIs as an individual, without using any kind of intermediate service/company, the procedure goes from mildly annoying, to utterly impossible: Google for example doesn’t want to hear about you, Facebook and twitter both want your cellphone number, Plurk was by far the most convenient so far… but who use Plurk anyway?

I finished all the textures (excepted one really) for the cuffs yesterday and did some experimentation on specular maps. I also cleaned up the model for upload in SL. I’m spending the day doing system upgrades on my servers and will get back to the cuffs tomorrow.

I spent the better part of yesterday setting up the ethernia.net server for a much-needed reboot (after 6 months uninterrupted), which ment updating everything, compiling a fresh kernel and in general, ensuring that the system would be in a stable state before restarting it.

Which wasn’t the case…

About 3 hours of outage around 2pm GMT+1 while i tried to figure out what had gone wrong (no physical access makes boot failure diagnostics difficult).

Thankfully, everything is now (mostly) back to normal.

I’ve spent a couple of hours cleaning up my plugins usage and configuring my web server for maximum caching ability.
This allowed me to move from a “D” grade on the YSlow benchmark to a “B” grade. I’m pretty happy with it, it looks like I can’t really do better unless i start using a Content Delivery Network. Which won’t happen because of the price, and because I’m allergic to cloud computing.

I just finished the update to baselayout 2 for ethernia.net, using this pretty handy gentoo guide:

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/openrc-migration.xml .

I have to admit i was pretty scared about the idea that i just might make the system completely unbootable, but everything seems to be working just fine for now. But apparently, as long as you follow carefully the documentation, you should be fine.

Just a little thing, if you have to do this migration too and, like me, use a non US keyboard and happen to have encrypted disks that need password entry during the boot sequence, there used to be a glitch on baselayout 1, where the system would be in qwerty even with your keymap set to a different keymap in /etc/conf.d/keymaps . Just keep in mind that this time your system will boot with the keymap you have set, so you might need to enter your passwords with the normal keymap this time.

I still have a lot of PHP related work to do before I can resume my usual SL activities.