thebaldgeek

Had a moment of clarity on Friday afternoon…….. (Warning, geek content to follow).
It occurred to me while I was mumbling under my breath about my flakey web site that quite often the browser was throwing up the “cant find beno.id.au” thing way too fast……. It was like it could not even find me……

Ahhhh, perhaps its not. So, I hit up my DNS server host……… Afraid.
This guy has been great. I have been using him for about 6-8 years now.
Its been free for me all this time, and I honestly never really think about it all that much. My Linksys router has had its OS replaced with a Linux version (Tomato), and it supports Afraid for dynamid DHCP, which Time Warner use.
So I never have to worry about my IP address changing and I never have to worry about my domain name resolving to said IP address.

That is, until the last week and a bit.
When I went to the news section of Afraid, I found what I was looking for.
In case you are reading this long after the event, here is a cut and past of the news from Friday;

2010-07-16 15:03:46

A user of afraid.org had a domain that around 7:30 AM PST came under attack, with many gigabits of malicious traffic at its peak directed to all afraid.org DNS servers. The attack is still in progress at the time of this writing, but has been reduced significantly. While attacks are not that unusual for afraid.org, they are generally not this large as today. Unfortunately – this exhausted every ounce of resource available for afraid.org, and caused serious disruption for the site afraid.org, and for innocent bystanders sites that are also using afraid.org for their own sites. So, after today’s eventful morning, I will be taking further measures to protect users by increasing the available nameserver pool size from 4, to at minimum 64, and begin allocating configurations to members in a way that minimizes overlapping configurations as much as possible. Over time I have observed that much of the human based problematic events such as this one comes from (a relatively small set of) unpaid members, it is a sad truth. I will not stop providing the free portion of the service, but I am strongly leaning toward moving paid members to their own tier of servers. While afraid.org has not had a problem of this kind in a while, I’m going to reflect on this event and take measures to make the site better because of it.

So, we found the mystery to my woes. I really am annoyed with myself, I really should have figured this, or at least included it in my tests a lot quicker than I did. I really am getting rusty over here (thats more than enough out of you Gary, I hope you split your drink from laughing!)

So, the bottom line it, I cant complain as I am getting it for free. The obvious thing is to see if paying for it would protect me from this sort of thing in the future or not. A few days of hit and miss every 6 years, is it really worth it? Is this sort of attack on his servers going to be come more common? Some of these questions I am not sure I am ever going to get answers to.
Bottom line. Least it was not something at my end. I have to be honest, I really was getting tempted to point the finger at Windows 7. It was the one thing I changed, and I am having hit and miss issues with my photo album, one moment it will change a photo, next it wont. I really cant get to the bottom of THAT one so I thought it might be a small indicator of bigger things.

Anyway, bottom bottom line, I am still going to take the site down for about 1/2 hour tonight to remove a hard drive from the current server PC.
That drive will then go into Terrys computer and will be formatted and have Linux installed. I will move the web site over to that PC (ie, my original one). Once the site is up and running I will swap the IP addresses and we will be back running on Linux. That will only take about 1 minute for that one.
I am hopeful that this will be it for another 6-8 years. Both Freddy and I are getting sick of all this shuffling and not having things working. Once this (last) shuffle is done, we are hopeful that 98% of things will be back up and running and the last 2% (I suspect that it will be the sharing of drives and data between windows and linux again) that is left hanging, I will just battle through it.

If you have been trying to hit my site of late (whadayamean you havent?!), you probably have noticed that it has been a bit hit and miss.
I am really not sure why. I have tested pretty much everything and just can not find anything wrong…… Not helpful or fun.
It seems to have been doing it for at least a week now.

This flakyness along with my continued frustration of getting more than 60% of anything working has lead me to consider yet another computer move…. Well, not so much computer as change the core OS.
I really did try and get along with Windows 7. I really wanted it to work. Really I did.
In a moment of clarity however, it came to me that all the Windows/Linux hassles came from me wanting to use ONE program. Lightroom.
When I was not doing any post processing of my photos and thus was running everything in Linux, all was good.
Then, I got into Lightroom and was running it in a virtual computer on my Linux computer. Because I could only use half of one of my eight CPU cores, it ran like a dog. That’s when I first changed to Windows. Sure, Lightroom ran well, real well, but the rest of my sanity went out the window.
So, as you may recall, I then switched to two computers. Linux for my web server/blog/photo gallery and Windows for Lightroom.
That’s when I had a lot of hassles sharing data between the two systems.
On top of that, I found that Windows does not do something’s very elegantly, like capture remote URLS, batch jobs or use component video capture cards.
Robert spent some time helping me try and get things going, but in the end, I came to see that I just was not using the right tool for the core job.

So, since you all decided for me that giving up was not an option, I have decided to go back to using Linux as my main operating system running the web site etc and do one of two things for Lightroom;
1. Try a new Virtual PC software that will use more cores of my CPU so the performance is better.
2. Give up on Lightroom and use GIMP for my post processing. (Last option, and not thrilled with the thought of this one).
3. Get and use a second computer for Windows and Lightroom, just turning it on when I need it. (And using Gary’s help to get the sharing between the two systems so I don’t have to use a USB stick to transfer the photo files as I was for a while).

So, at some stage soon, my web site will go down for an hour or so while I reformat the hard drive and load Linux and copy the web site etc over….. Oh, wait, given that its currently up and down like a hospital elevator, you probably wont notice any difference at all…. mmm, never mind.

P.S. Since I never did any post processing before I met Zim, I am blaming him for all my computer woes. You should blame him too. 🙂

Seems I have an apology to make……. I honestly had no idea that the few readers I have were so passionate about this blog / web site.

I’m sorry for under estimating you all.

Thanks for taking the time to express your support. I really appreciate it.

As such, we dug deep and have hashed about the computers and have things running a little smoother.
I can now update my web site from my windows computer, and still edit my photos on a windows computer.
And I guess most importantly, as a result of your support, I have decided to keep things running. One way or another.

There are still a few little bugs to sort out still, but on the whole, most people are not going to notice those little things (like the Uranquinty weather cam, humming bird camera, some of the weather data pages, Temecula earthquake page etc).
I will tackle those with a different approach. There is always more than one way to get things done in the computer world.

In other news, Zim has started his 365 Project again. He is starting a new phase of his life so it fits to start it up again. We all wish him the best and look forward to seeing where 365 photos take him.

We also got a chance to look at the house again, and will blog about it once we have a little more information (the Realtor feels we should hear something this week…. we aint holding our breaths).

I think I am about done.
Windows 7 has finally beat me down.
I am very seriously thinking of closing down my web site.
If I shut down this site, then I don’t have to deal with different systems not getting along. A bunch of problems go away.
I just cant get Linux and Windows to get along. I am tired of feeling stressed and I am tired of spending time on this. I would much rather be out taking photos or watching a movie or something.
Whats the down side?
I would lose a few people that currently look at my site for different things, but in the end, is that a big deal? The internet is a big place, they will find what they come to my site for somewhere else.
I would lose my photos on my site. I would have to find somewhere else to put them. I really dont like Flickr, but thats the logical choice.
I would lose the ability for people to comment on my photos. That would be pretty sad. (You have to have a flickr account to comment, I hate yahoo almost as much as facebook so I cant ask anyone to sign up just for me).
I would lose this blog.
I would lose the weather.
They are the main ones. There is one other thing, I would lose the humming bird and all sky cam. Its down at the moment, but I got a real kick out of having a camera like that. Again, is it worth it?  Duno.

One thing I do know, it should not be this hard… Its like I am being forced to make a choice. Give up photography and tinker with the computers, or give up the web stuff. I cant do both.