So, the last couple of weeks have been a bit hectic due to personal stuff… but just before all that kicked off I managed to migrate the site to its new home.

Old Server:

1.66 GHz Pentium-M (laptop), 512MB

New Server:

Opteron 170 @ 2.2GHz, 2GB

Due to using this hardware as a media server as well I was unable to go with my first choice of installing Linux as the OS (the media server uses a TV Tuner card that isn’t supported by the Linux TV drivers) so I got a bit sneaky…

The hardware runs Xp and on top of that I have the actual web server running in a virtual machine. The virtual machine runs Linux (Ubuntu to be precise). This way I get the stability of a linux server for my Web stuff, and I get to use my media centre stuff (Media portal) in the XP host.

The setup seems to be running well so far except for a few teething problems, which were down to my ‘Getseeds’ script (which scrapes every single torrent in the database when it’s run) causing issues. Today I found out how to do an incremental backup of the web server over FTP to a folder on the Host machine (like this).

Nice.

Just as an aside: I read a post a few weeks ago in which two old linux hads were wondering why Ubuntu has taken off so rapidly to become the distro of choice for relatively new Linux users.  That type of community documentation, and the helpful nature of the community in general is why Ubuntu is so popular.  Up until a few weeks ago I’d never tried Linux, now I have a web server doing automated backups over FTP.  I have a latop which runs XP seamlessly (so you can have windows apps appearing on your linux desktop, it’s pretty nifty) inside a virtual machine.  I have a desktop with much fancier effects and looks than any Xp / vista or OS X desktop and it’s all down to the helpfullness and openness of the Ubuntu community.

Anyway….

The physical server was a bit noisy (it used to be my gaming machine) so I removed the 80mm fan from the CPU cooler and stuck a 120mm fan in there using the tried and tested mounting method of ‘wedging it in between the RAM and the northbridge heatsink. There’s just enough space to hold the fan securely and this method seems to be keeping everything nice and cool.

The only thing left to do now is somehow get all the data from my file server (which has a 600GB motherboard hardware RAID) into this new server (the RAID on the new motherboard isn’t compatible with the RAID on the old one) then I can decommision the old file server… and use the hardware for a hackintosh or something.

For anyone interested in pictures, here you go:

From left to right: my settee, server farm (web / media at top, file at bottom), my front window.

Compare and contrast with the Hardware the pirate bay guys get to play with:

Sigh.

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I just had a shock when I glanced at the post date on my last post here… it’s over 3 weeks ago!

I’ve been pretty busy since then dealing with some family issues (more about that later), but I’ve also done some stuff to the site:

The site has moved from it’s old home (a crappy old laptop) to it’s new, improved surroundings (a virtual machine running on an opteron based server).  I’ve also moved from windows to Ubuntu for my hosting needs and, apart from some ‘Case’ issues (Linux recognises the difference between ‘This’ and ‘this’, windows doesn’t) the move went pretty smoothly.  Since then I’ve fixed a couple of bugs and re-instated the ‘Thank-you’ functions that used to be present on the site.  Make sure you start thanking those uploaders

The Move to a virtual machine means I can now backup the entire server in minutes, and restore it ina similar timeframe if there’s a problem.  Which is nice.  I can also shift the server onto different hardware easily, should I need to fix a hardware fault with the server.  The only real issue (albeit not much of one) is that to do this backing up process I have to take the server offline briefly.  That’s not a massive problem though, especially since the site usuaully goes offline a couple of times a day anyway.

What else has been happening…. well, not much really.  I’ve been off work for over a week now, looking after my fiancé who’s recovering from being admitted to hospital last Tuesday.  She’s suffered with depression for a long, long time and after a year of dealing with that on top of the pressures of looking after a very demanding little girl things came to a head.  She’s relatively okay now, although it’s going to take a long time before she’s actually ‘okay’ I think.  Thanks to everyone who posted well wishes in this thread.

The company I work for have been really good to me during this little crisis, letting me take time off work with no notice and even finding us a counselor through their employee assistance program, which makes me feel really guilty about the fact I’m actively seeking another job.  Basically I’m bored of my current position, there’s no opportunity for advancement or anything exciting where I am so I need to move on.  Also, I need a job that’s closer to home (I currently spend 2 hours a day travelling to and from work) and pays a bit more.  Does that make me a bad person?

I actually have an interview tomorrow, for a PHP development position.  This would be pretty cool, it’s a much more interesting role and might actually keep me awake during the working day, it’s much easier to get to (20 minutes on a bus) and it pays more.  However, there’s still that niggling feeling that I’m screwing over my current company.

On the gadgets front, I’ve recently discovered Media portal.  I’ve been looking for a windows replacement for Myth TV for some time, and this seems to be it.  The major benefit of myth TV (and media portal) over other, simpler media centre solutions is that they can be run in a client / server configuration.  This means that you can have a large, beefy machine stacked with TV tuner cards hidden away somewhere in your house while you have small quiet machines connected to your TVs.  Myth Tv is perfect for what I want, but it doesn’t support thetuner card I have…so, we’ll see how I get on with Media portal.  The only problem I have now is how to connect my PC to my TV.  My TV only accepts composite or RGB over scart, the only adaptor I have for my PC puts out S-Video. However, after reading this thread over at AVforums, I’m now on the hunt for someone to build me a VGA->RGB Scart cable since by pure chance my media PC has a radeon card in it (Nvidia cards apparently can’t do direct drive of a TV).

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So I haven’t posted anything on the blog for a while, I’ve been playing around with several things since my last post (mostly the Ajaxification of comicsearch) but my main project over the last week or so has been switching my main laptop (that I use every day at work and at home) to Ubuntu Linux.

The Switch has gone pretty smoothly (bar a few niggling faults that have had me tearing my hair out, see below).  All my hardware was detected, I got Compiz Fusion running with some tinkering so I now have a rotating cube thing going on  (see this for an example) and my desktop looks pretty sweet.

Performance seems (subjectively) much faster and ’snappier’ than windows, everything seems to happen pretty much instantly with none of the annoying ‘thinking’ that windows regularly has to do.  I’m hugely impressed with how smooth the effects (like wobbly windows) are.  Vista on this laptop always felt a little sluggish when anything taxing happened, but Ubuntu handles everything without breaking a sweat.

For those applications that simply have to have windows, I’ve installed XP in a virtual machine, then setup a seamless RDP session to that virtual machine (following this general procedure) so I can run windows applications on my linux desktop.  For example, the company I work for uses a softphone IP endpoint which doesn’t have a Linux version.  I run this on the XP machine and connect my USB headset directly to it.  Sorted.

The main applications I use on a day to day basis are a web browser, and a text editor.  Both are ably provided by Ubuntu (they’re hardly taxing) and I’ve also been playing around with MonoDevelop as an alternative to Visual studio for continuing development of ComicTree.

So, in general, everything is going well.  However, there’s a few things I can’t get working:

1) My wireless connection doesn’t start until I manually switch it on (using the front panel switch) and then run this script:

#!/bin/sh
rmmod -f iwl3945
modprobe iwl3945 disable_hw_scan=1
ifconfig wlan0 up

Which is a little annoying.

2) bridging my wireless network to my virtual machine (the XP one) causes my Host networking to stop working (see this) for more details.  This means I can either have networking in Xp (for my softphone) or in Ubuntu (for everything else) but not both at the same time.

update:  I’ve now resolved this issue by changing the static route command used in the bridging script.

3) I can’t get the firebird embedded database that ComicTree relies on working under Mono.  This isn’t really an Ubuntu issue, it’s Mono… but it’s still annoying.  I get a “type initializer error” every time I try to access the database under mono, it works fine in .Net.  For now, this issue means that Comictree doesn’t work on Linux (or OSX).  Annoying.

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Long time ComicSearch Member Varth Dader who yesterday recieved a 2.1 in Geology from Exeter University.

Congrats Varth, and any other members who received results recently.

As a tribute to Varth’s chosen subject, here’s a picture of a rock. I’m sure Varth could tell us what it is

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Still using Comicsearch v1? Then you’re missing out on shiny web wonderfulness like this:

Check out this (and some Ajax / web 2.0 goodness) Here.

Also, in related news, I’ve signed up to Twitter since everyone else seems to be doing it. I believe you can ‘follow’ my ‘tweets’ here

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The more astute among you may have noticed that we now have a new front page offering a choice between ComicSearch v1.0, and Comicsearch v2.0 beta. v2.0 is what I’ve been working on for the past couple of weeks, and is pretty much a cosmetic makeover. There’s jazzy new ajax effects to start with, and over the coming weeks I’ll be revamping the search functions, removing some superfluous code from the site and generally make the site easier to maintain and improve.

It’s still a bit flakey at the moment, you might find there’s certain things that don’t work on the new site, or weird errors so if you want to help out report any bugs or errors you run into. If I don’t know something’s wrong, I can’t fix it. As I’m sure anyone involved with ComicTree will tell you, once a bug is reported I generally resolve it very quickly.

Anyway, enjoy the new functionality, get in the chat room (it sits at the top of every page now, so you’ve no excuse) and get involved

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Just realised I haven’t made a post for over a week (I’m sure you’re all devastated) so I thought I’d write a quick update about what I’ve been doing.

First up, you may have noticed a new chat box at the top of the forum index. You can drop it down by selecting ‘Quick chat’ from the chat menu. If it doesn’t expand properly refresh the page. The original plan was to have this quick chat available at the top of the page wherever you are in the forum, however people started complaining about load times so until I can find a really lightweight ajax chat client that I can embed in the forum template, we’re stuck with the current one. Enjoy.

The untangle server I set up last week has been chugging along happily, unfortunately the hardware it’s running on isn’t quite so resiliant… there’s a fault on the power supply connecter so until I can afford a new power supply I’ve had to take it out of the loop. This has had the knock-on effect of taking down my Subversion server (it runs on the same machine) so ComicTree development is currently on hold until I can get it back up. Annoyingly, I’d just got to grips with subversion and got my head round the committing / updating process. Ho hum. Luckily I managed to fix a couple of bugs and push out a new version before the subversion server died, so ComicTree is now up to version 1.537.

On the website side of things not much has changed this week. The search results page has migrated back from the PHPCake framework since my original page was much more flexible when it came to advanced search options. I’ve updated the CSS of the search page so it all looks nicer now, and changed the download options a bit. Oh, also it should now show seed / peer information accurately when it’s available.

At some point I really need to undertake some kind of re-factoring exercise. Comictree and comicsearch are basically ongoing learning projects for me. That’s reflected in the code base which is a mish-mash of older, less elegant code and newer, more sophisticated code. the problem now is the older code, written when I didn’t really know much about what I was doing really needs replacing with something a bit better. I’m even considering re-writing comicsearch completely using AJAX techniques and possibly an ASP.Net codebase. We’ll see how far I get with that.

Anyway, that’s pretty much it for another thrilling installment of ‘random stuff from my head’. No Links this week either, I’ve been too busy job hunting to indulge in much stumbling.

Update: okay, I got bored today so I wrote an ‘Ajax Wrapper’ for the site. This basically (and rather obviously) wraps the entire site in Ajax loading lovelyness.

You can check it out Here

Obviously there’s still a few issues to iron out (Ajax breaks navigation based on URLs for example) but I’m going to keep working on it over the coming days so hopefully it will evolve into something special.

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I may have posted about untangle before, but this weekend I decided to give this rather spiffy piece of software a go myself. As the website says, untangle is:

The best open source projects, integrated and made easier for spam blocking, web filtering, remote access and more

So you really can’t argue with that. It looks pretty cool too (always a bonus for me)

Hey, what’s a network gateway?

For those unfamiliar with the concept of a network gateway, what Untangle does is filter all your network traffic looking for viruses, spyware and the like and removes them on the fly as you surf. It can also act as a content protection system (for censoring the boobies), act as an open VPN server (for remote access) and also (optionally) act as a firewall. The best part about Untangle is, although it comes packaged as a full operating system (it’s built on Debian) you can run it as a virtual machine using this handy VMware virtual appliance.

The ‘not seeing the network’ problem

Since I don’t really want yet another Server humming away in my front room, I decided to run the virtual machine on my current file server. Here, I made the rather unfortunate mistake of moving the virtual machine once I already run it once. With most Guest (ie: virtual) operating systems this wouldn’t cause a problem. However Debian, for what I’m sure are excellent reasons, keeps a record of what MAC addresses are assigned to each network card in your system. If you move the virtual machine, VMware generates new MAC addresses for each virtual network interface which, in turn causes the virtual appliance to not see it’s network interfaces. If you’re having this problem there is an easy fix though. I’m a complete linux noob, but some rather inspired (and lucky) googling brought me to this solution:

The MAC address to network interface ‘mapping’ is stored in this file:

/etc/udev/rules.d/z25_persistent-net.rules

so to fix the problem just remove that file and reboot the virtual machine. If you’re a linux greenhorn like me, you can remove the file by following this procedure (on the virtual machine)

Open a terminal session, enter a password (twice for verification) then use that password to login

change to the correct folder: cd /etc/udev/rules

remove the file: rm z25_persistent-net.rules

reboot the virtual machine.

that should get your virtual machine seeing its network cards again. Yay!

Routing via the virtual machine

Once the virtual machine is up and running all you need to do is stop your windows ‘Host’ system from seeing the internet directly, so it has to go through the new untangle server. My (physical) server has 2 network interfaces which I named ‘external’ and ‘internal’. The external interface connects directly to a firewall / router device. The internal interface connects to a network switch, which then connects up to all my network devices. ‘Ethernet 0′ on the virtual machine is mapped to the ‘external’ interface, ‘Ethernet 2′ is mapped to the ‘internal’ interface. To stop the host system bypassing the untangle server I removed the TCP/IP protocol from the External interface on the host system. Now all network traffic destined for the router (and onward to the internet) has to go through the Untangle server (which is running in transparent bridge mode).

Setting up the software

Once I’d got the network problem sorted out, installing Untangle was a breeze, albeit a rather lengthy breeze. Once the core system is up and running you have to download any updates, then download the applications you want to use (untangle itself is merely the host for various applications) before finally installing the applications into the ‘rack’ that untangle presents as its interface. This all takes some time, but providing there’s no hiccups along the way it’s all fairly straightforward.

So, does it work?

So far it seems to work fine. Of course, saying a virus scanner works fine because you haven’t got any viruses is like saying a bear repellant rock works because you haven’t seen any bears. All I can really say is the system doesn’t seem to slow down my browsing much (there is a barely perceptible lag as traffic is scanned, but it’s nothing to really worry about) and I havent seen any spyware or viruses since I installed it. My Girlfriend has a habit of downloading all kinds of crappy add-ones for Messenger though, so I’ll wait and see how it copes once she logs on later today.

Hardware Specs

My ‘Host’ system is a Pentium 4 2.8, with 2GB of RAM (1GB is allocated to the virtual machine). This is pretty much a ‘what I had lying around’ server, but it seems to be coping well with the increased load of running untangle even considering that all comicsearch traffic goes through this gateway. So that’s a reasonable amount of traffic.

To sum up

Untangle is pretty awesome guys.

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So yeah, once again I have very little comic related content to post.

Except this:

So, Instead of relevant content I’m just going to throw out a load of links from my bookmarks folder.

7 reasons the 21st century is making you miserable

The best thing I’ve read today, possibly the best thing I’ve read all week. Seriously, read this right now or suffer the rest of your life wondering what might have been. On a related note (if you haven’t read the link you won’t know why this is related for a start) I’ve recently discovered the joys of gardening. Planting up a flower bed is perhaps the best contrast I’ve yet found to the rigours of spending all week up to your elbows in PC parts. Lovely.

Stupid image directory

Not quite as interesting as the last link, this is pretty much what it says. A Large directory of stupid (and some NSFW) images. Including such gems as this:

yeah, that’s Einstein Kicking ass and taking names.

Why 3 Prongs?

Ever wondered why AC electricity has one ‘live’ prong and one ‘neutral’ when the current alternates between the two? This interesting little article explains this as well as any other questions you might have about electrical distribution systems.

A legal use for bittorrent

A dutch university harnesses the peer to peer power of bittorrent to push out a pretty phenomenal volume of software updates in a short space of time. Update 6,500 desktops to vista in 2 hours? That’s pretty impressive.

That’s pretty much it from me. In case you’re wondering about the Nazi Dinosaur, all is explained here

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Yeah, that’s pretty much it.

I’m currently in the process of setting up a subversion server to deal with comictree (which is fun, since it’s the first time I’ve used any kind of version control software) and once that’s in place I’ll give read access to everyone, and write access to anyone who asks for it.

I’m also looking into open source bug tracking software, so hopefully that will go into effect at the same time.

For anyone who’s wondering, Comictree is written in C# and the current version is compiled with visual studio 2008. It *should* compile on the mono framework (it did at version 1.5.0.0 but a lot has changed since then) and the code isn’t exactly well documented…but it’s interesting

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