Having had my new PC up and running for a month now I recently treated myself to an 8GB RAM upgrade to bring me the the insane amount of 12 GB total. I did this with a plan in mind. The plan was to use some of the RAM as a RAM disk for use with VMware workstation. The idea being to create a RAM disk and install Windows XP or Linux in to the RAM disk.

Now a RAM disk isn’t all that much good because the moment you shutdown your PC or it crashes or the power fails then you will lose everything. But this wasn’t bothering me that much. What I did was setup my VM using a 6GB RAM disk for storage. Once I had it all setup and up to date I shutdown the VM and simply copied the directory over to the hard disk. Now I had my backup I fired it up once more and played around a bit.

In addition to this I added a second virtual disk on the VM which is always on the hard disk so applications and permanent data is to be saved either there or on my NAS.

So what’s it like? First off I tried it on Windows 7 and didn’t have much success. There are several free RAM disk solutions available but when I got my VM up and running I started seeing a lot of “fragmented disk” errors and after rebooting I had files missing and it wouldn’t boot fully. All the hallmarks of disk corruption or in this case RAM disk corruption. Pondering about it for a bit I figured that maybe this would only work with Error Correcting memory (ECC). I was about to give up but I decided to boot into Ubuntu and try from there.

This was a resounding success! No errors of any kind. XP installed from an ISO in less that 7 minutes using an automated install. XP boots up in approximately 8 seconds from end of BIOS to desktop and the performance is absolutely incredible. Installing Office 2007 took about 5 minutes and  clicking on Firefox has it opening in about 1 second!

What makes this all the more interesting is that VMware workstation has a feature called “Unity” which runs the VM in the back ground and provided a start menu on Gnome. This makes for a very interesting way to seamlessly integrate Windows appications into Linux.

Bad idea.

Instead of an upgrade I just blew away the old installation and installed 8.10. I had no problems whatsoever during the installation or the first boot. I didn’t anticipate any problems as it was a clean install. It was when I tried to settle in with a few customisations here and there is when I noticed some bad things.

• No audio for a start. It worked in 8.04 perfectly well but nothing but static noises in 8.10. Someone on ILUG had a similar problem and using a suggestion mentioned there it solved it for me but then it just stopped working again.
• X is a bit screwy with nVidia’s own driver installed using Ubuntu’s restricted driver installer. when using an application such as Firefox things suddenly go blocky and I have to scroll the window for it to re-compose itself.
• It won’t shutdown or reboot! GDM quits, I get the Ubuntu splash screen and then get dumped at the console login prompt which I then am unable to use. Pressing the power button goes through most of the rigmarole of shutting down but again just drops me to a login prompt. I’ve tried various ways of trying to reboot or shutdown such as shutdown -h now and init 0 but no luck! Same story with the reboot command.
• Some applications just quit without warning. Most notably xtraceroute and Prismstumbler. They also don’t give a reason for quitting either.

So is there anything good about it? Well it was easier to install. With 8.04 the desktop edition installer wouldn’t recognise my USB keyboard so I had to go through the painstaking route of installing the server edition, then install ubuntu-desktop, then install linux-kernel-generic because the nVidia driver wouldn’t install with the server kernel which of course meant installing gcc and all associated bits and pieces. Strangely the USB keyboard used to work with 6.06 and 7.10.

So basically it is a piece of crap! It’s the only version of Ubuntu that I have had problems with and I’m at a loss as to why I’m having so many problems. I know that it is the cutting edge Ubuntu release but I would have at least expected some level of stability and functionality.

So first up was the retirement of my IIS server on which my tech blog used to reside. I have migrated that blog over to WordPress and it along with this blog and my main site have been relocated on to a new Debian 64bit server which was previously the already mentioned IIS server.

The migration also meant that I could catch up on some tweaks that I had long been putting on the back burner. As my main site is running Mediawiki I have configured the new server so that Mediawiki now uses memcached to help speed up queries and reduce hits to the database. It has had a bit of an effect already. in keeping with the desire to reduce queries on the database I installed Donncha’s excellent WP Super Cache plugin on both WordPress blogs. To give an idea of the difference that made a quick benchmark was called for.

Using Apache Bench I made requested a blog entry 100 times over 10 concurrent connections:

ab -n 100 -c 10 http://tech.sweetnam.eu/2008/06/even-intel-wont-touch-vista/

Without WP Super Cache the results were 20.72 seconds to complete with 71.47kbytes/sec

With WP Super Cache the results were 2.287 seconds to complete and 658.38kbytes/sec

However there is a caveat with those results as each test first passed through my reverse proxy but nonetheless the results are pretty conclusive. Another configuration change that I made that may skew those results is that I have disabled Apache logging on the web server. As all traffic first passes through my reverse proxy I use its logfiles for analysis. Interestingly from another test I tried recently, disabling logging on Squid Cache had absolutely no effect on its performance!

With everything now happily in place on the new server it was time to shut down and power off both of my Sun Machines. They will be ressurected for anytime I wish to play with Solaris. My mailserver remains running on my Poweredge 2800 although I took the opportunity to upgrade to the latest version of Zimbra today.

After all todays tweaking and migrating I am now left with my Smoothwall firewall performing NAT, my reverse proxy which I decided to keep up and running as it is outstanding for filtering unwanted traffic, the new web server and my existing mail server.

It’s probably still a tad excessive though! Next up is to change the theme for this site as I can’t configure the sidebars and the search option is strangely missing!

My primary e-mail server and (mail gateway for my Exchange server) was running the last LTS version which was 6.06 (Dapper Drake) so I decided to bite the bullet and upgrade it today. I was going to wait until next week to upgrade as the mirrors were almost certainly going to be close to their maximum loads today but I found myself with some free time and upgraded it over the net.

A couple of hours later and all is peachy. I only had one problem that caught me out and that was errors when the updater was trying to upgrade the Courier IMAP server. A bit of digging about on the net got me sorted and the upgrade completed.

While on the subject of upgrades I’m planning to upgrade my main webserver over the weekend. Currently it’s running Fedora 7 but I’m leaning towards installing CentOS on it instead. Of course by the weekend I could be after changing my mind once more.

Ahh. The freedom of choice

This one however was in my firewall/router/outgoing proxy server. I noticed lots of disk thrashing going on and couldn’t connect through ssh. Once I hooked up a monitor there were loads of filesystem errors flashing past the console.

I do have a spare disk but it is 160GB which is a bit overkill for a firewall/proxy machine. Temporary measures are in place which explains how you are able to read this. Still and all,  now I have something to keep me occupied this afternoon.

Lately I have been playing around with a lot of new software and hardware that I would have liked to blog about but this blog no longer seemed to be the place to do that. To facilitate my urges for both I have decided to setup a dedicated tech blog and I will continue with this one as my personal blog.

So, if you fancy a gander, head over to http://tech.sweetnam.eu and let me know what you think. In the interests of diversity (and complexity!) I decided to set it up on Windows Server with IIS and ASP.net. The blog software itself is blogengine.net. Thank you Tiernan for bringing that software to my attention a while ago.

I plan on writing an entry tomorrow on the steps I took to set the new blog up and how I managed it using only a single static IP address. Of course that is dependent on how the new year celebrations go tonight.

Have a happy new year!

Small businesses tend to be a little more flexible and more often than not a PC would have the same name as the user. But sometimes even large corporations can have their fun. At one stage eircom named their servers after characters from The Simpsons and I just sent an e-mail a while ago to an EsatBT hosted account and the server name was tweedledummer.esatclear.ie!

A few years ago when I was just creating the behemoth that is my computer room, I decided to name all my machines after characters in Futurama, but as I upgraded or changed operating systems this has since changed and now I have most of them named after the characters in Stargate SG1. You might notice that if you subscribe to comments on my blog that the headers will show that the mail came from carter.sweetnam.eu which is my webserver. My main workstation is ‘jackson’ while another is ‘oneill’.

Anyone know of any strange naming conventions out there? Or perhaps you have given your PC or laptop an unusual name?

I was having a few issues with DNS which a few people have notified me about. Kieran wrote about it on his blog and Eoin noticed problems too. Traffic was steadily flowing in so I wasn’t sure if the problem was with my DNS or not.

Anyway it appears that it was a problem. So as of this morning I moved all my DNS zones over to a co-located server which Kieran has very kindly given me permission to do.

In other news, I submitted my previous entry comparing Ron Paul to Leisure Suit Larry to reddit last night. As expected my karma has hit almost rock bottom but my blog has nicely managed to handle a nice bit of traffic all the same. Given the problems that some ISP’s had connecting to my blog I’m sure the traffic could have been a lot more. Since my DNS changes have started to propogate I have noticed an increase in traffic. So steady as she goes.

Luckily with Active Directory you don’t need to reinstall the server OS if things go awry. It is just a matter of removing the current active directory installation, rebooting and recreating it again. But, and there is always a but where Microsoft seem to be concerned, every desktop and server will lose their accounts in the directory and will need to be added again. So before you set about doing so, it is vital to back up any user data you have on desktops, laptops etc.

Seeing as I would be removing my main workstation from AD I figured it would be a good time to reinstall the OS as it was getting a bit bloated with loads of crud added to it over the years. I never thought I would say this about Windows but the installation of XP was the very same one that the machine came with two years ago. I never had to reinstall it and likely wouldn’t need to either only for I actually wanted to.

As the PC has a RAID controller and I have two identical 160GB Seagate SATA disks lying about I figured it would be worth a complete re-install with the disks in a RAID 0 array for a bit of a performance boost.

While XP was setting itself up I reconfigured my AD which went nicely. Then recreated various user accounts and sorted out various permissions on shares. (two houses across the road connect to my file servers, don’t ask!) By the time XP was up and running with updates installed it was now time to turn my attention to my second 2003 server. I had a plan in mind for that so the OS was reinstalled and on went Exchange 2003 and Sharepoint and related patches and updates.

If you have read Kieran’s blog entry about the difficulties he was having with his ISP connecting to my site, the problem was actually to do with my DNS setup and more specifically my firewall configuration. As I was doing plenty of changes about the place I reconfigured my public DNS server and placed it in a DMZ ahead of my firewall. Hopefully this should fix the problems that were arising.

Next I set about installing Office 2007 SP1. I have to say that I like it quite a lot. The new UI is quite refreshing and after a few minutes poking about it becomes second nature rather quickly. Outlook 2007 now supports RSS feeds too so that is a welcome addition. I’ve only just begun to look at all the new features but so far so good.

My Linux machines I’m happy to say, I didn’t really have to touch. With all my messing about they performed happily although I did take the opportunity to ensure that all updates had been applied.

All that’s left for me to do is setup my media server which I think is something that I will get around to tomorrow. This machine had been out of action for a while after a motherboard failure but Dell replaced it on Monday for me so time for it to go back into use.

For those wondering how I managed to find the time to do all this today? I have a chest infection again and I was barred from going anywhere near Lucas Hard to believe he is a month old already!

Firstly, before I continue this post you do change your passwords regularly don’t you?

I was having a look over my referrers and various search terms that people use to end up at this blog. For WordPress I use the Firestats plugin. This is the plugin that also displays your countries flag whenever someone leaves a comment. However it was last week when I noticed this:

It was bothering me for a while but then other events took over so I had forgotten about it. Until today that is when I read this article on theinquirer.net which inturn leads to this blog entry about how a person had their blog hacked. I’m not sure if the articles are related to what I discovered in my logs but you never know. It is more likely that they were possibly trying to harvest e-mail addresses. In any event whoever was using those search terms above was from Russia.

So what about using Google to crack your WordPress password? All this occurs because WordPress stores its passwords in encrypted MD5 format but in what is known as un-salted mode. This means that the encrypted password is the same every time. This makes it possible to build up a database of MD5 hashes for various words. For example as mentioned in one of the links above, the author used Google to search for the word “Anthony” which in its MD5 format is “20f1aeb7819d7858684c898d1e98c1bb.”

Once Google returned a list of matches then it was possible to find a blog in which this password has could be used to gain entry if it was used as part of a URL.

If the password was ‘salted’ then there would be some extra randomness added which means that the key above would be completely different and therefore vastly more resistant to a dictionary attack.

All in all it is interesting stuff but just in case you don’t understand any of the above just be sure to change your passwords on a regular basis.