IPv6

So the IPv4 addresses are gone, did you notice?

Probably not, since for now it won’t affect most of you, it will however affect you in the future, and a lot of people who will not be able to get an IPv4 address, they will only be able to get ipv6 addresses.

IPv4 and IPv6 are two different Internets, this means that if you need to talk to someone who is on IPv6, you also need to have IPv6, the same applies in the other direction, if you only have IPv4, you can only talk to people on IPv4.

This also means that if you are on IPv6 you can only access services that are IPv6 enabled.

Luckily a lot of populair sites are IPv6 enabled, For example Google and Facebook both have an IPv6 version. (Note if you do not have IPv6, you will not be able to reach those links)

Well this post is to inform that if you are on IPv6, you can now also reach my fantastic and very exciting webpage. Just head over to ipv6.eldaria.net

Thanks to my recent Router upgrade to an Apple Time Capsule, and an IPv6 tunnel account with http://www.tunnelbroker.net/ my site is now IPv6 enabled.

« Server downtime

Server downtime

Server downtime.

Today a big power outage for a large part of my town, caused the server to be down since about 06:45, to 19:45.

All should be restored again.

IPv6 »« Baby Carrier

Google Wave

Today I was reading on Engadget that Google is launching a new system called Google Wave.
It is a new system that integrates Mail, Chat, Collaboration, Wiki, and a whole lot more into one tool.
The protocol is open, and the application it will be open source also.
Check out the demo, it is a bit long but It is worth the time, this looks amazing, I really like the way it looks and works.
I signed up for the Beta, I just hope it will not stay in Beta as long as Google Apps did.

Interesting as I was writing this post the server went down and I could not post it.
I rebooted it and it took very long to come up, but when it did I got database connection error trying to get to the site.
After some investigation, I found out that the disk was full on the server, so cleaned out some files, and now It has some more space.
But it reminded me I need to fix the original server as this server is only temporary and have no redundancy.

iPhone review »« For Dogs: How to hug a baby.

Server Outage

As some of you noticed since Sunday at 09:18 Stockholm Time, the server has been mostly offline.
Well the reason why is that since I moved I have a new ISP called ComHem.
Unfortunatly it is the only choice for high speed internet besides ADSL in this house.
The reason I say unfortunatly is that I have heard really bad things about them, and well when I did my research I found that they block several ports such as port 25(Mail), port 80(HTTP) and since a web server needs to have port 80 open for the world to be able to see it, I had to find some kind of solution.

And here in Sweden there is a company called PRQ, some of you might know them as the company that hosted Piratebay back in the days.

Anyway they also have a VPN solution, where you VPN to them and get a anonymous internet connection, but this service can also be used to run a server when your ISP is blocking it, I pay 150kr/month for this.

But this last 2 days it was down, I could traceroute to their internal network, so my end was fine, but after that it just timed out.

I have been trying to reach them several times, both by Mail and by Phone, and only once was I able to speak to them, that was Sunday evening, and they guy explained that they are rebuilding on the site, but no ETA.

What I’m most dissapointed about is that no notification was given prior to this work, and no status during the work, Not even a notice on the website. I also find it rather annoying that as a paying customer my service was down for almost 3 days.

According to my Sitemonitoring the site has been up for very short times, but that it is now stable for some time.
I have still not got a reply on the mail I sent to them, so I have no confirmation that it will stay up, but let’s hope it stays stable.

Give Blood »« Issues with album

Issues with album

I noticed there were some issues with the album not working.
This was because I had changed the URL for the gallery when I moved it.
I have now reverted it back and it should all work again.
Sorry about that.

Server Outage »« Suggestion for server fix?

Suggestion for server fix?

Ok so I have looked around a bit for a replacement for the broken server hardware.

Going for Co-location will be to expensive I think, as I would have to build a completely new server to fit in a server rack cabinet, and pay a rather steep monthly cost.
If I have the server at my house the only monthly cost would be the electricity bill, the server I already have, except it is currently broken.

I Identified it to be a problem with the Motherboard and one of the harddrives, not sure what broke what, but the fact is that one of the drives will spin down all of a sudden and then spin up and make noises repetably, not a good sign.
Also the motherboard will not detect any harddrives connected to the Primary IDE channel, This is the same place the broken harddrive were connected.

Currently in the server there are 3 IDE drives(2x 250GB and 1x 160GB) and 1x SATA(250GB) drive, the drive that is not working is one of the 250GB IDE drives.

Since I bought the two 250GB IDE drives at the same time, and they are of the same brand I don’t trust the second drive to last much longer.
The drives were set up to in a RAID 1, mirroring each other as a safety, this is also why I was able to pull the data off them, and move the pictures to the other server.
However this redundancy is not in place at the moment on the temp server, as i told before I have no ongoing backup on it, I do have a backup of the albums as they looked when i Copied it to the temp server, but anything new added will not be backed up at the moment.

But I have looked around for a new Motherboard that will support most of the hardware I already have to limit the cost of the repair, but also to add some future proofing.
And I found a nice board that has repeated good reviews, and has confirmed support for Linux.
The Gigabyte GA-P35C-DS3R costs about €100, and supports the current CPU and RAM that I have, as well as future many current CPU’s.

But since one of the IDE drives are failed and the other one is likely to soon fail, I was thinking to add new SATA drives instead, and set up a RAID 5 for a performance boost as well as keep redundancy.
And harddrives are not so expensive now, so I could add some performance and capacity to the server by just replacing the IDE drives with SATA.
Since server is on all the time, I look at server grade harddrives, they usually cost slighly more but in the end they last longer, the previous 250GB SATA drive is a server grade drive, and the MTBF is almost double than a normal drive.
While the IDE drivers were just the cheapest I could find at the time, and he 160GB IDE drives is an old drive I had lying around I use it as boot drive and for the operating system.

I wanted to get Samsung drives since the have good performance, low noise level and usually resonabley priced, also the server grade drives carry a 5 Year warranty.
Unfortuantly I could not find a price or anyone selling the 250GB version, the closest I could find was the 320GB, this one cost €65 and in a Raid5 you need a minimum of 3 drives making a total of €195.

This way I can use the 250GB as a boot drive, and set the 3 drives up in a Raid5.

So there it is, I need about €300 to get the server up and running again, if you are interested in donating towards this, let me know, I will take the Electricity bill, and you get my promise that your site/album will be Green energy, I buy only wind power.

Issues with album »« Falling back.

Update on Troubles.

Ok so I have transfered the pictures, it took 2 days.
But they are there now. However it does not work.
I am currently hosting at a provider called Dreamhost.
And not only was it super slow to transfer, but I can not get the album to work.
And I’m 99% sure it has to do with the way they built their servers, it is super slow, and basically the album times out.

So I will for now leave the blog there, but will set up one of my older computers to act as a web server for only the album, unfortunatly it is not so fast hardware, but at least we get the album back online, please note that I have no backup running on this server.
I will try to do this tomorrow, I’m too tired today from work, so will take it a bit easy.

For the future I’m thinking of some different solutions, Since my current server is not working, and I have identified it to be a problem with the mother board and possibly one of the harddrives, there is little I can do now, due to tight finances.
For the hosting in US I pay about USD380 for 2 years, this hosting is expiering in April, and I’m not sure I will renew it, it is too slow, and does not work really good.

Additionally I am paying electricity to keep my home server on 24/7, Now that was not a problem before, since it was included in my rent.
Now it is no longer included, so although electricity is not so expensive in Sweden, and My electricity is Green, I buy from a company that only sells Electricity from Windpower, it is still an extra cost.

So I was thinking of building a new server, and put it in a co-location.
This is more expensive than having a web hosting, but it has a lot of advantages.

First, it is still my own server and I decide what to do with it, how much hardware is in it, etc.
By Co-locating it, it will be in a secure environment and have a high speed link to the internet(Electricity is included).
Cost: about 60 Euro per month + initial cost of building a server that can bo co-located(different casing and cooling system).

Other option is when I have some more money I will just fix the server I have, and put it back online keeping it at my house, it has worked for many years, actually I had a server online since 2001, have a look here: Internet Archive
And according to The site monitoring service That I signed up for back in 2005 I have an average uptime of 97.835% since June 2005. Pretty good I think.
Cost: Some electricity, not sure how much actually, have not calculated how much it uses. + some Hardware to fix it up.

Well for now and until april I think we can survive with the temporary solution.
Let me know what you think, in the comments, or by mail, msn, Pigeons, smoke signals.

Falling back. »« Troubles troubles.

Troubles troubles.

You might have noticed that Eldaria has been offline for some time.

It has been one thing after the other.
But now I’m fed up, and I don’t want to spend time on it now, so for now I have moved the site to an external hosting provider.
If it works, It might even stay there.
The Albums are still down, it takes quite a wile to transfer such an amount of data, (15GB), Originally it reported 63 Hours, but since I already had some of it there, it should be less.

Anyway, it is late and I want to sleep.

Update on Troubles. »« Spotify

Spam and Maintanance update.

Ok lately the amount of spam comments have increased a lot, you won’t see them since I have to aprove all comments.

But basically I was getting 5 comments per day that where spam, so I have installed a capatcha system to put a damper on it.

Basically it means if you want to comment you have to type what is in an image.

I found a different one, that actually also serves a purpose, everytime you translate what is in the image you help to digitize books.

You can read about it here:  http://recaptcha.net/learnmore.html

And Regarding the server, I ran into some issue when trying to set up a new server so I have rolled back, and are awaiting some answers on forums.

Until then I will leave site up.

Baby on the way, first pictures available. »« Some updates and Server Maintanance.

Some updates and Server Maintanance.

Hello everyone,

Quite a while since I made any updates here, so it’s about time.

So what has happened since last time?

Well me, Marina, Holly, Balder and Heimdal has moved to Hässelby in Sweden, it is in the Western part of Stockholm.

Here we share a large apartment with some friends, Aurelie (who also moved from Holland to Sweden.) and Göran(He moved up some months earlier.)
Move was a pain, we moved during the weekend of 27-30th of June, And well trust me driving Amsterdam-Stockholm-Amsterdam with way to little sleep in 3 days is no fun.

We have started to settle in, Marina is going to Swedish course, and I have started looking for work.

I had saved up Holidays from my previous employer, enabling me to be on Holiday from June to end of September, I have used this to get all the details arranged, including getting me some well needed rest.  :smile:

And I have some great news too, In end of July actually only 2 days before my Birthdate, we found out that Marina is pregnant. This was kind of unexpected news, but still very welcome news, since the plan was to move to Sweden to start a family, although the start a family part was supposed to be a bit later, but well nature wanted it differently.  :razz:

So after our calculations, expected delivery is on the 24th of March 2009.

Marina is going through some hard times, as many other pregnanat women, she is nausious, puking, difficulty eating many things, pain and general weak feeling. But luckily this should start to wear of, since she is entering 11th week now, and they say that most women start feeling better in 11-12th week.

I will kep you  updated on what happends on this of course.

So another update, this more boring than babies.  :roll:

With the move came a bonus, as I mentioned in the previous blogg, the server would be moved to a faster connection, well this was true, right now it is connected to a 100/100mbit Fiber connection.

Well not directly to fiber, but close, the Fiber converter is in the Fuse cabinet.

So you should notice a slight speed improvement loading images and such on the Album, or on your page if you are hosted with me.

Another update is that I decided to learn more about Server Virtualization, for those of you who don’t know what that is well, to be brief, I have a Computer that acts as a server, This server does a lot of things, most noticibly Hosting this blog, and the album, but it also does E-mail, file server, Database server and some other things. And right now it all runs as one server, all running in the same environement.

For a home server that is fine, but for businesses, it is not a good idea, since if for example the Mail server crashes or if a hacker found a security flaw in the web server, this could spread to all the other services, and take them all down.

Before this was solved by having one or more computers for each type of service, so one computer for Mail, one for Web, and another for Database, and so on.

But that is very inefficient and expensive, both in Energy and Money.

Because usually not all services need all the resources of the computer at the same time leaving many servers stanidng doing nothing a lot of the time.

So instead someone came up with the idea of Virtual servers.

Basically that means that on one computer runs several virtual servers, all Isolated from each other.

So even if one server get’s hacked or crashes, all the others will remain unaffected.

It also gives the advantage that you can run different type of Operating systems on the same computer at the same time, for example different flavours of Linux, Windows, and Solaris.

Well i wanted to try and learn more about this, so started investigating and I found a nice open source virtualization system called Xen, unfortuantly the hardware I have does not fully support virtualization, basically as you remember some time ago I upgraded the hardware in the Server, and bought new motherboard and CPU and so on, well the CPU I got was a Pentium D 805, and this does not have the Virtualization feature, so Today I bought a new CPU called Pentium D 930.

Unfortunatly my Motherboard is too old to support the new Core2Duo or Quad processors, so had to stick with the Pentium D generation.

I picked up the last one they had in the store.

I installed it and besides having the ability to do Virtualization, it also got a  bigger Level 2 Cache and it is a bit faster, 3.0Ghz, vs the old 2.6Ghz, this while still using slightly less electricity.

Now I need to collect some money to upgrade the memory also, this would give a good speed bump, since right now it is kind of struggeling with only 1GB.

I even tried to steal some memory from my old Dell PC, it has 1,5GB, so wanted to take the 1G, but it was too old. the Dell is using DDR 400, and server uses DDR2 667

So I have to go and get some new once.

Donations are as usually always welcome.  :mrgreen:

Well anyway, to be able to set up Virtual servers on my server, I need to reinstall everything, since I don’t have another server to take over while doing this it means I have to take down everything while doing that.

I plan to do it this comming weekend 5, 6 and 7th of September, if it does not work out I will make another attempt in the weekend after.

Well that was all for this time.

Brian.

Spam and Maintanance update. »« Moving to Sweden