The Life of a small-time server admin

I initially made this journal to piss off my sister oddigy... Just kidding.

Well, in these pages I'll occasionally post some stuff... Nothing really earth-shattering.. Just some occasional ramblings in my day to day life as a server-admin, and web-host.

Hi LJ people...
Still alive, just have been very busy the last few months. Things are luckily a little calmer now.

In my downtime, I have configured the.....er wait. I'm getting ahead of myself

Since my last post I've gotten a new PC (arrived on election day, hence the name).

Obamatron 3000 Specs:

*Dell Studio glossy black tower/dust collector
*Intel Core 2 Quad Processor Q6600
*4GB DDR2 SDRAM
*500GB NCQ SATA Hard Drive (7200 RPM) w/ 16MB DataBurst Cache
*320GB SATA (transplanted from ol' pc)
*^^ 500GB Seagate External USB Drive.
*ATI Radeon HD 3650 256MB (i know, I know... It's all they had in the config)
*X-fi extreme gamer (transplanted from ol' PC)
*DVDR drive & dvd drive
*16 in 1 media reader thingy
*Winblows Vista x86 Home Premium
*Samsung SyncMaster 2433BW 24" LCD (Thanks dad!)

Anywho... I got adventurous the other day and installed Ubuntu 8.10 (don't freak out, I still have Vista) ------- I have configured it to dual boot either Vista or Intrepid.

Ubuntu really kicks ass, as far as I'm concerned. Just having a small bit of audio problems which I will soon iron out I'm sure.

And for those too scared to manually configure Ubuntu/Dual Booting --- there is a one click solution -- WUBI!!
You simply install it (Wubi/Ubuntu) like any other windows program... If you don't like it, you just go to programs/etc and uninstall like any other program. And it configures the dual/multi booting for you. And most importantly it quarantines all of the Ubuntu stuff on the hard-drive to keep it from messing with your windows stuff...

Going to play now.. Ta Ta.........

No, my LJ hasn't been attacked by some spam-bot.

I've just had many very good experiences with the below mentioned firm, and thought I'd give them a little "airtime".

Anyway.....

If you're like me and don't have health insurance (too bad there isn't affordable private health insurance anymore) because you are self employed or whatever, that shouldn't stop you from being able to purchase your much needed prescription medications.

When most people think of an Online Pharmacy they automatically think of something that crawls from the underbelly of the internet. Some of them are that way, but surprisingly many are not. The ones that are dangerous are the ones from outside of the U.S. - as you don't know what you could be getting, if you get anything at all.

I'm not talking about controlled substances or anything like that.. Those are a major "no no" to purchase online.

I have dealt with one firm: First Care Rx
And that one firm only. For various reasons.
Not only are they speedy and reliable (they are based in the U.S.), but they also have a large list of medications to purchase. Including Ultram and Soma, which for hostwitdamost are crucial because of the long hours at the PC. Another MAJOR plus are their prices. The meds come to your door via FedEx usually the very next day in a normal pharmacy labeled bottle just like you'd get at your local pharmacy. And the meds are all prescribed by a licensed U.S. Dr. So there are no worries there either.

So, if you are like me and lack medical insurance and need prescription medications - give First Care Rx a try. You won't be sorry.
I give them the "hostwitdamost stamp of approval".

Yes, I mean in the head....Slow.......as In.....well.... retarded.

Over the last 48-72 hours I have been battling it out with every flavor of ATT affiliate you can imagine (Bellsouth, SBC, pacbell, etc) because they apparently had a "Let's just throw a bunch of IP ranges in our email blocklist just for fun" party.

And you guessed it. Our server range was added. Yippee!

So all emails to any flavor of ATT got bounced back with a "You are blocked in DNSBL" message. Yeah.. But, we're not.

So I went and filled out their online form. And waited........And waited..
They finally responded with a form-mail response saying I wasn't in their blocklist..........HRMMMMM??????

So I emailed them back.......And asked if I wasn't blocked then why am I getting bounced from their mail-servers and once again produced the evidence.
Waited.....and waited.....

Got another email (form email) back saying "Your IP has now been removed from our blocklist.. blah blah"..

Tried sending to bellsouth - all was well. But SBC/Pacbell etc were still no-goes.

Emailed them again. Another form-email back "Your IP has now been...."

That last email was last night/early this morning.. I was just about ready to throw in the towel (no, not really. as hostwitdamost knows his customers need to email out to ATT and their affiliates).

Also somewhere in this time period I made the mistake of calling ATT/Bell.. They thought I was from mars and they were just interested in selling me DSL service.. I finally had enough and asked to be txr'd  to their abuse dept. They agreed.. I thought "Cool".  Alas, voicemail..With a very special message. "Thank you for calling the abuse dept. If this call is related to you or your customers emails being blocked from ATT  this is not the correct number to call... CLICK". 

grrr......

Today I awaken to find a bunch of form emails waiting for me:
"Thank you for contacting ATT, your IP has already been removed for our blocklist.. blah blah.."

But the good news is, the issue has been resolved. Confirmed via the mail-logs.

But......Geez.. What an experience!

No..I'm stupid.

Last time I went down south to one of the areas biggest casinos a few days before Christmas I made out like a bandit. Coming out with 800$ or so.

Just returned from said casino again. .They lured me in with $15 worth of slot tokens and a free buffet..... I thought what the heck. Might as well.

Put my lil' $15 coupon in the machine (exact same one I played and won on last time).. Started playing. First two hits o' the button I won a small amount.. Third time I hit the button I got "Triple Diamond ---- Triple Diamond ---- Seven"... Payed out $120 or so.......

Should have stopped there. But Noooooooooooooo.

In the end, I lost that and the $120 I brought with me.

Moral of the story - stop while you're ahead. Don't be stupid like I was.

But I guess to rationalize it I was just there for fricken 5mins when I "hit" and those darn slots can be so addictive...... And I guess deep down I was expecting a repeat of the last visit (Triple Diamond X3).

That is why I only go twice a year.

It's entertainment, folks.......If you win or lose.








And even bigger entertainment watching me make an ass of myself losing $$$.

At the insistence of oddigy I guess I shall make an update.

Nothing much new in the world of hostwitdamost.. Just been tinkering with the server.

Oh yeah.... I installed a week or so ago Rsnapshot
Which is a pretty cool thingy. Makes my older backup solution look like crap. This takes a snapshot of my server every four hours and rsyncs it over to the 2nd hdd. What's so cool about it, is after it took its initial big arse snapshot during installation -- all the following hourly/daily snapshots are just incremental. Rather, it will only save the files that have changed since the last snap.

Also rblsmtpd is pissing me off. Don't know if it's a Plesk thing or if I'm just being anal. Ever since updating Plesk to 8.3 (screw updating to 8.4, just look at their forums)  whenever rblsmtpd is triggered the plesk panel gives the appearance that Qmail shuts down. But in shell, a "Service qmail status" gives it an ok saying it's running. I think I should just stop going into plesk and refreshing the services status thingy so much... Matter of fact, I don't think I ever did it this much since upgrading to 8.3.. So, therein is my problem I guess. I'm anal. I noticed this behaviour once -- and now I'm fricken addicted to watching it repeat itself. Even though there are no apparent problems with Qmail itself. And I'm not overburdening the server with multitudes of RBL's just spamcop and sbl-xbl.spamhaus.

And I guess to aggravate the situation.. This morning I got an email from a client who's co-webmaster was having problems sending via SMTP.. I thought, "Well maybe there is a problem with Qmail"........ Turns out (as i found out later) this co-webmaster had just changed ISP's (the fricken day before) and was simply being blocked by spamhaus because the previous owner of their IP was quite naughty... I got their IP delisted and all is well now.
Enough to make someone go crazy, eh?

That's about it.....................Must.....Not.....Hit.........Refresh.......In.......Plesk Service Status.

Well.. I've been thinking about doing it for months..

My server came standard with some icky PHP4 flavor. Did a lot of research on what 5 could fuk up or whatever..
Didn't seem like a whole lot.

So I utilized Art's Yum Repo.

A simple:
[bash~]# yum php update
Did it.

No sweat, no fuss, no problems. Just swapped out the php.ini file for the new one, reset some variables in the new php.ini and I was all set.

Now I'm happily running PHP 5.2.5-4 on my server. No complaints from my clients (knock on wood) about any problems this may have caused with their apps.. Hopefully it will stay that way.

I was thinking about upgrading MySql to 5. But..........Nah........ Seems that really does have the chance of screwing a lot of things up during the upgrade process. I'm happy with MySql 4.......Plus it (5) seems to rely on a whole new set of stuff....So if it ain't broke, I'm not fixing it.

In other news, this past weekend I went out to see "Harold and Kumar Escape Guantanamo Bay".... Pretty funny flick. Haven't seen their first movie, so I'm sure I missed out on alot of jokes/etc related to their first release.

Gonna go play with the server now..

I am a big fan of htop which is a replacement for the standard version of "Top" that usually comes pre-installed with *nix


Instead of the normal:
[bash]# htop -d 30 output


I can now get a nice colorful version by typing:
[bash]# screen htop -d 30



Kinda cool me thinks.

Our server runs the Plesk control panel. If it were up to me I would just run the server sans control panel, but the clients dig it because it automates many processes etc etc.

Since moving over to our Dual Xeon server, I had been running ver. 8.2.1

At that time, ver. 8.3.0 had already been out for a little while.. But I like to wait at least a few months to make sure there aren't any major bugs in the latest distro.

Well like the tard that I am, I used the auto-installer within the CP. But it gave me a failed installation.. Then I realized I should clear out the /var/spool/up2date packages (well, move them to a BU Dir to be exact). Tried the update again, all seems to be well. I see some weird mysqld instances going on, so I'm going to check out the my.cnf to see if Plesk went and fuggled around with my settings.

But........I cannot stress enough, if you do ANY updates to your sys ----- BACKUP BACKUP BACKUP!

And run up2date -u regularly for all the latest patches. You'll be glad you did.

But a word of advice for those running RHEL 4&5 systems, make sure you edit your etc/sysconfig/rhn/up2date to include:
pkgSkipList=dummy-selinux-*;kernel*;;;

So Up2date doesn't go upgrading your kernel and messing up your sys.. unless of course you want a kernel upgrade...

Time for me now to go make sure Plesk 8.3.0 hasn't fuggled around with my settings.

The PowerBall numbers just came out........No luck for me. Not even a 3$ winner. I suck.

Lately I've had a weakness for playing this. I think I've played like 5 times now in the last two months.......

Hell, with a jackpot for this drawing at 162million dollars, I couldn't resist......

Last time I played (Wednesday) at least I recouped 7 of the 10$ I spent on it... But I used that 7$ to buy more tickets for tonights drawing (17$ in all).

Oh well. It's always nice to dream.......Plus I've promised Romeo (our overweight cat that has somewhat of an eating disorder) an inflatable pool filled with premium cat-food if I ever do win.. I think he would dig that. And Julie (our spoiled cat) has been promised a diamond collar.................ANYWAY..........

If nobody wins again, and the jackpot goes up again - I will play again... But if someone does win the jackpot and it starts all over, I'm done for awhile.. At least until the jackpot goes over 100mill...

I occasionally visit abovetopsecret.com to visit their "breaking news" section. They have all kinds of alternative news etc.
But what I see popping up there more frequently is something that pisses me off big-time.
That being, these idiots (officially called "No-Planers") who believe that no planes ever struck the World Trade Center. 
I mean..........COME ON!

These idiots (calling them idiots because I'm being nice) believe:
1. The planes were in fact holograms
2. They were missiles "disguised" as airplanes

yadda yadda yadaa

And these folks believe with all their heart that this is true! WTF is wrong with the world?

Granted, I agree that we haven't been told everything about what occurred that day (Flight 93 being possibly shot down, for one). But this above B.S. is just taking it too far.

When these folks are confronted with: "Well, how come we saw the planes on every major news station across the world, AND in amateur videos?"

They will respond "Oh, the TV stations were in on it.. And all the amateur footage has been faked by the CIA".......

Yeah....the CIA was sitting at CBS/NBC/ABC/FOX/CNN that day with their particle accelerator footage modification beams....Which also affected the thousands of amateur videos........

In my opinion these idiots come up with these extreme theories because they, themselves cannot grasp the enormity of the horrible disaster that occurred on 9/11. And they do not want to accept that, hey, s#it happens!

Long before I was a server admin/webhost guy I was an ER technician.. Only later to find out the administration was a bunch of idiots with paranoid tendencies.. But that's a whole other entry.

I worked the night-shift, my specialty was in cardiac emergencies in the dedicated cardiac emergency dept.. I would though, occasionally float to the "Regular" E.R. if I was needed.. Or if nothing was going on of importance on my side of the building.

It was roughly 4am on a Thursday morning when the EMS radio came alive with MFD paramedics reporting "37 y/o male with foreign object in body cavity. Current vitals are ----, ETA 10 minutes. Anything Further?" The EMT asked.. We could make out a bit of a chuckle in his voice.. This had to be good.. We just weren't prepared for HOW good this would be.

Since things were slow on both sides, myself and a couple nurses went out to the ambulance bay to await the arrival of this dude. Anytime we had free time was good, and gave us time to have a quick smoke (ew, I know.. Gross habit.. but whatever).

As promised, about ten minutes later the MFD ambulance pulls up, calmly backs up into the bay.. And what are we greeted with? Why yes, some dude laying on his stomach with a poor EMT (who was as white as a sheet, and he was a black dude) yelling, "NO!", pleading with this guy not to turn over. What was this? Did the guy have something impaled in his back or something? We soon found out.

After taking said dude into ER room ten, we tx'd him on over to our bed......That's when we got the full, real lowdown on what was going on.

Apparently this guy had one of these ------> click here  stuck in his rectum........ Apparently his boyfriend thought it would be "exciting".. Little did he know.. Seems it went in too far, and caused a vacuum which prevented it to be removed digitally. We all understood all too well now why the EMT insisted the patient didn't turn over in the ambulance.. And I was given the wonderful job of taking over said EMT's "Don't turn over" pleadings. Guess this guy didn't realize that if he turned over, crack POP. there goes the light-bulb and many blood vessels in "that" region.

All was fine though. The good Dr. defeated the suction caused by the shiny invader by advancing a 18F foley cath up the dudes butt, inflating the balloon and pulling back.

Instead of sending the bulb to pathology, we gave it back to the guy... Actually, he insisted we give it back......... Let's just hope he's using it properly from now on.