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.

Falling back.

Ok I have moved everything to the temporary server since WordPress and Gallery dont’ like to be on different servers if you want to integrate them.

But it is working now, Album is up and working, and so is the blog.
If you are hosted on eldaria, and something is not working let me know.

Please do remember however there is no backup or disk redunadancy on this temp server.
Also the hardware is not so new, so it might be slow at times.

But untill I can afford to replace the parts in my real server, this will have to do.

Suggestion for server fix? »« Update on Troubles.

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

Spotify

Ok so I have now joined the future of Music listening.

I never like the idea of CD’s, I think the only Music CD I ever owned was a single CD that came as a promotion “gift” with a computer game I bought, I did have some 5 LP’s back in the day, can’t remember all of them, but I think there was a Magnus uggla, Murtel Crue, and some others.

No I was early with the electronic music, Already on the Commodore 64 I would load up a game just to listen to the music, and on Amiga it was MOD’s, a kind of 4 track sampled music, I even hacked my Amiga 500 to enhance the experience by increasing the “Chip” memory, this was the type of memory that was able to handle Music and Graphics, so by increasing it I could listen to “higer” quality tunes, I also bought a special thing that would enhance the sound, I think it was some kind of Filter or something.

On The PC, Well I had a bunch of MP3′s I would rip CD’s that friends had, and store them as MP3, and well before you start thinking thta is illegal, well in Sweden it is legal to copy between Friends, so by having a lot of Friends through a Lan party club I aquired more music than I would ever listen too. I actually always been more of a Radio Person, just putting a mixed bunch of music on playing random.

Although back then Harddrive was expensive, so I burned all the MP3′s to CD’s, Unfortunatly this was a bad idea, as one very hot summer I forgot the Leather CD bag on the desk in direct sunlight, and my CD’s basically turned transparent, rendering many of them unreadable.
So I salvaged what could be salvaged, but some 15 CD’s were completely unreadable.

Then came Napster, at that time I was sharing a house with some friends and whenever we had visitors, we would download some music, and they would all store it on my server so we could access it from anywere in the house, so I ended up having all kinds of music, everything from French Rap to Polish Pop, Swedish Rock, to Soviet Marching music!?!?. But with those early download music came the down side of Crap Quality, some of the songs were recorded on low bitrat, no tags, or sometimes not even complete.

So I started looking for a solution, I was still heavily resisting paying for a piece of plastic I would never use, and started looking if there was a way to pay for guaranteed quality downloads, and there was this new cool service called allofmp3, some Russians came up with this brilliant system of selling music to a resonable price and in the format you choosed, you payed depending on the size of the file.
The files were tagged, categorized and super easy to search. It was still not clear weather it was legal or not, I mean technically they were since they payed royalties to the Russian record assosiation I think they were called ROMS, but it was exactly what I was looking for, cheap, easy and good quality. Some time later Itunes started up, but they were expensive and files had DRM(Digital Restrictio… erhm Rights Management), something I’m strongly against as it limits my rights as a consumer.

I can honestly say I do not mind paying for music, I stronly believe artists should get payed, and I have still never been to a concert, so I do not supprt artists that way, I do however pay my Media Tax every time I buy a CD, and believe me I have not used a CD or a DVD to store music since I lost a larger part of my collection to it, I also pay a TV license which effectivly pays for the public Radio and TV here, also whenever I listen to non public Radio I have to listen to commercials, so in the end I have payed for music.

Ok, so then allofmp3 was shut down by American RIAA lobbyists, and my source of Good quality music (Read DRM free in good quality) was lost, I did not want to go back to download through various services since that would be a step back, so it was back to listening to internet radio stations, I did buy some music from Itunes when they released Itunes plus, a service were you could get DRM free music.

But now some Swedish guys have launched a new service called Spotify, it is a legal music distribution system, that do not require(Or allow) you to keep any files locally, instead you stream the songs, in from what I can hear good quality. They have a huge collection that is growing. It has several ways you can use it, one is payed by commercials, you can buy day passes, as well as a monthly subscription that both do not have commercials.
You can make customized playlists, or just make your own radio station based on music you like, really nice.

It is currently in Beta, and on Invitation only, except for the premium monthly service, I tried several times to sign up for the premium support but it was failing, I think it had to do with the beta, I did not have an invitation so I wrote them requesting that they fixed the payment system so I could get an account.
They replyed back saying there were some problems with the payment system, but they also sent me an invitation, I have now tried it for a Day and I like it a lot, It has a native client for Mac OSX, and the commercials are not intrusive at all something I can definatly live with, although I will for sure upgrade to the premium system just to show I support this.

There is one downside though, since it is streaming there is no way of transferring the file to a portable media player, hopefully that is only tempoarary, or at least some kind of mobile client.

Anyway, you can find it here: www.spotify.com I do not have any invitations yet, so if you want to join you can try the premium service, or wait untill i upgrade to the premium servie and then maybe If I know you I can arrange an invitation.

Troubles troubles. »« Our new apartment.

Our new apartment.

Hello everyone.

A short update of what is going on.
We recently bought an apartment that we moved in to on November 22.

No Pictures yet,it is too big a mess.
The place is in serious need of renovation, so we have started with that, we decided to start with the most important room first, the bedroom. So we started tearing down all the old wallpaper/paint, I can honestly say it looks as if no repairs have been done for a very long time. There were 3 layers of Wallpaper and one layer of paint on top of that. And ols Masking tape still sitting there.
The bottom layer of wallpaper looks as if it might actually be the original, since it went underneath sockets and panels.

But since there were paint on everything, we took it all away, and had a clean room with no floor panels, or anything.

But we did run into a problem, the room had 3 different type of walls, 2 Betong walls, 1 Woodwall and 1 Drywall, so painting on top of that would give 3 different shades, so we had to put up a kind of wallpaper made from glassfiber, than paint a layer of white, and finally paint 2 layers of the colour we wanted.

We also wanted a new floor, the existing plastic floor was horrible, so we were looking to buy wood floor or laminat, but could not find a type that looked nice in that room, but since it was the bed room, we decided for a carpet instead.

We also replaced all the floor panels, as well as adding new ceeling panels, (Think they are called panels, they run along the walls next to the floor/ceeling.)

Next project will be the livingroom / Hallway, this will probably not be until January/February  since we need to save up money for materials.

When I get around to take some pictures I will post them.

Spotify »« Holly 20/08/1997 – 30/10/2008

Holly 20/08/1997 – 30/10/2008

Yesterday was probably one of my worst days ever.

I was as every evening out for the evening walk with Holly, and we were coming back.
As we went up with the elevator I took of her leech, but when the Elevator arrived on our floor and the door opened, the neighbour was on her way out with her dog, and was waiting for the elevator, so when the door opened her dog went to attack and grabbed hold of Holly over her back.

It all went so fast that none of us had a chance to react, when we finally got her dog to let go, Holly laid down and the elevator doors automatically closed, I was already on the floor, and wanted to check her, but as soon as I touched her she would turn around trying to bite me, it was pretty clear she was not aware the other dog was gone and I was trying to help her.

She got up briefly trying to walk, but she was badly damaged and laid down again, she had trouble breathing, and I could feel she had several broken ribs, I rushed to get the car key, and Marina, and together with the neighbour we went to the car to go to the Animal Hospital, but I think she had already stopped breathing by the time we got to the car.
But we still continued to the Hospital, when we got there, they confirmed what I thought, her ribs had broken and punctured her lung, and she was dead.

So Holly became 11 Years and 2 months old, anybody who knew her knows how sweet she was, and she will be very much missed.

Holly has been with me pretty much since I moved to Holland in 2000, and has followed me almost everywhere I went except when I went to places to far away like Ukraine, but she did go with me on my Crazy scooter ride from Amsteram to Lammhult in Sweden, and back, she was sitting in a shoulder bag that I had on my belly, enjoying the wind and the speed. I unfortunatly did not bring the camera on this trip, so I have no pictures of it. Actually I do have a picure now, Annelise who ows the Kennel where Holly is from sent me 2 pictures, I have added them below.

She went with us when Marina’s Parents came to visit, and we traveled to Denmark and Sweden, she came with us when we went to the beach The flower garden, well everywhere.

Anyway you can have a look at my album, there are a lot of pictures of her, and she will be missed for sure.

Pictures sent by Annelise at CanisDanics.

Our new apartment. »« I got a JOB!!!!!!!!

I got a JOB!!!!!!!!

Ok so I have been looking for a job for a while, since I got to Sweden, well not really that actively, was lazy enjoying my holiday for a while.

I mean we moved to Swedisn end of June, and I did not update my C.V. on monsterboard until  21st of August.

I applied for a couple of different jobs, and went for some interviews, but nothing went anywere, some i have not heard from again, and some I turned down.

Anyway so on the 12 of September I got a call from a recruiter for a Job.

She send me the Job description, and to be honest I almost turned it down right there, I was worried it was a call center like job.

But getting closer to my last day to BT, i decide i might just as well go, just in case nothing else comes up.

She calls again the next day, and I tell that I am interested.

And on the 15th I get a mail asking if I can go for an interview on the 17th, which I agree to.

So I go to the interview and the the position turns out to be much more interesting than my first impression.

I get interviewed by an in house recruiter, and I guess he found me to be an interesting candidate since already at the end of the interview he asked if I could come for a second interview on the 24th.

I then go for the second interview, this time with the Customer support manager, you wont believe this but well he is a dutch guy, hmm the dutch is haunting me.

Anyway we have a nice chat we decide to settle the interview language to English since my Dutch was as good/bad as his Swedish. .

After the interview I again have a better impression of the job.

We agree that I will come to meet the team leader the next day, I kind of have the feeling that I will get the job, but not sure yet, but by now I am really interested in this job.

And yesterday afternoon I went to meet with the Team leader, as well as another guy, who will be my collegue doing the same function.

We also talk a bit, mostly about what I did at BT, and after about 30 minutes we are done and they ask me to wait, since the manager (the dutch guy) wanted to speak with me.

So I sit and wait and after a while he comes in telling they like me and would like to hire me, and hands me an offer along with a contract.

I get very happy, but tell I would like to take it home to read through (Had to many bad experiences with rushing things.)

When I get home and read it through I find it is again better than my expectations, so today I went there to hand in the signed contract to HR.

And as of the 7th of October I will be working as a Technical Support Analyst for a company called Cognos.

Ok so almost done setting up our new life in Sweden, only thing missing is our own place.

And speaking of that, me and Marina have been looking at houses, and we actually found our dream house.(Link removed, House no longer for sale)

It has everything we wanted, not to far from Center, but still in a quiet area, a garage for my car, a garden for Marina, a big workshop for me, enough rooms to have a guest room and a computer room, as well as a room for me and Marina  and for the kid that is on it’s way, a nice layout on all of it. And for a resonable price, I mean this house is everything we want. A house that both me and Marina could agree on.

But unfortunatly it looks as we can’t afford it right now.

Now that I have a job I called a financing company to find out if we could afford it, and they told me no.

Since we only will have one income, and here is a rule in Sweden that your morgage payments can only cost 50% of your household income.

And this house would cost us about 60%.

The stupid thing is, that if I was single, I could buy it.

The calculation would then be based on only my income and my expences, but now it is based on supporting 2 persons on 1 sallary.

Although the amount she gave me that we need to have left was way more than we need to be able to live a normal life, with a kid , but rules are rules.

And since we don’t have enough savings to put in we have to borrow the full amount that is allowed (95%), and that makes it very difficult for us to get it at this moment.

Oh well hopefully something will come up later, so for now we are looking to get a rented apartment and then save up so we can get a house later.

So until next time, you now know what we want for christmas, I think i will be really good so santa will come.

Holly 20/08/1997 – 30/10/2008 »« Small update.

Small update.

ok small update.

The hospital called back with the results.

And they told that according to the test, there is 1 in 20.000 chance that the baby will have down syndrome.

I guess that is good. since we have no plans to have that many babies.

I got a JOB!!!!!!!! »« Baby on the way, first pictures available.

Baby on the way, first pictures available.

Hello everyone.

Just a quick update to let you know how it goes with the baby business.

Yesterday we had a meeting with the doctor, just to talk about different things.

One of the things, we were wondering was about a test that can be done to screen for Down syndrome, this includes a Blood test of the mother and an Ultrasound, so yesterday they took a blood test and today we went for Ultrasound.

The blood test had not yet been analyzed so we have no result, but well since Marina is only 28 the risk of Down Syndrome is only about 0.1%.

I will put an update when we get the result.

But for now you can go to the album to see the images from the Ultrasound.

We have another Ultrasound, the one they usually do, this one is on 24th of October. Will get some more images then, as well as a video, I found out that they can actually record the session on a DVD, so will get that for sure.   :smile:

Small update. »« Spam and Maintanance update.