I’ve been really busy lately, and just haven’t found the time to update. However, just as a teaser, I’ve got two entries in the books. One about Seattle, the other about the Xbox360 adventure last night. Anyways, hopefully they’ll be something up later tonight, and if not, over the long weekend.
Category: rebelpeon.com
New Features
Well, today I want to introduce a new feature to rebelpeon.com. I enjoy eating food, and being in Chicago, I’m surrounded by great food everywhere. Plus I have a tendency to eat out a lot (at least for lunch). Therefore, I think it only makes sense to put my adventures online. This new section will probably be broken down quite a bit into categories. That way, it will be easy for me to find places that I want to visit based on various criteria. Well, without further ado, lets kick this off…
Oh, and just so you don’t think I’m crazy, there will be another feature coming down the pike very shortly. If done right, I could see it drawing a lot of traffic. Now, I just need to find the time to do it.
We’re Back (Again)
Wow, another long hiatus, but we seemed to have weathered the storm. There were many reasons for the downtime including a failed hard drive, crappy Intel NICs that actually had the RJ-45 jack come unsoldered, figuring out the layout at the compound, and me just being busy with other things.
However, we’ve come back better than ever. We’re currently rocking ExpressionEngine 1.3 , plus the backend, if not super fast, is crazy cool. I’m currently divided up all backend resources to it’s own virtual server. This allows me to play with one server, without, necessarily, effecting all the others. Granted, that doesn’t really happen, since many servers are tied together (web server is tied to active directory server and SQL server), but it greatly helps. Plus, this way I can have a sandpit for me to test new, emerging technologies without having to take down everything when something goes wrong.
I should be able to keep uptime back up to where it was before moving, but I already know of at least one downtime in the near future. The server is physically moving within the apartment once the necessary equipment arrives. This shouldn’t take very long, but then again, neither should the last few things I have done.
Is It Alive?
Yes, I’m slowly getting everything back into shape. There’s a lot of back-end changes going on, mostly for personal testing, so it’ll be a bumpy ride for a bit. Aaron and I have moved into the apt, and we have had Internet access (on and off) for a week now. However, since we both have an “Internet presence”, we’ve had to figure out a way to share everything nicely. This is sort of the spot I’m in right now. As you can see, I’ve got it slightly working, but I’m still missing a few spots. Hopefully I’ll be able to plow through those soon, so I can get full access to my online resources. I may need to get a book on ISA 2004 in order to do everything that I want, but so far, I’ve been able to get everything else working just how I want it.
Only time will tell, I guess. It seems like there’s a lot of stuff I’ve wanted to blog about, but haven’t had the website to do it. So, with luck, there’ll probably be a few updates here soon.
Referrers
It’s amazing how having your website down for a week and a half, really reduces the amount of referrers you get. By visiting my referrers page prior to the downtime, I was seeing anywhere from 20-30 referrers per day (not visitors or anything, but people coming from links on other sites). Now I’m seeing fewer than 10 a day. Not that I really care, just interesting since most of the referrers are from friends’ websites or from search engines.
Back in Action
Wow, so that was a long downtime, eh? Basically, what happened was my IP changed, and the software that’s supposed to auto update my DNS nameservers didn’t really do it’s job. But in all honestly, that may have been my fault, since it was complaining about not being able to log in with the credentials supplied.
Now that every thing’s back up an running, I’ve got a lot to talk about. Hopefully I’ll have some time to actually do it.
Edit:
Oh yeah, and that may not sound like it should’ve taken over a week to fix, but I’m essentially living up in Chicago now. So when something breaks in Champaign, it takes a bit to get down and fix it.
Updates all Around
Well, they aren’t exactly updates, I’ve just decided to use a few features for anti-spam that I recently didn’t want to have to deal with. I got about 10 random spam posts on my website last night, and, well, I’m just kinda sick of it.
First of all, trackbacks have been disabled. Nobody uses them on my website anyways, and well, they were just a bringer of spam. The second thing, is that I set commenting limited to 30 days. This was actually already set on all the other rebelpeon.com sites, except the main one (mostly because nobody else updates their site, so they were all already over 30 days old anyways).
Hopefully this should all but stop the spam, but at the very least it will limit it to maybe a few here and there.
Logs of Fun
I was talking with a coworker today about my site over some beers, and it got me to thinking that I hadn’t checked my site logs in about forever. It’s always fun to browse through the logs to see who’s viewing my site, and how often. Well, it turns out that the guys at Fox Drive have taken the number 1 spot with hits. Nothing like 9.2k hits since November 3rd, with over 63MB transferred. Way to beat out the search bots guys. Keep up the good work. 🙂
In general statistics, I have about 812 hits per day, have close to 92k hits serving up over 645MB since November 3rd. Looking at the page views per day starting in November, there has been a steady increase since around the beginning of the year. Looking at the visitors per day, this trend is magnified. However, I don’t think this has to do with my blogging poweress, but more to do with the influx of spam. For some reason, I don’t think that my visitors all the sudden doubled at the beginning of the year, but who knows, maybe.
Hopefully I can still keep people interested with my life. Things seem to have died down a bit lately, but that’s about to change. Change is definitely coming. Hopefully quite soon.
Yet Another Redesign
This is for all you RSS readers. I’ve done a mini-redesign yet again on the site. I definitely like the use of white space better now, and the color scheme fits me and that site better.
Virtualization
Alright, for those of you that don’t appreciate being a nerd, please feel free to stop reading this post. For the rest of you…
At the last DS meeting, we had a presentation by VMWare. Now, I use VMWare Workstation to do a lot of my MSI development and testing. Granted, I could use the University site licensed version of Virtual PC, but VMWare is just better. So anyways, I was very intrigued by what they were going to talk to us about, especially with the recent release of Virtual Server from Microsoft.
Personally, I had never used either companies server solution, but because of my previously reported problems with Virtual PC, Virtual Server already left a bad taste in my mouth (turns out that virtual server is leaps and bounds better than PC, but still, old habits are hard to break). The meeting was, as I expected, mostly centered around their server products: GSX and ESX. Now, you can go read about each one from the links listed, but in general, what it comes down to is that GSX is an application that runs on a host operating system while ESX is the host operating system. Talk about awesome.
Lets take a step back for those of you that are new to virtual machines a second and tell you what this means. What all of these applications do is run a virtual computer on another computer. So, for instance with my MSI testing, I have my normal Windows XP installation, and then on top of that I have VMWare Workstation that runs a virtual computer inside of it. It has it’s own hard drive (which is actually just a file), sound card, video card, network card, bios, etc. For testing, this is a must have. The server class products add a bit more: ability to easily have multiple workstations running at the same time, a nice management window, web management, etc. For those that are familiar to Solaris back when NT4 was a big seller, may remember add-on cards you could purchase that would run NT4 in a Solaris window. This is the same kind of thing, only it’s done completely in software instead of hardware. Similar to the workstation products, both Virtual Server and GSX Server run on top of an operating system as an application (Linux, Windows). Now, ESX Server removes the host operating system all together and interfaces right with the hardware. This is where VMWare really shines because this reduces the overhead of GSX server by around half since there isn’t a middle OS messing with things. This means that Virtual Machines can share memory, and not be bogged down with whatever is happening with the host OS.
Well, I know you’re all wondering how this all applies to me. After seeing that presentation, I was very excited about trying to play with ESX. Needless to say, that was a bust, you can’t even download a trial version from their website. However, you can grab GSX server to give it a whirl. So, rebelpeon.com is now running totally on virtual servers. I’ve been needing to do some stuff to my server anyways because of all the problems I’ve been having with it, so I figured this would be a great way to do it while learning a bunch.
It was a snap to setup, I actually did it all on my tablet. I got GSX server installed on it, and then built the 2 machines from there. I then migrated all the stuff from what was currently running on the main server to the virtual servers. Once everything was migrated, I wiped the physical server and installed a fresh OS on it, then put GSX on there. I then powered down the 2 virtual servers on my tablet, and moved the hard drive files over to the real server, then powered it up. It was so easy. Plus, since my real server is a dual P3, it’s actually using both processors now (one for each virtual server). The only problem I’m having right now is getting access to a physical disk in on of the virtual servers, but that’s because it was a Windows Dynamic Disk, and VMWare doesn’t support those. All in all, a fairly painless process, plus yet another thing to add under my belt.