Ronney Black dot Com

WEB HOSTS THAT SUCK - AQHOST

I've been offering web site hosting to my clients for the last six years. In that time I've had more than a few unpleasant experiences. The journey began with Easy CGI - They were the absolute best ever. That is until they were bought up by a larger organization that screwed up everything. The old Easy CGI hosted a Windows VPS plan for me. It worked wonders for a year. No trouble whatsoever. It was quick, responsive. No downtime and the support team actually supported me. Then came the new guys. They killed the VPS server. That's right dead. A month later and it still was dead. Not only that but they continued to bill. I had to contact the company's chief financial officer in order to get a refund.

My latest rant has to go to Aqhost. These guys have been hosting a client's ecommerce site for the last two years. A few months ago they suspended the account for non payment. Whoa - what the heck. The procedure was for them to take the payment from my paypal account each month. That's the way it worked for years.  Until somone in the billing department changed their procedures, failed to take the money, assumed I was not paying and switched off the account. When we talked about it they gave a lame excuse about a computer problem. Well three months later they have done it again. So here's my recommendation - Don't use Aqhost.

Unix has always had a special place in my heart. I may have mentioned this before so forgive me if I'm repetitive. Back in the good old dos days SCO  ran an effective ad with the line Instant Mainframe.  The ad pictured a 386 sitting on a table in a glassed in room. The machine had twenty or more wires running from the back, presumable out to terminals or PC's.  Now this was significant because in the early eighties mainframes were THE conputer and IBM was THE COMPUTER COMPANY and the IT department ran almost everthing. 

The problem was that individuals and departments often had to depend on the IT department to provide them with information and reports. This IT dependent system was slow and lacked the agility that competitive businesses and managers needed. Consequently individuals and departments started buying PC's and generatiing their own reports and mini IS systems.  Eventually the needs of the mini IS system began to grow beyound the ability of single user DOS and mini networks were started. As I recall, the major choices then were Novell, Banyon, and Unix. Novell quickly became the defacto standard.

In the late eighites I was asked to review a client's IT infrastructure and make recommendations to improve it's efficiency.  They were running an NCR mini that used the ITX operating system. This was real serious stuff. And seriously expensive. An upgrade of their then 8 user system would have cost in excess of $100,00 inculding hardware and software.  This is the context within which the SCO Instant Mainframe ad came to mind. To make a long story short, I was able to recommend and implement a 25 user SCO Unix system with hardware, software and cabling for less than $80,000. And to top it off the Unix operating system proved to be not only elegant in design, but rock solid stable. In eight years the only downtime that system experienced was due to a dead scsi drive.  To me that was impressive.

In the late nineties I was called upon to perform a similar review for another client. They were running a a PICK application on a 32 user ATT system V box with some really old hardware. In addition they had a linux boxes used for backups.  After a lengthly review of their operation and discussions with their staff and key software vendor it was decided to install a microsoft solution. The plan called for two NT 4 servers, one to act as the domain controller offering file and pronter services, the other, a large multiprocessor HP box would house their PICK based application. The linux box stayed in place. We eventuall got the NT boxes to run fairly well, although it was never smooth.  The PDC just plain sucked. Morning logins were slow and reboots were regular. In fact we fond that reboots on at least a weekly basis reduced the amount of stress we suffered.  The experience left me with a bad taste in my mouth for MS server products because in the final analysis the two NT boxes were not as stable as Unix nor were they performing as well as Unix.

Meanwhile my unix clients have been very happy and not experiencing problems at all. Like the linux box at client # 2 - they just keep running and running. In fact during the four years that I was associated with client # 2 the linux box never required a reboot. So you see my view of the two products really is from a position of experience - some of which I would rather not go through again.  Since the NT4 I have had ocassion to install and support half a dozen or so Windows Server 2000 and 2003 sites.  Server 2000 is a vast improvement over NT4 and 2003 is even better than 2000. But so far neither match the power and elegance of Unix ( now linux).

 VmWare Server is the BOMB.  Check this out. Take a serious dual or quad 64 bit processor and load it up with 8 gig of ram. Get yourself a big drive and some network storage.  Install xp in a partition. Install Vista in another partion. Now the vista boot loader will let you choose vista or xp.  Kinda cool. Except the MS way of life is fraught with dangers, adware, viruses etc.  Now for the smooooth.  Download a modern 64 bit version of Linux - I chose Ubuntu because of it's broad based support. Install Ubuntu and give yourself a large home partition. Reboot and the grub loader will let you log into ubuntu or if you choose the windows option you will be presented with the vista boot loader. Even Cooler.

Now boot into ubuntu and download/install the vmware server. After settimg it up you can install practically any operating system inside your linux OS. This is really cool.  So lets say you want to learn linux fedora core.  Just download it and install it in your vmware server gizmo and off you go.  This is way to cool.  So cool in fact that I almost never boot into xp or vista.  The possibilities with linux and vmware are seemingly endless.  So I installed an xp virtual machine in vmware. It works fine. It seemed a little slower than bare metal xp but then I added the vmtools and it sped up considerably.  So I have my Visual Studio in there plugging along.  Then I put a fedora core virtual machine together along with the lamp stack and it ran swell as well. In fact I can run both the fedora and xp virtual machines at the same time.

Now that things are set up I plan to install small business server in a virtual machine and see what it's about. 

Well here's a gotcha everybody should know about. A few days ago I added a column to the main table in the mysql database.  A user called the next day and pointed out that she could no longer add entries.  I poked around and found that the primary key on the main table no longer had it's autoincrement attribute set.  Google searches indicated that this has happened to others and that one had to be very careful when making mods to the table structure.  The fix was to drop the auto inc column and add it again.  It's a good thing that particular column was not used in a foreing key relationship. So the moral of this one for me is to BE CAREFUL and KEEP A BACKUP.

Speaking of which, in the process of fixing this problem I came across SQLyog. It's a good gui tool for managing a mysql database. In particular it allows you to easily build  triggers and stored procedures. So far it's the best tool I have found.

The Buckeye State Funeral Directors and Embalmers Association held this year's convention at the Belterra casino and resort in southern Indiana. Now, I'm not much of a casino person, in fact I pretty much avoid them and any notion of taking a chance with my few dollars.  I thought the trip was going to be a disaster when after 33 miles of travel the check engine light came on.  I almost went into a panic and then realized all I had to do was call the dealer. The service tech who answered the phone said don't worry about the light until the car starts running badly.  So it turned out to be an enjoyable trip.

The facility is really pleasant. Not grand but nice.  Kenny Robinson and I rode into the little town of VeVay - did I say little.  Nuff said.  The best part of the trip however was the ride back. It was a gorgeous day for a ride with the top down, and to top it off the check engine light turned itself off. Magic !

Don't believe everything you hear about sqlserver being faster than mysql. Converting from slqserver to mysql improved the performance of my web app dramatically. It may do the same for you.

The last two weeks have been busy as all get out. After building a few data entry and reporting pages for the Elect Pernel Jones Jr web app I found that the app kept crashing. At first I though the problem was related to using datasets. Replacing the data sets with CBO's led to a slight performance improvement but as it turned out the main problem was related to running msde and / or sqlexpress 2005 in a constrained memory configuration.  Now I know we have heard that ms sql server will run the pants off mysql. At least thats what the majority of posts on the net assert. What goes unsaid in those statements is the fact that sqlserver and it's variants run well provided they have enough memory.

Well let me say this about that. If you are running an app on a hosted web server and are looking to improve performance  then you may be disappointed with ms sqlserver.  In my configuration I have a vps with 768 meg of ram. I gave 256 to the sqlserver versions of my app and found the server running out of memory as multiple people (4) began using the app and running reports. Not only did the apps crash - but the lack of memory took down the whole server - requiring periodic reboots. Reducing the sqlserver memory to 128 did not improve matters - in fact it just slowed things down more. So here's what I did. 

First I installed slqexpress thinking that msde had memory leaks.  That did not take care of the problem. So I created an odbc connection, imported my tables into access. Brought up the mysql navigation toolkit, exported my access files to mysql, installed the mysql net connector, reworked my DAL to accomodate the mysql net connector and bang. Lengthly reports that timed out under sqlserver breezed through under mysql.

But, it was not quite  easy as I said. Here are some things to look out for. You can't pass a dbnull to a mysql date - if you do mysql saves the date as 0000-00-00 which asp net does not know what to do with.  The mysql navigation toolkit by default builds tables using the latin1 character set. You will probably want to change that and use the utf8 character set. Your stored procedures and views may need a bit of rewriting but none of it is complicated.  The online mysql docs are pretty decent but I wound up putting out $50 for Paul DeBois' MySql book. And I'm glad I did.

So if you have trouble with poor performing web apps, you may want to give mysql a look. It made a big difference for me.

Well the work continues on the Pernel Jones Jr Election website.  Over the Memorial Day weekend I did a bit of visiting with family and chores around the house. In the midst of it all however I found that the Pernel Jones Jr website was running slow as all get out.  At times the pages would not load, in fact the entire web server was being brought to its knees. I thought for a while that the problem was msde but after spending a day prepping mysql to load the 500 thiusand records I found that the problem was really related to the dataset datatable objects. It seems that these two gizmos are memory intensive and a large query - or several large queries will consume huge amounts of resources. So a redesign is in process....

This problem occurs when the parameters and field names are not spelled exactly the same - so use all caps for field nams and params and the problem should - might go away.

That says it all. PJ, as known by his friends and family, is once again running for a seat on the Clevleand City Council.  In the last election, four years ago, he lost the vote by a mere 14 points.  His opponent had the backing of  mayorial candidate Frank Jackson and a host of other notables. Since then things have changed.Many residents in the ward are upset about the current council person's performance and would like  a change. PJ's campaign is capitalizing on that sentiment with the phrase A New Way Forward For Ward 5. I'm supporting Pernel Jones Jr and urge you to do so as well. Volunteers are needed and as always, campaign contributions will be much appreciated. www.perneljonesjr.com

Well the light bulb finally came on. Some time ago Verniki said I should get a pair of terrabyte drives - one for storage and the other for backing up. So Now that I have the drives I'm trying to figure out how to share them with Peabody - my ubuntu box and the others windows boxes on the network.  Well It finally dawned on me that I can format one of the drives as ext3 under linux, then mount the drive and share it out as a samba share. So I found this neat web page with a step by step that worked like a charm. How to Setup Samba under Ubuntu It covered it so well that my share worked the first time I tried it. Very good - so here are a few of the notes to myself
stop samba = sudo /etc/init.d/samba stop
edit samba config file = sudo /etc/samba/smb.conf
start samba = sudo /etc/init.d samba start

Thats too smoove

My linux trip is fraught with tricks and turns. I started up my machine a few days ago and noticed that sound was missing.  After some consternation I googled up a solution.  It seems that a recent system software update fouled somehting up - sort of like windows might do. It turns out that the I had to add myself to the sound users group.  Here are the steps

see if you are a member of the sound group - getent group | grep audio

if you dont see your login id do this :

sudo adduser XXX audio

test  sudo cat /dev/urandom > /dev/dsp - this sends static to the speakers - stop it with a control C

that seemed to fix things - but for some strange reason the pulseaudio gizmo does not like my machine so I have to go into System-> Preferences-> sound and set the sound device as an OSS type to get things working.   Oh yeah - I had to tell Amorak and Audacious they should playback through an OSS rather than a pulseaudio -

So now music plays again in the Black House.