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

Moving to Sweden

So time for another update.

Not a very good blog, too infrequent, but well no matter.

I have now been living almost 8 years and 7 months in Holland.

And I had decided quire a while ago that it was time to move on.

So, on the 27th of June we will move to Stockholm.

In regards to the server, there should already be a an Internet connection there by the time we move there, and I will move the server with me and set it up in Sweden, but that does mean that it wil be down for some time.

Count that it might take the whole weekend of 27-30 of June to get everything set up.

If for some reason Internet is not set up by the time we get there, I have a backup plan to put it at my Mothers place, but that could add some time.

The good News is that while server is currently on an ADSL connection with only about 1mbit upstream, the connection in Sweden will be 100mbit, so hopefully it should be a bit faster.

Will try to make some more updates later.

Brian.

Some updates and Server Maintanance. »« A sleeples night.

A sleeples night.

Huff, So It is 03:30 at night, and I have been awake for at least an hour, twisting and turning in Bed.

I’m not really sure why, but while twisting and turning, Ideas for my car kept popping up, so I decided to get up and write a bit about it.

People who know me, know that I have a Volvo 850 T5 Saloon.

The car is from 1994, and well has over 600.000km on the meter, but it still drives great.

Of course with such an old car, it has some faults, It drinks Oil like crazy about 1 liter every 800km.
The Air Co is not working, and because of the Oil leaking onto the exhaust pipe, it is not possible to use the ventilation when idling or driving slowly like city traffic, this because it takes in the air mixed with burnt oil fumes.
And lastly the previous owner did a horrible paint job, and paint has started fading on the Hood.

But besides that, there is hardly any rust on it, it still drives 240km/hour without a hitch, and accelerates fast enough to outrun most non tuned and some tuned cars.

So what do I want to do with the car?, well first of all, I actually wanted a V70R, but since I don’t have the money to buy one, I will focus on this car.

I wanted to have a hook on the car, to be able to pull a trailer, or put one of those bicycle holders.

I went to the Volvo dealer Svala Motors in Zandam and asked for a quote on the price for a new one. Unfortunately their computer system were down when I was there so they were not able to give me a quote, but I left my Details, and they promised to call back.

I the mean time I went to a company here called Brezan, and they gave me a quote of €350 for one with 7 pole electric connector.

I figured that was rather expensive thinking I can just as well get a second hand one.

So I started looking and found some different websites offering searches from Car scrap yards, and found onderdelenzoeker.nl, here I filled in a search and some days later I got some offers, ranging from €100 without shipping and with old electrics, to €90 including shipping and new 7 pole Electrics. I ordered the cheap one including shipping from De Boer Auto Demonatage.

2 days later Volvo called back and left a voice mail, asking if I wanted 7 or 13 pole connector, but since I had now already ordered the second hand one I never followed up on it.

Well about a week after I ordered, it arrived, I opened it and the flakes of rust was falling out, wow it was very second hand, well you get what you pay for. I looked up some drawings of how it should be connected, and quickly realized that there were a lot of pieces missing, so off to Volvo to get those pieces. This time I went to Furness Car in Amsterdam Southeast.

After some investigation with them, we found out that I actually needed to order a Mounting kit, since most of the parts I needed were not available separate, ok so another €50 for those. While I was there I asked how much a new hook would have costed. he told me €180 not including electrics.
I quicly realized, that I could just as well have ordered it there, argh.

ok, well now it is 05:30, so need to get ready to go to work, will continue laters.

Moving to Sweden »« New harddrive arrived and installed.

New harddrive arrived and installed.

Hello everyone.

Yesterday the new hard drive, kindly donated by Ronald, arrived.
It is a Seagate Barracuda ES 250GB Type ST3250620NS.

I have installed it in the server, and after much fuss with mixing Serial ATA and normal IDE it is now working.

I will start setting up a backup scheme to run daily backups of the Album, websites, databases and mail to this drive.

At the same time I am working on switched my external hosting provider to a new one.
The External hosting provider is hosting some other domains that I own. www.levinsen.nu, www.bt-rota.net, www.eldaria.com, and www.gobly.net.
With this new provider I have a massive amount of space available, and I will use some of this space as an External backup solution.
More on this later.

Hopefully in the future I will scrape together enough money to build a 1 or 2 Unit high server and then host all of the domains on my own server, but co-located for better reliablilty. But this is probably some years into the future.

A sleeples night. »« New site launched on Eldaria.

New site launched on Eldaria.

Hello everyone.
One of my collegues decided to go on Holiday, and as part of that he wants to have a blog, and an album.
So I offered him some space on my Server.
You can find the blog here.
And the album here.

As you have seen earlier there is no backup solution on the server, well as a thanks he offered to pay for an extra harddrive.
So soon I will install an additional 250Gig Harddrive that is going to act as a Backup.

Thank you Ronald.

New harddrive arrived and installed. »« Holiday

Holiday

So we just got back from our long overdue Honeymoon/Holiday.
This was actually the first time since Marina and me got married some 2.5 years ago, that we went on Holiday together without either going with someone or going to visit Family.
And this time we went to a Log Cabin in Northern Finland, approximately 100km North of the Arcric circle in a place called Äkäslompolo, near the Ylläs fell.
We had a great time, We stayed for 7 days, and the first 2 days the temperature was pretty constant between -27C and -24C, by the end of the week the temperature went up to somewhere around -15 to -10.
We had a pretty active holiday.
We tried Cross country skiing and got lost, We went Reindeer sledding, We rented snowscooter and got lost, Went with guides by snow scooter visiting the Lainio Snow Village, and last we tried Husky sledding, (Dogs pulling a sled).
We had great food, The log cabin had everything, Our own private sauna, fireplace, fully equipped kitchen.
It was a very nice Holiday.
Pictures have been uploaded to the album, you can find the link on the right.

Enjoy.

New site launched on Eldaria. »« Keeping (Getting) Healthy.

Keeping (Getting) Healthy.

You know there is a joke.
Why do men get married?
…
So that they don’t have to keep their stomach in anymore.
And well ever since I got married my stomach, and well butt started growing. :-S

I also starting to have some back problems and R.S.I in my hand and wrist, So I decided some time last year that I was going to start doing some fitness.
My company had an offer that you can go for 30 Euro per month and no sign up fee, so I though why not?

Said and done, I signed up a week ago, and missed my first appointment, but then 3 days ago I had my first session.
I got on this thread mill, kind of a mix between a bike and a rowing machine, difficult to explain.
The instructor told that I should do 5 minutes for warming up, huff.
Ok warmed up, now we went on to some kind of circle of instruments.
Basically it has various equipment where you go from one to the other shifting every 40 seconds, and go on a bike in between every exercise.
Ok that was tuff.
Then they showed some other tortur… I mean Exercise equipments, and well they told that after about 2 weeks we could go there but that we should start on the circle.
So the next day I went again, and yesterday I didn’t. (Can’t go everyday.)
Will probably go today.
Wish me luck.

Holiday »« last.fm

last.fm

A while ago I started using Kubuntu as my primary operating system replacing Windows.
Kubuntu is a fork from Ubuntu.
Anyway so in Kubuntu the musicplayer of choice is Amarok, it is by far the coolest music manager I have seen.
I never been the kind of person who lives for music, most of the time I can not name an artist or song name when it.

But with Amarok I have started managing some of the Albums that I have purchased on line over time.
And it has this little built in feature that it can automatically uploads what music you listen to, to a site called last.fm.

What they do is analyze what music you listen to and then suggest similar music, you can also share your profile and let others know what music you listen to.

Click here to see my profile

Keeping (Getting) Healthy. »« New Look.

New Look.

OK so I changed the look on the frontpage of Eldaria.

I got on the wave of Blogging., my previous page where anyway just a bunch of updates of what is going on, and a very bad one at that considering nothing happend.

Figured I could just as well change it into a blog, hoping that it would give me an incentive to make more updates of my fantastically interesting life. Hmmm….

last.fm »« More mess