All I know is that it’s called Progress and that it seems exceptionally slow. This could be due to many things, but mostly I’d start with the assumption that it, and Subshop, are crap.
That’s it. Good luck.
So a client and I ended up moving her laptop, a Dell Inspiron 1525, to Ubuntu because Vista and the attendant AHCI drivers were absolute filth. Did the file shuffle thing, ran the install. Activated the proprietary wireless driver, and presto, we on the wifis. Next up was getting the C885 going. I thought this would be a minor pain, where I set up wvdial and finally got network manager to recognize it as a dial up connection. No sir, it was mind blowingly painless. I got it current with updates, rebooted, plugged it in and network manager configured it for me. For some reason there’s a dual entry for it, only one of which appears to work, but aside from that everything is just brilliant!
There’s a website I built… a long long time ago. Part of the backend for it is a simple CMS setup. It’s all PHP on the data processing end.
The other day I get an email that they can’t update one part of it, it just gives them an error when they try to save. Namely that it can’t connect to /tmp/mysql.sock . I reply with “Well, nothing in the code changed, and that’s a server related error, so contact those guys”. They do, the webhost smells it’s fingers for a while and says it must be a coding error.
So I try it. It works fine for me. Absolutely no errors at any place in the process. Yet the lady trying to edit it has tried from at least 3 different machines and 2 different networks. The maddening thing is that none of that matters, this is all server side code.
I just know it’s going to be something retarded at the webhost. Not that I can really imagine what.
As you may know, I’m no big fan of Vista, but I have to admire one thing. Emperor:Battle for Dune, with the 1.09 patch, runs flawlessly thus far.
So, I’ve been working on moving a website where I don’t have access to the actual files. Long story.
Anyway, I got the layout sorted and started looking at the actual content. It dawned on me how big a pain in the butt it was going to be to format all that by hand, especially since after this move I’ll be working on completely redesigning this site. So, what to do?
First I looked at saving it as html from OpenOffice, but that uses a lot of table stuff, which bugs me. Then I had an IDEA!
I setup tinymce to just output to a page, view the source, trim a line, and boom, about 90% there in a couple swift steps. I might eventually go through and have it output the actual html, but this is good for now.
I’ve long suspected a certain amount of snake oil to the whole ReadyBoost!!!! thing in Vista. Being stuck on a laptop with Vista, for the mo, and having picked up a nice PNY 8GB thumb drive yesterday, I figured I may as well try it out.
Nothing I do, currently, is all that intense, so I figured the only thing I that would really show any impact would be Forged Alliance. Fired up the benchmark mode and let it run.
Non-ReadyBoost Score: 12465
With ReadyBoost: 11529
So… uh… I guess it doesn’t help with games? Or at least that game.
Here’s the header stats from the two runs-
Stats Log Report
Logged frames : 4127
Timestamp : Fri Mar 13 14:03:47 2009
SupComMark (sim) : 10000
SupComMark (render) : 2465
SupComMark (composite) : 12465
Stats Log Report
Logged frames : 3724
Timestamp : Fri Mar 13 14:13:38 2009
SupComMark (sim) : 10000
SupComMark (render) : 1529
SupComMark (composite) : 11529
So either I’m doing it wrong, or something.
So, you find yourself thinking “Hey, company should host it’s own email server. Then we can spam at will!” or something to that effect. I mention spam because there’s no sane reason to run your own email server.
Anyway. For this task you might be considering Exchange. Let’s see if it fits your environment and needs.
Do you run on an Active Directory domain?
Do you have more than, say, a dozen users that need email?
Do you have a severe learning disorder?
If you answer yes to any of these, then Exchange might work out. Unless you don’t run an AD domain, in that case just move along regardless of the other two.
in regards to this fine post from a while ago, which someone decided to pitch some software on in the comments, that once your PST file, in those versions of Outlook, is over 2GB, you’re hosed. You have to take whatever you can extract after truncating, or pony up the money to use that Outlook tool. The issue is one of file format, and is rather boring. I just wanted to be perfectly clear that you can’t just upgrade Outlook, or move to another client, and have the actual file be fixed.
Well, that went flawlessly. For swap I really wasn’t sure if resize was applicable, so I just turned off swap and ran mkswap on the logical volume, which worked fine. For the root partition I girded my loins and ran ext2online /dev/<volume group>/<logical volume>. Took something like 10 minutes I’d guess.
So, wonderful. Now I just need to figure out a backup plan for this thing.
So, rather than doom myself to total repition, I instead used a non-solution. I added the new drive into the existing volume group, then used it to extend the logical volumes. This was done with the following commands (I’m using lvm2, just FYI)-
fdisk /dev/hd<new disk> (/dev/hdb in my case)
Depending on your specific system the hd portion may be different, so check on that.
In fdisk create a new partition, size it how you want, then set the system id to 8E. This marks the partition as Linux LVM.
Next, create the physical volume-
pvcreate /dev/hd<new disk><new partition> (/dev/hdb1 in my case)
Run pvscan to make sure it shows up.
Now add it to the volume group-
vgextend <volume group> /dev/hd<new disk><new partition>
If you aren’t sure what the name of your volume group is you can use vgscan or vgdisplay.
Next we extend the logical volume size, utilizing our new roomy drive-
lvextend -L+100G /dev/<volume group>/<logical volume name> /dev/hd<new disk><new partition>
Now, the -L indicates you’re going to be using a space indicator, instead of one of the other bizarre options. The + indicates we are adding space (you can also shrink lvs), the rest means 100 gigabytes. The default is megabytes. The last argument tells it to extend this using space from the specified physical volume. There’s also lvresize, but I wasn’t sure if it would have balked in this case or not, so I went this route.
Check the details to see if it worked-
lvdisplay (you should see it listed with the new size)
And you’re done, right? Well… no. Now you have to resize the file system. Since this is the root file system on a production box, I’m taking the time to ask around about whether I should even attempt doing this online or not, and which command is recommended. There’s ext2resize, resize2fs, or ext2online. I’ll post a part III about how this worked out.
So, why do I call this a non-solution? Because the main hard drive is old, and I’d like to get rid of it all together. Once I have this sorted out and get some breathing room I’ll make some backups of key files and stash them on the local backup box.