Mike's Weblog :: Mike Neir's Page

It is my recommendation to all system administrator types to NOT try a direct upgrade from mysql 4.0 to mysql 5.0. It's not a good idea, especially when your tables are still stored in a mysql 3.23.x format. I made the assumption that there would be some conversion utility that would upgrade tables easily. I didn't find one. Had I done a full SQL dump, I might have had an easier time. But no, I just made backups of the data files themselves.

All of this resulted in a large pain in my ass, as I did a full emerge of mysql 5.0 and php 4.4.2 only to find that mysql 5 didn't like my data. So I tried emerging back to 4.1, which worked somewhat, well enough to get things back to a read-only state, but it still didn't like the table format. In response to that, I copied my mysql data directory to another machine still running mysql 4.0, and did a full database dump, like I should have in the first place. I was able to import that dump successfully into mysql 4.1 since it actually blew away all the old tables and replaced them with the same data, only in the newer table format.

So if you happened to see that my website was down last night for around 9 hours last night, now you know why. Be ye not so stupid.

After working with a customer on installing Turck MMCache tonight, I decided to try it out for myself. It's a piece of software that plugs into the PHP engine in the webserver that caches the compiled php code so that it doesn't have to be compiled every time a script is called, which is the default behavior. This reduces overall system load and makes the scripts run in a more timely fashion. My webserver is by no means fast, so I figure it can't hurt. I tried navigating around the site a bit, and when surfing on my Windows machine, it does seem really zippy, especially in the photo gallery, which has seemed a bit snail-like since I upgraded to gallery2. My linux boxes still seem about the same, but I think that's because I use Galeon more than anything else. I've never once thought that its rendering engine was fast, even on a fast computer.

Yah, that's what life seems like right now... just kinda cruising, everything is the same day in and day out. I guess that's what I can look forward to in the adult working world. It'd be nice if there was something new that could occupy some of my time. Oh well.

I was (somewhat painfully) reminded yesterday of how bad I used to be at PHP/MySQL coding. I did some updates to my music stats project that I started like 4 years ago, and holy crap is the code ugly. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, because I didn't know the stuff. That's not to say that I'm "good" now, but I can certainly make things cleaner and more efficient than that. Oh well.

I had another one of those rare guitar moments today, the kind that make me want to keep playing and learning. I had already played my loud stuff right after I got off work, but I was bored, so I went down later on in the evening just to doodle. The distortion was all off and I was just walking little patterns up and down the higher strings, but it sounded really cool. I had the gain on the clean channel turned up more than usual, and that combined with the neck-bridge pickup combination just made the guitar sing. I really need to pick up a power dampener so I can turn up the gain more without making the rig so loud that it makes the furnace resonate. I can't imagine that the neighbors or my roommates like that too much. Oh well.

I uploaded some pictures of the new place today. There are some pictures of the place barely moved in, somewhat moved in, and totally moved in. They're not labelled, so you'll have to imagine where they are. Oh well.

My server just hit 200 days of uptime the other day and that's pretty neat... Oh the joys of having a box in a stable environment with no heat or power problems. It also helps that I have Linux running on there... there's no way a windows server would have lasted even 1/3 as long. Windows blows. Oh well?

Yah, someone accused one of my last few posts of not being in english, and in a way they really aren't. I've been working on some technical projects over the past couple weeks, so my brain has been in the computer dork mindset, which leads to all sorts of technobabble. I'll try to translate some of it here... My wireless LAN project was basically a way to encrypt all of the traffic going between computers on the wireless network (my laptop, Joe's laptop, and the communal Windows machine in the living room) and the gateway machine, which is the computer that connects to the internet. The reason that I'm doing that is because the encryption protocol used on my wireless accees point is inherently flawed, leaving it wide open for breakin by a patient person. IPsec (IP security) is a much better alternative, offering a very secure encryption that's not easily broken. The concept of a honeypot is basically something that is left wide open that people will get into and meddle with, for the purpose of learning different methods of attack from the not-so honest people out there. The honeypot is meant to be infiltrated, so anything bad to it isn't really damaging.

The laptop stuff was Matt and I being total dorks, although in this case, Matt was definitely leading the way. Basically his PHP-code based retort translates to the following: open your laptop, and while the laptop is unloved, pour love into it. The humor is really lost in translation though... I seriously laughed out loud when he typed that.

Hmmm... now to current events... I haven't been up to all that much. I'm fairly confident that the pre-mentioned IPsec stuff will be stable and do what I want, which is good. That means it's not just a learning experience... :) I've been spending a lot of time at both work and home working on the latest revision of the server monitoring program that I wrote to keep tabs on things at work. It will probably keep me busy for quite a while, but I've got the data collection framework in place, and it's collecting and storing the data as it should, albeit from one server, and only when I'm testing things. I'd like to get it on other servers soon to make sure it behaves as it should, but I -really- want to get some form of an automatic update system set up first, so that when I do make updates, I won't have to log into a bunch of servers to update things manually. There's also a lot of work to be done... Apart from the data collection I still have to create the alert system that will notify us when things are 'out of whack', the log averaging and trimming system that will give us a cool historical record of server performance, tendencies and general changes, and the whole display and admin interface that you need to use it all... It's quite the undertaking, but I look forward to the challenge. Once Josh gets done with his current projects he may lend some of his rather extensive talents to the project, and Joe Doss really wants to dominate my interface/display pages with his CSS kung-fu. Greg also said he would help, so we'll see where we can fit him in... ;) Ok, enough geek talk.

I went out with JDoss, his girlfriend Abby, and her friend Allison to see Shrek 2 this evening, and it was hilarious. Most of the humor was totally directed at adults, which was cool. The computer animation was really good, although there seemed to be quite a few parts where the spoken words were noticably out of sync with the animation on the screen. I know that it's exceedingly difficult to replicate human expressions, but it did seem like the first Shrek movie, and other CG movies, have been more successful in their timing. Oh well, it was still friggin hilarious. I enjoyed the company too! :) Thanks for the invite Joe!

(15:39:09) Mike: I think this is two days in a row I haven't even taken the laptop out of the bag
(15:41:36) Matt: omg ur breaking up!!1 quick!! $fp = fopen("laptop","a"); while(!loved("laptop)) fputs($fp,"<3");
(15:41:55) Mike: rofl
(15:42:24) Matt: gah i really have to stop working on php
(15:43:07) Mike: lol
(15:43:33) Mike: what really scares me is that it's syntactically correct
(15:43:48) Matt: lol except for the missing "
(15:43:52) Matt: damn typing too fast

Seven 3rd shifts down, six more to go. So far they haven't been all bad. I'm just sitting here with a headache, thanks to the cough deposited in my lungs by the remnants of last week's cold. What sucks is that I'll have this cough for another 2-3 weeks. Always happens that way. Which means I'll have a headache and a fucked up throat for said 2-3 weeks, because when I cough, I don't just cough, I COUGH. I cough like my lungs are trying to pass a cinder block through my windpipe. All of that strain gives me wicked headaches and makes my throat quite irritated, which in turn makes me cough more, which ..... you get the picture. Blah.

I started some stuff for the monitoring project last night and continued work today after I woke up. Most of it consisted of figuring out how event-based XML parsing in PHP works, and figuring out how to impliment that stuff into what I'm doing. Not too tough really, just a bit confusing at first. I'm just trying to set up some of the classes and functions that the program will use to do its thing. Things are moving, which is cool.

I've been cleaning up the session code the past couple of days since it pretty much broke when I upgraded the server (and more to the point, PHP). I just got ultra-scanned by Google the other day, so it must have made the page a bit more friendly. Any other time the Google crawlers came by, it would hit the index page and die. I also combined the About the site and about the server pages into one, since they're essentially the same thing, and were both pretty thin content wise.

Oh, I may have a rant tomorrow if things don't go right... a couple guys at work made an executive decision that could possibly make our lives HELL for the next few days if it doesn't work out the way they plan... They changed a the way apache and PHP behave on EVERY ONE of our shared servers, which means any person that has CGI or PHP scripts that read/write data files may be calling us because their shit was broken by the change.... Tomorrow could get interesting...

Well, my new webserver is up and running with full Gentoo goodness. I've got all of the data and programs moved over, and it seems to be working. I had to change some of the code for the site a bit since the PHP version changed, but no big deal really. Changing the admin pages for www.neir.org will be another matter... that's why I'm going to be the true procrastinator and do it LATER. :) The server info page has been updated with the new info.

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