Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:30 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:20 AM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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[The monkeys seem to have gone to lunch, then. &mdash Ed.]

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:31 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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These untrained monkeys seem to have a fascination for routing loops. In other words, I can connect to them, but my packets just go around and around in their network without ever going anywhere useful.

Plus 70% packet loss to their own web server.

Every few minutes, for thirty seconds or so, there's a window where things actually work, and I can send an email or post something. If I'm quick.

I'm switching ISPs tomorrow.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:20 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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She is a bone chilling revenger of widows

She lives in rotting woodlands near poisonous toadstools

She is only seen at midday under a quiet, cloudless sky

(Get your own magic fairy! via Ramblings of SilverBlue)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:39 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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These days, when a web site won't load, often the first thing I think is:

Oh shit, I hope the problem is at my end.

As I mentioned earlier, this is not a good weekend to be a network engineer. There's a security hole that's been discovered in Cisco routers, which are a major part of the Internet's infrastructure, and techies everywhere are scurrying to patch them before some script kiddy causes havoc.

Whether either one of those is responsible I cannot tell, but this last half hour I've been suffering up to 98% packet loss here. Fortunately, it is just me, according to the remaining 2% that struggle through, battered and limping, to tell me that the rest of the world is still out there.

So for all my readers (hi Susie!), this is Pixy Misa (who these days only does weekend tech support on a voluntary basis) signing off in hopes that the less fortunate will have this mess fixed by morning.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:15 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Me: Can you tell me who the author of ______ is?

Retailer: I can't.

Me: Well, can you look it up?

Retailer: I can't. Our computers are down.

Me: Ah. Well, can I take a gander at your Books in Print.

Retailer: [Smirks] We don't have a list of all the books in print. We wouldn't be able to fit it in the store.

Me: In fact you would. We had these great big volumes and then later microfiche when I worked in a bookstore a number of years back.

Retailer: Do you know how many books that would be?

Me: Lots, I do believe you. But the fact remains that Books in Print is indeed a real thing.

Retailer: Well, we don't have it. We have computers instead.

Me: Apparently not.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:26 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Slashdot

Build your own Gauss Pistol - or, if that seems too tame, you can add a jet engine to your bicycle or go-kart, or maybe construct a 2 million volt tesla coil in your garage.

For those hard-core thrill seekers, try being a network engineer this weekend.

ZDNet

ZDNet bemoans the dangers of caching P2P data and wireless networking, or at least its current incarnations.

Fortunately, they stop whining long enough to take stock of their current Top 10 Tech Gadgets.

O'Reilly Network

Swaine Manor, one of the best computing columns around, has come to O'Reilly Network. Good thing too, as I haven't bought Dr. Dobbs (Michael Swaine's regular home) for months. [He should stick to commenting on computers, though. — Ed. Having now read his home page, I'd have to agree.]

They also have a short article on BitTorrent, the nifty file-swarming application. The article introduces the term idempotence, which is a very useful concept that more programmers need to understand, dammit! Uh, sorry...

The Register

It would appear that one of the many bad places to be a network engineer right now is British Telecom, where techies trying to prevent a Denial of Service attack instead created one of their own.

OS News

The evil and irrelevant SCO is being evil and irrelevant again. I think it's time that SCO went quietly into the night.

Designtechnica

Designtechnica reviews a 30 inch Sony LCD television. If anyone else has a 30 inch LCD TV that they need reviewed, please let me know.

Wired News

Wired interviews a blogger who is making money out of it. And no, it's not Andrew Sullivan.

(Thanks again to freshnews.org for their automatic Geek News aggregator.)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:55 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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1. In /etc/fstab, set the noatime option on the filesystem that holds your databases. By default, Linux will record the last time a file was accessed (useful if you're doing archival backups). For a database, where small parts of the file are accessed constantly, and particularly for a database like PostgreSQL, which creates a fair number of files, this generates a significant number of unnecessary disk writes. (This tip applies to pretty much any database; I've done the same thing to good effect on the Progress servers at the office.)

2. Check the -B parameter you are using. If you haven't set -B, PostgreSQL will only allocate 512KB by default, which is absurdly small for anything but a trivial database. The number after -B is the number of 8KB buffers to allocate. Be generous. (Again, this tip applies to pretty much any database. Linux will cache previously read data for you anyway, but the database buffers are likely to be more efficient, particularly if your database is intelligent about combining writes.)

3. Upgrade to 7.3. I'm not sure how big a difference this makes, but I did it anyway. This is rather more involved, as you will need to backup your databases (use pg_dumpall) and restore them (use createdb to make the empty databases, and use psql to reload the backup file). (This tip applies to most free software. Since changes tend to be incremental when you're not marketing driven, new releases are usually better than old. The rule about letting someone else test x.0 releases for you still holds.)

These three steps will turn a disappointingly slow web forum that puts a substantial load on your server into a sprightly board that hardly makes a dent on your load average.

Go to!

(Now I just need to do something about Movable Type. Since it generates static pages, it's always fast for readers, but it's a little slow on the back end. Especially if your Secret Project X™ (remember that?) involves loading up 2045 individual posts.)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:10 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Through the miracle of Autoreciprocation™, a link to Wizbang is a link to you!

Say, that Autoreciprocator™ is kinda nifty. I wonder how I can get myself one of those...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:57 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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