Thursday, May 15th, 2008
This one is for those people out there who know about computers. When people are searching for a new computer, they usually ask me what to get. I say something like, “I design websites, what the heck do I know about computers?” That usually gets some mean look and the person walks away. I haven’t been known for my bright attitude at times.
Well, I usually do ok, but I am getting a little tired of buying computers. I want my next one to last. I bought the one I am working on about 6 months ago. I am going to keep this one for something, but I need a monster. Here is the issue…I work with tons of files. One of my sites has 59,000 image files that I need to copy/paste, delete, move, whatever. That’s just one example. I also have very large files that I need to open/close, etc… My problem isn’t the need for processor power to run huge applications or for gaming, I just need something for big, and lots of files. Uploads and downloads are my middle names. I have been working on getting the fastest servers available and now my bottleneck has become my PC.
Here is what I am thinking:
- Dell Precision T7400 Workstation
- Quad Core Intel® Xeon® Processor E5405 (2.00GHz,2X6M L2,1333) (Do I need a 2nd processor?)
- Genuine Windows Vista® Business, with Media (I’m willing to move on from XP. Plus, Vista actually puts the computer in sleep mode, like I never got XP to do. Big power savings.)
- 3 Year ProSupport for End Users and 3 Year NBD On-site Service (This is important because I want someone in this house if the computer breaks.)
- 256MB PCIe x16 nVidia NVS 290, Dual Monitor DVI Capable ( I know absolutely nothing about video cards.)
- 4GB, DDR2 SDRAM FBD Memory, 667MHz, ECC (4 DIMMS) (I want more.)
- C23 All SAS drives, RAID 5, 3 drive total configuration ( I also know nothing about RAID. I basically want the speed of SAS drives, the speed of two drives working together and the redundancy of a third drive. I don’t know the difference between RAID 0 and RAID 5.)
- Three 146GB SAS Hard Drives, 1 inch (15,000 rpm) (How much faster are SAS drives than SATA drives?)
- PERC6/i SAS/SATA Hardware RAID Card - For Connecting Internal Hard Drives
- Dell 1505 Wireless-N PCIe Card
So there you have it. I already have a monitor, so that’s cool. I think I can save a few bucks by switching out the SAS drives for SATA drives. It depends on what I find out about them. I want more RAM, but didn’t see the option for more. I am wondering about another processor and the video card.
Well, any advice? Am I missing anything?
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Friday, January 18th, 2008
So I broke through to support today. After days and says of no response, I actually got through to an American who knew what to do. If you aren’t familiar with what I am talking about, please read about it.
I first called Sales. I thought that if anyone would answer the phone at a miserable hosting company, Sales would…and they did. Hey, you always have to have enough people to take the money, right? I told the guy that I wanted to cancel my contract for the server because I couldn’t run a company like this. He got quiet and transferred me to the Philippines. The freaking Philippines…AGAIN!!! I am telling you, when you have a real problem, the best person to talk to is one in the Philippines. Yeah, right. I challenge you to find me one person on the planet who likes their customer service coming from the Philippines. Again, they had no idea what I was talking about but actually transferred me to a living, breathing American server technician. The strange thing is that while I was talking to him, I heard all sorts of commotion going on in the background. It was other support techs talking on the telephone. What was this? How did they get through? Do they have the good phone number? I have the regular customer support number as well as the managed server number. I thought I was golden…guess not.
I talked to the tech for a little while, when he put me on hold. While I was on hold, I was downloading some configuration files from the server. I need them for when I transfer the websites over. All of the sudden, the websites started working again. Do you want to know what he did? He restarted Apache. Gee, I think that is what I have been trying to tell this company to do all week. Apparently, when I was optimizing that huge database, the temp directory became very full. The temp directory only holds about 200MBs and the database was over 750MBs. The optimizing filled up the temp directory and locked up the server. Restarting Apache and cleaning out the temp directory is no big deal, but what good is a company if you can’t get in touch with them to get it done?
I have to say, this hosting company has awesome equipment and really great prices. If they only had awesome support, I would be with them forever. That is such a waste.
I called my new hosting company today to have them set up another server over there. Now, let me tell you why I am with this company…they are the IT provider for some pretty serious companies, like Bluetooth, Motorola, Webmail.us, etc… They have managed backup that is real, they have server monitoring, their support is simply fan-freakin-tastic and their equipment is great. Can you tell that I am happy? The new server should be set up by Monday afternoon. This will make five servers in total, but before you think I am crazy, I want to let you know that I will be skinnying them down to just two over time. With this kind of company, I can afford to have more sites on fewer servers. Also, I am having them locate the servers in separate datacenters in different areas of the country, just in case something goes wrong with one datacenter.
So, I guess I know what I am doing next week.
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Wednesday, January 16th, 2008
If there is one thing I have learned from doing this business thing all these years, it is to work with the best companies out there. The problem is, they are kind of a pain in the tush to find. You are bound to get involved with the wrong companies here and there. I sure did.
Today was another day spent transferring two of my websites over to my new hosting company. By the way, this is called website migration. It’s not the most difficult thing in the world to do, but it can take some time if the site is large. At this point in my life, I am very good at it.
I woke up this morning and decided to optimize a few databases that were left on one particular server of mine. One database was rather large…I mean huge. It was a little over 750MB. That’s pretty big. When I began my process, the page hung…the database was too big. This, in turn, took the MySQL server off line. I called support at the wickedly horrible web hosting company (the one I have been moving away from) and couldn’t get through, twice. Then, I called a third time and got through to the Philippines. I swear I have nothing again the Philippines, but I vow to never knowingly do business with a company who uses them for customer support. They are all very nice people. The issue lies with the company not giving these customer support people any authority to do anything on their own. If they are just going to be working the telephone and passing the issues through to the real support department, why not just use the real support department to start off with? I have a real feeling many of these companies are actually losing money by outsourcing their support. That support is enough to drive even the most regular person nuts.
This morning, when the server (yes, the entire server) went down and I finally got through, I explained the problem. I told the girl to reboot the machine. She continued to troubleshoot by reading off her little card. I tried to tell her again just to reboot the machine, when she put me on hold. I waited for about ten minutes when I realized that the same scenario from a few months ago was actually happening again. I decided to hang up the phone and just transfer the sites over to the real hosting company. That, my friend, was the best investment I have ever made. It saved my sanity and saved my hair.
Well, the transfer process is almost complete. The DNS of both sites still has to resolve, but things are looking up. One of the only issues left to deal with is the data loss. I was forced to use my own database backups…one from January 2 and one from December 16. So, if you placed any ads on any of my websites in the past two weeks, please re-register and replace your ads. My apologies.
Here is one word of wisdom for you if you are in this line of business - no matter how much your website hosting company tells you they do backups, backup your databases and files yourself to your own computer. The last time this happened with this company, I was informed that they had no database backup. Nope, they just didn’t and I suppose I would have to travel to the Philippines to argue about it.
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Tuesday, January 8th, 2008
I run a bunch of servers for my business. One server, in particular, is better and more advanced than the others. Well, the server isn’t more advanced, the software installed on it is. On that server, I am running Plesk, which I have learned is fantastic.
I recently began automating many of my more boring tasks by using cron jobs. A “cron is driven by a crontab, a configuration file that specifies shell commands to run periodically on a given schedule.” Basically, if you have an application that needs to run on a schedule and is capable of being triggered by a cron job, using this feature can be a real time saver.
One of the reasons I didn’t start using this nice little feature sooner is because I had no idea how to set it up through SSH. When I got the new server with Plesk installed on it, setup became very easy. I Just used the “Scheduled Task” feature and it was all done.
Well, that’s all fine and dandy for the capable applications on the server running Plesk, but what about the other servers not running Plesk? I would still have to setup the cronjobs using SSH. Believe it or not, I have been avoiding setting up those jobs to this day. Just a bit of background…these jobs only need to run every few days or so. What I am about to suggest is not really suitable for jobs that need to run every few minutes.
Last night, I started fooling around with “Windows Scheduler.” The link I just gave you is for XP…the information I am going to give you below is for Vista. I am sure you will get the gist. Windows Scheduler is a great feature similar to cron that is installed on your own computer, not the server where your website is being hosted, but does something very similar. It automates those boring tasks that you and I would forget about very easily.
So, how do you run a cronjob with Windows Scheduler? If your cron enabled application has a file that needs to be visited (usually something like cron.php, or something along those lines), it’s quite simple. All you need to do is tell your personal computer to wake up, open a browser and visit that page. Here is how you do it:
The first thing you want to do is to open your control panel and click on “System and Maintenance.”
Then, on the next page, click “Scheduled Tasks.”
After you click that, you will be brought to the Task Scheduler screen. It’s a new window. I am going to go over how I set up a new task this morning. As I said above, all I wanted to do was to have a browser window open and automatically have it visit a particular URL.
The first thing I did was to click on the “Task Scheduler Library” and then on “Create Basic Task.” The Task Scheduler Library is where I am going to store these tasks.
After you click “Create Basic Task,” a window will open with space for you to describe your new task.
Fill in the information so it’s recognizable to you. Then, click next (down at the bottom). The next window is going to ask you when you want your task to run.
I set it to “Daily.” On the next screen, you can adjust it.
On this screen, you can describe more about your daily task, such as start date, time and frequency. I set mine to every other day (a 2 in the recur every: box).
This screen asks you what action you want to perform. As I said above, I wanted to open a browser, so I click the “Start a Program” button.
Here’s is the trickiest part. On the next screen, you have to choose which program and what additional arguments.
In the “Program/script” box, I browsed to open Firefox, which in this case gave me this path, “C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe.” In the “Add Arguments” box, I put the URL of my cron file, such as “http://www.mywebsite.com/cron.php.”
In the final screen, you are offered a summary of what you filled in. I like the check off the “Open properties” box for some extra steps I needed to take. Click “Finish.”
The last few items are quite simple, so I won’t offer screen shots for them. When the Properties box opens up, click the “Conditions” tab up top. Since my computer goes into sleep mode after a half hour of non use, I want to wake it up to preform the task, so I click the “Wake computer” check box. Then, I click the “Settings” tab up top. In case the task is missed for some reason, I click the “Run task as soon as possible…” check box and the “If the task fails, restart every:” check box. You can put your own values in there.
When you are finished, hit “OK” and see how it goes. I tried this with a specific time when the computer was in use and it had no problems. I haven’t tried it when the computer was in sleep mode, so we’ll see what happens. Give it a shot and let me know your results.
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Monday, December 17th, 2007
My cron jobs have been running as scheduled, but the strange part is I have been getting status emails…with errors in them.
I am using the cron jobs (Scheduled Tasks) in Plesk to run my sitemap generators. Every time the generator runs, it deletes the old generated files and creates new ones. I was wondering why I was getting errors. Sometimes, the files wouldn’t generate at all.
I called tech support at my new wonderful hosting company. Melissa explained to me that I set up the cron jobs under the user account for that domain. When the jobs are run via web interface online, they are running under the apache user. When they are run by cron, they are running under a different username, without the same privileges. The cron run is not able to delete those existing files and write new ones.
The way I got around this in Plesk was to click on “Server” (over in the left column) and then “Scheduled Tasks.” Once in the scheduled tasks manager, I clicked on “Apache” to set up the scheduled tasks under that user.
I am running the sitemap right now through the cron job…wait…it just finished with no errors and the files were updated correctly. I did not receive a status email because I set the email address up while the cron job was running. I am running a different site right now and will let you know how it goes.
By the way, Plesk is very good.
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