Messages

51

Living Room / Re: Anyone here using a standing desk?

« on: May 11, 2011, 03:32 PM »

Also, according to the graphic each extra hour of TV = 11% extra death risk,
So by that logic, watching 10 hours of TV would instantly drop you dead

52

Living Room / Re: Anyone here using a standing desk?

« on: May 11, 2011, 03:29 PM »

So, If I am to believe this infographic, then eating gum while sitting would consume more energy than standing?
So, obviously the solution is not to get a standing desk, but to chew more gum! 

53

Living Room / Re: what is the benefit of this old style network

« on: April 24, 2011, 11:56 AM »

At work (Hosting company) we run a quad-nic setup.

* Two NIC's for internal (LAN) traffic.
* Two NIC's for internet (WAN) traffic.

In VmWare the two LAN NIC's are grouped, and the two WAN nic's are grouped for redundancy. (if one link goes down, the other one remains up.) - They are also connected to four switches, that are also set up in a redundant manner.

This allows a physical separation between LAN and WAN for security and performance, and a fully redundant network.

Nowerdays with VLAN's you can get away with separating LAN/WAN on the same switch, but many sysadmins and corporations are (with good reason) paranoid enough to not trust their network separation to a VLAN configuration in a switch (which can be hacked to change the config). Physical separation is simpler than VLAN's and not subject to (malicious) misconfiguration in the switches.

54

Official Announcements / Re: Server - Apache problem running out of memory

« on: April 19, 2011, 08:24 AM »

First of all, while mouser states "we don't know" he really means "he doesn't know" I tried to explain, but oh well...

The problem is this:

Recently we have been implementing a lot of caching in order to speed things up. The database currently does quite some heavy query caching, and on the apache side we have besides the usual stuff, APC for php opcode caching (which the forum software, smf, can use the API for). All of this, of course comes at a cost of memory.

We had maxclients set quite high (200), which makes things run pretty fast with prefork, since there's always processes around to serve new clients. The problem is that the average apache process size has grown to around 30MB, so worst case scenario is 20*30MB=5.8GB, which is more memory than the server has.
In fact, after the aggressive MySQL caching, there is only 780 MB free for apache to play around with.
This is why I have decreased MaxClients to 20, which will prevent us from running out of memory, at the cost of some slowdown.

So really, all we have to do at this moment is probably just make the MySQL caching a bit less crazy, to make some more room for Apache.

As f0dder points out sort of kind of, the fact that Apache with prefork is process based, it makes memory consumption a bit hard to predict (since the memory size of a process changes by what script is running, moreover, if you use keepalive, it grows with the number of requests a client makes over the same connection to the same client thus making things even more unpredictable).

I wouldn't go as far as switching httpd, but we could switch MPM. There is an experimental event MPM for apache, but I'm not sure how I feel about using an experimental MPM on a production server.

To make matters worse, packet loss at softlayer has been really hurting us.
This is their latest excuse:

    SoftLayer Engineers are aware of the sporadic packetloss and/or connectivity to FCR01.SEA01. Currently engineers are working on resolving this issue; however, there is a chance a reboot to the router will be required. In the event this needs to happen, a notice will be posted here along with any other information gathered.

-- Update --
Service has been restored to customers behind FCR01.SEA01. During the process of working on the router, the issue manifested itself into 100% CPU resulting in upstream and downstream links going down along with routing protocols. Engineers were able to stabilize the router without a reload, and are currently monitoring it to determine if the fix is permanent.

-- UPDATE --
Engineers have determined this is not a permanent fix for the FCR01.SEA01 issue. During the course of troubleshooting this issue with Cisco, it has been determined that the best course of action is to upgrade the router to the latest IOS version. This will be happening at approximately 01:30 CDT.

--UPDATE--
Engineers are continuing to work with Cisco TAC on this issue. At this point, the router has been restored to service at approximately 03:20 CDT. Some customers may continue to experience intermittent packetloss behind FCR01.SEA01.

Working for a hosting provider myself, I understand that stuff happens, but this packet loss stuff with them has been going on ever since we moved to their seattle data center every day.
Also, one would think that softlayer is big enough to have a replacement router ready they can just put in (or have a proper redundant network that can route around it for that matter).

55

Mircryption / Re: Blowssi - Perl v5.10.1 - 2/3 subtests failed

« on: April 19, 2011, 12:34 AM »

You might be able to get away with just skipping the make test step.

I'm not the author of Crypt-ircDH1080 so you might want to ask whoever made that module.
All I can say is that it works fine here on perl v5.12.2
It's pretty hard to debug stuff without ssh access over a forum

56

Developer's Corner / Re: Partial (corrupted) downloads from a server (Not a valid win32 application etc)

« on: April 11, 2011, 04:17 PM »

Does the server allow download resuming?

-Stoic Joker (April 11, 2011, 11:55 AM)

Yes. (Apache does by default)

57

General Software Discussion / Re: DLS: Mozilla publishes name and shame list of slow Firefox add-ons

« on: April 05, 2011, 07:03 PM »

Might be worth noting that they only benchmarked ff startup/shutdown time, not the actual impact on page rendering!

58

Mircryption / Re: mircryption-compatible script for irssi

« on: March 31, 2011, 02:47 PM »

The meewbies.com instructions might be a bit outdated since they were written for previous versions of blowssi.
KiTTy was nice enough to put up the instructions for the older versions, but hasn't been around lately to update it.
The "official" instructions are included in the archive.
Basically, you just need to install the required perl modules, drop the script in ~/.irssi/scripts and add a /load line to your ~/.irssi/startup line for it. Not much to it really

59

Living Room / Re: The Official DonationCoder.com card game: CodyCards

« on: March 30, 2011, 08:15 AM »

Awesome! looks great!

60

Mircryption / blowssi - mircryption compat for irssi - v0.2.0 - Jan 03, 2011

« on: March 29, 2011, 01:57 PM »

blowssi is a an irssi cryptography script.

Download from official web page: http://linkerror.com/blowssi.cgi

Key features:

• Compatible with mircryption and FiSH.
• Supports both cbc and ecb encryption modes. (to use cbc encryption just prefix the key with cbc: )
• Blowssi is Free (both as in freedom and as in beer) software (licensed under the GNU GPL v3)
• Blowssi will work on any platform perl and irssi work on.
• dh1080 key exchange (since 0.2.0)

Requirements:

• perl (...duh)
• Crypt::ircBlowfish (see bundeled zip file, but also available from donationcoder.com)
• Crypt::ircDH1080 (see bundled tar.gz file)
• Crypt::CBC (on gentoo you can just: emerge dev-perl/crypt-cbc)
• MIME:Base64 (on gentoo you can just: emerge perl-MIME-Base64 (which is a virtual package) or emerge perl-core/MIME-Base64 though you probably already have it.)
• irssi (... duh!)

Installation:

• First make sure all requirements are installed (see above).
• To install, just put the script in ~/.irssi/scripts and put this in your ~/.irssi/startup :
• /load ~/.irssi/scripts/blowssi.pl

             
More detailed installation instructions: http://mewbies.com/h...r_irssi_tutorial.htm

61

Living Room / Re: The Official DonationCoder.com card game: CodyCards

« on: March 29, 2011, 12:20 PM »

Looks good!

But yes, a codycards specific thing would be neat I imagine, with a graphic of cody in a cage filled with coins, and lots of things coming at him (the predators and weapons etc on the cards)

62

Living Room / Re: The Official DonationCoder.com card game: CodyCards

« on: March 29, 2011, 12:03 PM »

If you're going to have the cards professionally printed, shouldn't you have a design for the back?

63

Programmer Libs / Re: PythonProtoCards - Prototype Card Game Images - v1.2.01 - 3/25/11

« on: March 25, 2011, 12:23 PM »

As having played fun games made with this library, I can only recommend it!

64

Living Room / Re: Amazing LEGO Great Ball Contraption Breaks World Record

« on: March 19, 2011, 11:01 AM »

This is extremely awesome.
I wish lego wasn't as expensive as it is

65

Developer's Corner / Re: Discussion of CMS suggestions for the DC software directory

« on: March 02, 2011, 05:09 PM »

Yeah, but it's still what would be ideal.
I wish there was a CMS LIBRARY instead of a CMS webapp. This would make life so much easier in terms of integration. And not just for DC, but for umpteen other projects i have going

66

General Software Discussion / Re: What's your favorite eBay/auction helping software?

« on: February 24, 2011, 02:46 PM »

i like auctionsieve, it's cross platform

67

Living Room / Re: Black ops: how HBGary wrote backdoors for the government

« on: February 23, 2011, 06:23 AM »

HBGary Execs Run For Cover As Hacking Scandal Escalates
http://blogs.forbes....g-scandal-escalates/

68

Living Room / Re: Black ops: how HBGary wrote backdoors for the government

« on: February 23, 2011, 05:36 AM »

http://lcamtuf.blogs...world-of-hbgary.html

Linked in the above post is a link to the details of the attack, how hbgary got compromised: http://arstechnica.c...-the-hbgary-hack.ars

69

Living Room / Re: Black ops: how HBGary wrote backdoors for the government

« on: February 20, 2011, 02:14 PM »

http://92.241.162.216/hbgary/

Mirrors:

• http://hbgary.anonleaks.ch
• http://92.241.162.216/hbgary
• http://77.91.225.168/hbgary
• http://hbgary.leakmirror.org
• http://anonleaks.okhin.fr
• http://hb.cryptologic.tk
• http://leaks.anonamegame.com
• http://hbgary.prooops.de
• Tor: http://q46v6775dhfqrqln.onio

70

Developer's Corner / Re: Registrations on Websites: User Chosen Password vs. Assigned Password?

« on: February 17, 2011, 02:28 PM »

This one is easy:

It's just a matter of risk assessment, like anything in real-world security.

A generated password is better.

The chance is FAR greater that a person will chose a weak or reused password than that their email will be sniffed.

In a perfect world, it would be even better if the password is shown to them after signup over https and not emailed.

71

Living Room / Re: which is more important, system ram or video ram?

« on: February 07, 2011, 12:50 PM »

It all depends on what you want to do.

If you're not a gamer or 3d artist, then you don't have to think twice about it. System ram for sure, it's general purpose, and benefits almost any application. It allows you to do more heavy multitasking, etc,...

If you plan on playing games, or work in anything else 3d (3dsmax/maya/blender/etc) the story changes a bit. The amount of video ram will be a key factor on how much (3d) stuff you can show on the screen at the same time. (Amount of vertices, texture memory, etc,...) this is important for games, but also for anything else 3d. (Say you are doing detailed architectural design or something in a 3d application, you will start feeling it when your card is showing more geometry on the screen than it can handle) - Unfortunately, it gets more complicated in this arena. You also want to look at the gpu and memory clock rates on your video card. - If you plan to get a video card you should be looking at gpu and memory clock rate, and amount of memory.

Almost any modern video card, integrated or not, will be able to handle the native resolutions for most monitors today, so if you're not doing anything 3d i wouldn't even worry about it.

72

Developer's Corner / Re: Need Advice on MySQL Server Tuning

« on: February 03, 2011, 06:36 PM »

I would say that the major rule of thumb is to try to not allocate more buffer space than your machine has memory, though that can be hard to predict.

73

Developer's Corner / Re: Need Advice on MySQL Server Tuning

« on: February 03, 2011, 02:41 PM »

Besides what was already mentioned...

* If EXPLAIN shows it's using filesort, you might want to increase your sort buffer sizes.
* If you have some queries that repeat alot, enable query cacheing... it will turn those queries into lightning

74

Official Announcements / Re: Server Slow/Load Issue - Jan 22, 2011 - search temporarily offline

« on: January 27, 2011, 08:26 PM »

And, on top of that mysql also caches query results.

75

Official Announcements / Re: Server Slow/Load Issue - Jan 22, 2011 - search temporarily offline

« on: January 27, 2011, 12:02 PM »

memcached?

APC