The folks at Awesome Blogs ran a small interview with yours truly ..

The article can be found HERE

Very informal .. but quite nice

Technorati Tags: blogs, Interview, NullMind, wordpress

Read more…

Popularity: 15% [?]

On this thread on WHT, the users were gagging on some poor guy because he wanted to become a host, but didn’t had a business plan

I asked people to lay off the guy (after all, how many of us had a business plan when they started)

somebody called me an hypocrite because we at Psoft recommend more servers as a (business plan ?) requirement .. etc, basically in the past he called us and guess he didn’t felt respected (I work for Comodo/Psoft in the H-Sphere Control Panel division)

one of the comment backs from a user was: (regarding myself) .. ps a user I have no idea who he is…

“In fairness, regardless of what you may think of H-Sphere, Carlos has been around these forums and around the hosting business for many years prior to his involvement with H-Sphere. He’s more than qualified to offer advice and well-wishes to anyone, whether he’s currently affiliated with H-Sphere or not. ”

“But when it comes down to it, he’s got so much history in this biz, it’s kind of mind-boggling. He designed the first Cpanel theme for God’s sake! He can correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe he also did the Cpanel logo.”

How’s that for an endorsement .. I should print it and have it framed (and send a copy to Cpanel … from H-Sphere)

Technorati Tags: Comodo, Computers, CPanel, H-Sphere, Linux, work

Popularity: 13% [?]

People sometimes say I’m quite a character …usually not in a good way, following that lead Thiago created a new character for the upcoming strips of The Pings which is based on myself (Null).

On this draft the Null character seem to be inviting people over to Relio (My Hosting Biz), I’m hoping we will have a few new comic strips done by next month.

Technorati Tags: Computers, Linux, comics, thepings, toonz

Popularity: 13% [?]

Note:

When:

warning: rpmts_HdrFromFdno: V3 DSA signature: NOKEY, key ID 025e513b
Error: Could not find the GPG Key necessary to validate pkg /var/cache/yum/base/packages/xxxxxxxxxxxxx.rpm

do:

rpm –import /usr/share/doc/centos-release-3/RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-3

Technorati Tags: Computers, Linux

Popularity: 10% [?]

A couple of days ago I read a news article that stated Apple was to migrate his machines to the Intel platform, steering away from the PowerPC in favor of x86.

I personally prompted it as nonsense, true that IBM has not been able to produce a 3 Ghz chip yet, but would Apple really go as far as moving to Intel ?, well the truth would be known at the WWDC conference, so instead of speculating, I decided just to wait (but deep inside, kept dismissing it as a silly rumor)

Well, yesterday Steve Jobs put an end to the rumor, and made a fact, Apple is switching to the Intel processors.

Technorati Tags: APPLE, Computers, OSX, upset, WWDC

Read more…

Popularity: 10% [?]

Summary of the night

• server 26 had to be re-formatted, client messed it up beyond repair
• server 27 had to be re-formatted, client initially requested the wrong OS
• server 53 crashed while performing backups, reboot and came back fine.
• server 98 crashed*

Server 98 crashes at about 3:00 AM, turning it ON/OFF would make the HD’s spin and the lights blink, but no video or activity, upon investigation it appeared the CPU fan failed, and the CPU overheated .. we let it cool down, no avail, the CPU seems to be fry, unfortunately it’s a “Duron”, we don’t use those anymore, so no replacement in house.

We decided to move the HD to another intel machine that was on standby, install the OS and migrate the files over.

On the new machine, the install failed twice, HD errors on a new HD, we try it again with another HD, and it went thru, install was done, but now the /etc/fstab need modifying, so it wont try to read the old HD partitions with the same name as the master on boot instead of the master partitions.

After many hours of troubleshooting, we are finally about ready to start the data migration… and it’s 9:00 AM, a whole night lost.

I do 8 Computers.

*Edit (12:30PM) - Finally it’s all done, system has been restored successfully*

Technorati Tags: Computers, tired, work

Popularity: 9% [?]

I recently found an old design I had done for KDE that I completely forgotten about.

Back in the late 90’s I was evolved a bit with the KDE project, one of the jobs that I did was to create a screen-saver, I did the graphics and another person did the coding.

My design idea was simple, a 3D Tux in a spaceship flying around in a space backdrop .. simple, but efficient (and cute for the time). I designed both the Tux and the spaceship in Lightwave 3D from scratch .. then I animated a sprite loop and the rest was coding, the name of the screen-saver was “KTUX” and it’s part of “KDEtoys”

It seems it’s still part of KDE and floating around .. so even so it was a simple job for me, I’m quite proud it stuck with the project :).

Technorati Tags: Linux, KDE, toonz

Popularity: 12% [?]

What a crappy night.

One of our client’s d-servers decided to act up at 3:00 AM, when running most commands it would error with a Input/Output Error message.

The initial consensus was that this was a Bad HD, but this exact server had the HD replaced on April 11, although not impossible, the prospect of a 2 month old HD failing already was hard to believe, but this was not the problem, the problem was .. the client had not done any backups.

Even so it’s not my responsibility to make sure customers have backups, somehow in the end I knew we would take the head for it, so I attempted to backup the one site this server hosts, and it failed, mid way thru the backup, the server simply .. CRASH, so we moved to repair mode, while the tech ran a lengthy FSCK, I started to plan the move to another disk, and started to complement the terrible day I would have ahead, this is a online pharmacy, which demands a uptime SLA allot higher than usual customer do.

The first FSCK for some reason failed (I now believe due to tech error), so we moved on to a second one, using a few extra options .. and thanks to the lucky start .. it seems to have done it.

I checked the logs, there were no EXT3 or HD related errors even before when it was giving the I/O error .. so I’m uncertain if the HD was bad, or if it was just a corrupt sector of data, were part of the kernel or a major OS file might have been.

Regardless, this has allowed me to now have a stable system, and my first command to it was “BACKUP”

I have let it run now, as the HD seems to be behaving, but if it fails again, with a backup on the side, I can restore it in an hour, vs trying to harvest data from a bad drive, which could have taken days.

I really should have chosen a less stressful profession, like dismantling live bombs… at least those guys get to sleep.

Technorati Tags: Computers, work

Popularity: 7% [?]

Today I shipped off the two 20″’s Monitors (2005FPW), I paid for the second 24″ (2405FPW) and shall have it next week perhaps.

I’ll be working on 2 x 24″ .. 48″ of TFT Goodness
Cant wait, I’ll make sure to post pics when it comes.

Technorati Tags: big boys toys, 2405FPW, Computers

Popularity: 7% [?]

I just been spending the past 2 hours messing around with my Blog settings trying to find why when I post a new entry, blog directories and Technorati are not being notified (PING).

I use ecto to blog, and checked and rechecked the ecto settings as well, all was good and the proper ping recipients were set, I even opened a new topic on the ecto forums asking for help.

Then I open up a new post window to write my frustration and I notice this checkbox labeled “PING”, right there on the post window, in plain view:

What a bafoon … sure enough once I selected that ON, I could see ecto pinging the blog directories.

Technorati Tags: ecto, Idiot, wordpress

Popularity: 8% [?]