CAN I BE OF ASSISTANCE?

Guck

I forgot why I went with MySQL rather than PostgreSQL for Minx, when PostgreSQL is so much more flexible and robust.

Full-text indexing in PostgreSQL is fucking hideous.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:40 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Time To Die...

The latest bizarre failure cascade (a hiccup in a single MySQL table on one server leading to a completely different server becoming unbootable) made me think of this:

I've seen Sun monitors on fire off the side of the multimedia lab.  I've seen NTU lights glitter in the dark near the Mail Gate.  All these things will be lost in time, like the root partition last week.

Time to die...

Coda: And here's me going aargh, now I can't even post to my own blog on my own software on my own server...  Oh, yeah, 7PM exactly, the backup just kicked in.  One minute later - fine.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:03 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Offsite Backups

After our recent brush with disaster, I've been paying more attention to backups, including properly setting up the offsite backup server to do offsite backups.

There are, at last count, 5,172,047 user files on the main mu.nu server.

Thanks go to Movable Type and maildir.  I hate maildir.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:34 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Ah, Bind Mounts

Of course.

The new mu.nu and mee.nu servers - probably arriving next month, depending on Intel and the weather - are going to be running on a virtualised platform.  Current contenders are Xen and XenServer (which provide better isolation between virtual nodes) and OpenVZ and Virtuozzo (which provide better efficiency).*

The way you set up either platform is pretty similar: You allocate a big bucket of disk space (which had better be RAID, or you risk losing everything at once), and then you create your virtual environments in that bucket, granting them certain amounts of disk, memory, and CPU resources.

Which is easy to configure and works fine for a basic setup.  But one of the other new things about the new servers is that I'm going to be installing SSDs - Intel X25-E SLC drives, to be precise, which deliver 3,000 write IOPS and 30,000 read IOPS, which is a whole bunch faster than anything we have at the moment.

The SSDs will be used only for databases; they're far too expensive for general storage.  But if the general storage for the virtual nodes is allocated from the big storage bucket, how do I point databases at the SSDs?

The answer - at least for OpenVZ and Virtuozzo - is something called bind mounts.  This is a new Linux kernel trick which allows you to mount any existing directory as a filesystem elsewhere on the server.  With OpenVZ, that lets me mount a particular directory on the SSD as a filesystem within a particular virtual node - exactly what I need.

So I can, as needed, split off a particular blog (or group of blogs) into its (their) own virtual server with its own specific configuration of Linux and Apache and MySQL and so on. 

The only catch is that CPanel costs $12 a month per virtual server.**  I can run as many sites as I like under each virtual server, but each server that needs CPanel is another $12.

Minx doesn't need CPanel, of course; it doesn't even use Apache.  Because the mee.nu server is specifically set up for Minx, though, I couldn't put Protein Wisdom on there while the other server was being fixed, so it ended up overloading the main mu.nu server.  Having virtual nodes will make it hugely easier for me to move things around like that.

Virtuozzo is the commercial version of OpenVZ, and it offers some nice extra features, including integration with the Plesk control panel (a competitor to CPanel, and a pretty good one).  The problem is, OpenVZ is free, while Virtuozzo is licensed per virtual server per month.  A three-VPS*** license runs $60 a month; a ten-VPS license $100, which is more reasonable per node, but not exactly cheap.

A 100-user VPS license for Plesk is $10 per month, compared to $30 per month for a hardware server license.  But only if the VPS is running on Virtuozzo, whereas the CPanel license is the same regardless of what virtualisation platform you're on.  And while Virtuozzo is nice and offers a control panel integrated with Plesk, I don't really have any users who need that.

So right now it looks like it'll be OpenVZ.  This weekend I'll be setting up a test server to play around with it; there are some issues with both RedHat 5 (the kernel is fairly old) and Fedora 10 (some libraries are too new) which caused me problems when I first tried it a couple of months ago.  I need to get all that sorted out quickly so that we can move forward into our shiny virtual future.

* That's a trade-off.  If you want to say, this 2GB of memory belongs to this virtual node and no-one else can use it, then that means that node is protected from memory contention from other nodes.  But if it only uses 1GB of memory, the other gig is wasted.  Xen is oriented more toward isolation, OpenVZ towards efficiency.

** Including Fantastico.

*** Virtual private server.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:10 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Okay, Let's Give This A Whirl

Parsing time, only different:

mp3 - check!
ac3 - check!
wav - check!
wma - check!
flac - check!
ogg - bzzt

avi - check!
mkv - check!
mpeg - check!
mov - check!
mp4 - check!
ogm - bzzt

I'm beginning to sense a pattern here.  But if I can get the ogg handling sorted out (and it's possible my test files are crappy), kaa.metadata will prove very useful.

Update: Got the latest version from SVN, and everything works except one ogg file I generated myself (my own composition, from Acid Pro).  That file does play successfully in WinAmp, though, so there is still a bug or two there.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:15 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Ugh

Ugh.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:09 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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What Show Am I Watching?

Our hero and his maybe-girlfriend (aged 16-going-on-4) are plummeting to their deaths from the school clock tower whence they have been ejected by a perverted demon puppet, but are rescued in the nick of time by our brave (if scatterbrained) heroine wearing mechanical wings and a rocket pack (made by her little sister) - and a durian on her head - at the precise moment the Earth is undergoing a very near miss from a rather unlikely short-period comet.

Name the show!

Update: Here's a small hint:

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:52 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Michiko To Hatchin

What is that thing she rides?  Looks like a cross between a Vespa and a humpback whale.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:32 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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A Mac That Doesn't Suck?

Note:  This isn't a Mac vs. PC rant, so much as a lament that Apple have an operating system that almost perfectly fits my needs, but runs on hardware that doesn't remotely.

New Mac range out - new Mini, new iMac, new Pro.

Mini - Finally has halfway decent graphics - Nvidia 9400M, but no dedicated video memory.  On the other hand, main memory is DDR3, so there's plenty of bandwidth, more than the CPU itself can use.  On the third hand, that means that the memory is twice as expensive as DDR2 would be.  On the fourth hand, six months ago it would have been more like four times, so maybe the time has come.

Base model is $1049 in Australia, better model $1399 for a dual-core, 2GB/320GB config, which is more than I paid for my new PC - which was a quad-core, 8GB/1.5TB system* (with a very nice and rather expensive Lian-li case and Corsair power supply).  But MacOS + iLife is a huge improvement over Vista and, well, the whole lot of nothing that comes with Vista.  iWork is a $99 add-on, which makes it cheaper than even the home edition of Office.  Overpriced hardware, but great software makes it a qualified win.

iMac - I don't want, nor do I have room for, a monitor that is permanently affixed to an unmodifiable and underpowered hardware platform.  Fail.

Pro - Nehalem Xeons, yay!  Starting price of $4,499 for a single-CPU machine, more than the old dual-CPU system, boo.  I don't think so, Apple peeps.  Also, if the specs are correct, the single-CPU system has only four memory slots, and the dual-CPU system eight - on systems with three and six memory channels, respectively.  That's something you only see on the budget range PC Nehalem motherboards, and the Mac Pro is anything but a budget item.  Fail.

But one out of three ain't bad; I might finally be picking up a Mini.  Uh-oh.  Naming time...

Update: Mac Mini?  Has to be Taiga.

* And is now a quad-core, 8GB/4.5TB system with a 1GB Radeon 4850.  Oh, and three DVD burners.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:51 AM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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On Bouncing Babies And The Difficult (And Excessively Prolonged) Birth Of The New Alexandria

So, having nothing of interest to say, I was going to post the video of the Boogie Pimps' second mix of their cover of Jefferson Airplane's classic (that is, nearly as old as I am) song, Somebody to Love, the one that presents us with the vision of an Alice-sized (i.e. nearly two miles high), lingerie-clad Natasha Mealey writhing picturesquely about on the English countryside (literally, as it happens), all the while being peppered with gleeful skydiving infants, to wit, this:



Except that, people being what they are, which is to say, complete idiots, all the copies of which video were uploads of the same letterboxed 352 x 264 AVI file, post-processed by Youtube's patented video-dequalitiser, and were, to put it succinctly, crap, not least when you consider that, viewed in Youtube's new standard widescreen format, this provides the viewer with large friendly black bars on all four sides of the video. 

So I did what any blogger would do in this day and age (2009, in case you hadn't ventured outside recently, for which I would not blame you one iota) and Googled it in association with the magic word ("torrent"), downloaded the results, and squirtled it back up to Youtube, who, with the promptness and efficiency we have come to associate with their common corporate parent, presented me with a Terms of Use violation.

Notwithstanding the fact that Youtube, and, arguably, Google itself, are permanent floating Terms of Use violations, they are within their rights (and perhaps even their contractual obligations) to do so.  That doesn't actually help me get the file uploaded to Youtube, but in the course of searching more carefully through the one hundred and fifteen copies already present thereupon I did by chance espy one that didn't suck, which the reader shall find hitherto embedded.

For some reason the sound is clearer on the crap version, but my guess is that it's because someone twisted the treble knob thirty degrees past the stop, so it's not actually better.

The point of which is this: An obscure musical group produced an interesting take on a classic song, and a clever (if a trifle outré) promotional video to accompany it, and by the miracle of modern (that is, early 1970's) technology that is the Internet, I am able to share it with you, my audience and friends, to the enrichment and betterment of all (including, at a guess, Grace Slick, copyright terms being what they are), except that I can't, Youtube's Terms of Use being what they are, except that I can, Youtube's retrograde as opposed to anterograde enforcement of which being what it is, hence the presence of the heretofore mentioned video above.

By the way, the milk symbolises milk.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:55 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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