About 2 years I was on Roadrunner. I loved it; so much so that I always reccomended it to friends and family. Download speeds were blazing fast 10+mbps, sometimes even 15mbps. I moved away to Comcast and feared for the worst (after hearing a lot of bad reviews from them).

Boy have times changed. I’m back home visiting for the holidays and Roadrunner is absolute crap. What was once 10mbps is now a mere 1-4mbps, 4 if I’m LUCKY.

Pinging google:

round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 56.777/171.755/1155.530/229.523 ms

1k ? 8% packet loss? To google.

Honestly I can’t believe how far down hill their service has gone. The cable TV is skippy but the internet is just downright SLOW.

Comcast, on the other hand, usually gives me between 8 and 20mbps consistently with an average upload of 1mbps - compared to Roadrunner’s 400kbps.

While some people have Comcast horror stories, at the moment Comcast is better than RR by far to me. Things like streaming videos (watching SouthPark on Comedy Central’s SP Studios website) or watching Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on Netflix (fallen in love with that BBC series) is painful at best. Low quality from Netflix’s streaming (understandable since the connection is *slow*), and skipping on streaming videos.

Never thought I’d say Comcast was better than Road Runner / TimeWarner, but they are - at least for me.

As a side note: typed this from my shiney new Macbook Pro which I’m in love with. Everything’s nice and snappy.

So I’m planning on purchasing a shiny new Macbook Pro 2.4 ghz 2GB ram 15″ screen and the 250GB 7200 RPM HDD. I was going to pick it up in store, so I first called one location. After being put on hold about 5 times while she figured out what “250GB @ 7200 rpm” meant, she said they didn’t have that model in store.

So I called the second store - she informed me that they carry ZERO upgraded models in store. So if I wanted to get the base 2.4GHz macbook pro with an upgraded HDD, I couldn’t find this in the store. Ever. Or the 2.5 GHz model with a 7200 RPM HDD, order online. Basically anything but the stock model I’d have to order online.

Needless to say I’m now just ordering online instead of going to the store since they have free 2 day shipping. Can anyone else confirm this?

After toying with the idea to use SVN (or possibly Git) I decided to try SVN and find a nice web interface that was easy to setup.

In comes WebSVN, which I thought would be easy to setup. Well I created the SVN repo following the instructions in the SVN book and had it up and running fine for my new server monitoring script.  Then I wanted to create a front-end to this repository (and for BlueBug once I made that one).

I looked at Chora but it was a bit more time than I wanted to spend on something simple, so I went with WebSVN. I uploaded the files, moved the distconfig.php to config.php and it looked as if it was working. After clicking on a repository I got a blank page.

Upon looking into the error log I found this lovely message:

[STDERR] XML error: no element found (3) at line 1 column 0 byte -1
cmd: svn –non-interactive –config-dir /tmp list –xml -r 1 ‘file:///home/bluescri/svn/mbm/’

Googling around a bit I found quite a few suggestions but none fixed the issue. For curiosities sake I did a svn –version and got

# svn –version
svn, version 1.1.4 (r13838)
   compiled Aug 21 2005, 20:56:55

apparently I was running an archaic version of SVN. Downloaded the latest version and installed it.

wget http://the.earth.li/pub/subversion/summersoft.fay.ar.us/pub/subversion/latest/rhel-4/i386/subversion-1.5.1-1.i386.rpm

wget http://the.earth.li/pub/subversion/summersoft.fay.ar.us/pub/subversion/latest/rhel-4/i386/neon-0.27.2-1.i386.rpm

wget http://the.earth.li/pub/subversion/summersoft.fay.ar.us/pub/subversion/latest/rhel-4/i386/neon-devel-0.27.2-1.i386.rpm

rpm -Uvh *.rpm

# svn –version
svn, version 1.5.1 (r32289)
   compiled Jul 25 2008, 00:38:53

Bingo, upgraded.

And voila, it worked! Awesome looking SVN repo front end.

I’ve been writing a new program for monitoring servers ( I havn’t found one that was easy to setup and didn’t require some painful process to setup server / remote side ). It consists of the monitoring machine where all the remote servers report to. The remote servers run a simple PHP scripts every 5 minutes that reports to the monitor.

Here are a few screen shots, let me know if you’d like to see more or learn more.

• v1.2 - 10/27/2008 - RELEASED
  1. Fixed all short tags (if you still get an error let me know, I’m 99.9% sure I got them all)
  2. Script now works properly in sub directories - see demo for in-action.

I have released an update to BlueBug today that addresses the following issues that were brought up in comments:

• v1.1 - 9/9/2008 - RELEASED
1. Added a line to the config.php to limit registered users to posting. Add $config[registered] = 1; in your config.php file to only allowed registered users (if upgrading).
2. Added a last insert id function to the Database class.
3. Administrators now get emails when new tickets have been added.
4. Assign to list for tickets now properly displays all users.
5. When a user is assigned to a ticket, they are notified by email.
6. Priority # changed to text for easier reading.
7. Users are now emailed when their ticket is closed, if they are registered.
8. There is now a user administration area in the admin panel.

I have to say this is one of the niftiest features I’ve found so far in Google’s Chrome:

Google Chrome's Element Inspector

Took me about 20 minutes to figure out why this wasn’t working when installing yum:

After you follow the instructions at http://wiki.centos.org/TipsAndTricks/BrokenVserver
You get to the part where your trying to install rpm-python. This doesn’t work quite as you’d hoped. 

Error:

# rpm -Uvh rpm-python-4.4.2-48.el5.i386.rpm

warning: rpm-python-4.4.2-48.el5.i386.rpm: Header V3 DSA signature: NOKEY, key ID e8562897

error: Failed dependencies:

        rpm = 4.4.2-48.el5 is needed by rpm-python-4.4.2-48.el5.i386

So clear all the other RPM’s you installed, download these three from the repository (varies if your using 64 bit or i386)

rpm-4.4.2-48.el5.i386.rpm       rpm-python-4.4.2-48.el5.i386.rpm

rpm-libs-4.4.2-48.el5.i386.rpm  

Make sure all these are present then run:

rpm -Uvh *.rpm

 This will install the libs and the RPM update at the same time so the error isn’t thrown.

I’m always trying to find a good method of monitoring system performance and logging it, but today I ran into a rather strange issue that I couldn’t find on google.

sar 0 was returning high idle percentages:

# sar -u 0

08:17:29 AM       CPU     %user     %nice   %system   %iowait     %idle

08:17:29 AM       all     18.11      0.01     11.66     70.22    3549.42
running top didn't produce 3.5k % idle and in fact the system was nearly 98% idle. 
The quick fix is to simply run

yum update sysstat
That fixed the problem immediately on the box I was using.

Hope this helps someone else.

Made a fresh look for BlueScripts, hope it’s a bit easier on the eyes now.