Technical Notebook » Learn From My Mistakes

Lesson learned with virtual (VPS) hosting

Stuart Ryan — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 07:39:11 +0000

Virtual hosting, VPSs, Virtual Private Servers, whatever you want to call it (as it comes in many shape and forms) is often a very appealing option for someone that is making the move beyond shared web hosting but not quite ready to get a low end dedicated server.

As I run numerous websites including my blogs and a couple of high traffic sites, over the years I have tried VPSs several times, often as a means of looking at reducing operating costs. Unfortunately each time I have found that performance on these servers have been abysmal. Regardless of this fact, I decided to once again give this a try and over the last 2 months have tried two separate Virtual Private Server companies. At this stage because I am not wanting to do a review I am not going to mention them however with each of them I had severe issues.

The first hosting provider I went with had underlying issues when I attempted to resize my VPS which resulted in data corruption and extensive downtime (as well as a whole lot of no responses when things went wrong). The second provider was well performing to start with however a couple of weeks after migrating the sites (as some people will have noticed) all my blogs started taking in excess of 10 seconds to load each page which is unacceptable to say the least. (As an aside I believe this was due to a mixture of limited CPU resources and high IO wait times)

Therefore I have learned the following lesson, if you do decide to get a VPS, remember that if you pay with peanuts you will get monkeys, the cheapest is almost always not going to be the best and will be cheap due to oversold resources (especially in the case of so many concurrent users that disk IO becomes terrible).

I am now using a hybrid server, which is virtual on a dedicated server, so there is ZERO sharing of resources. I have to say so far I am very happy but I guess time will tell (and will probably do a review when I later get a chance).

What are your thoughts on Virtual Private Servers?

Stuart

The iPad + Numbers with Microsoft Windows + Excel

Stuart Ryan — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 10:28:39 +0000

Have you ever wondered how on earth you can export spreadsheets from Numbers on the iPad to Microsoft Excel? I have and much to my dismay I found the above combination of software may as well be known as a royal pain in the proverbial rear end. Recently I decided as part of my studies in photography I would use Apple’s Numbers application for the iPad to capture a series of information for each of the shots I was taking on a roll of film (yes that is correct, film… not digital LOL).

Much to my dismay I found that once I had filled out the spreadsheet, the only formats that I could export from the Numbers application were either to Apple Numbers, or PDF. However as my main computer is a PC I obviously don’t have Numbers as the iWork suite is only available for Apple OSX.

Therefore I found myself in the difficult situation of how to get the file across to my computer so that I could convert it and continue work on it in Microsoft Excel. In the end I figured out the only way was to do the following:

In the Numbers application on the iPad select the cells you wish to copy and copy them by tapping on the selected cells once and select copy
Open up a word processing application on the iPad, in this case I chose DocsToGo
Create a new word document and paste the text in
Email this to yourself and open it on your PC
Copy the text by selecting it all and clicking Ctrl + C
Paste this into a new excel workbook. Obviously you lose any formatting however you get the data over and it will correctly place it into rows and colums.

Until such a time as Apple enables the ability to export to a competitors format I would strongly recommend that you use a different app (such as DocsToGo) that natively supports the Microsoft Office formats so that you do not run into these issues.

If anyone has any other ideas I would welcome hearing how you get around this frustrating issue.
Stuart

Trials and Tribulations of Installing New Software

Stuart Ryan — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 08:52:00 +0000

Over the last couple of weeks I have taken on the interesting task of installing the Atlassian Suite for my open source development site Open Source Battlefield. Particularly during the last week I have taken this up a level and powered through this with vigor and have essentially been banging my head against a brick wall.

Before I continue, the task I have set out to do is install the following:

Crowd – Atlassian’s Centralised User Management Software
JIRA – Atlassian’s Bug Tracking and Project Management Software
Greenhopper – Atlassian’s Agile Project Management Plugin for JIRA
and finally Confluence – Atlassian’s Wiki Software

I began my journey with the Atlassian “Here Be Dragon’s Quest” and I found it was an excellent starter to assist in getting my head around Tomcat and how I could set up Confluence, JIRA, GreenHopper, and Crowd. However due to a memory constraints on the server I wanted to roll the three applications into a single Tomcat instance on my server. For the average Tomcat admin this may seem like a simple task however for me… a person that has never touched Tomcat with a 10 foot pole, it wasn’t as easy as I was hoping.

In steps Scott Herdman a good mate of mine from uni who has been helping me greatly with this little project of mine as he has administered Tomcat and the Atlassian products before. (Oh and for the record he was the one who told me I should document my experiences for others to hopefully learn from (and granted… he is right it IS why I have this blog) so therefore he gets this free plug).

Scott has been answering questions on and off for me and the circle of my learning has gone something along the lines of:

Problem –> Read Error Logs –> Search Google –> Re-Read the Atlassian Guides –> Search Google Some More –> Read the Error Logs Again –> Beg Scott for some assistance –> and back round to the beginning for the next problem.

After many MANY trials of getting the Atlassian Suite up and running in a single Tomcat instance I decided that they have made the recommendation for them to be installed separately for a reason. Unfortunately it appears that due to conflicts in the libraries that are included with each application in order to get them to all run on the one Tomcat server would require a lot of tweaking and careful petting LOL of which I don’t have the time for.

So if you are starting out, and have little experience with Tomcat, I hope that I can save you some time and effort straight up… don’t try to roll your own Tomcat, just use the ones included with each application it will save you a good few weeks.

So this is why I have really not been around much. After my exams are over next week I will be back more and have a few interesting ideas for things I can post about but for the moment I am off to play with my swanky new Atlassian Suite. For reference I got it set up as Open Source Battlefield Home (Confluence) and Open Source Battlefield JIRA. Crowd is installed as well but really has no use of being included here LOL.

If anyone else has experiences with Atlassian I would love to hear your thoughts.

Stuart

Protect your files online!

Stuart Ryan — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 11:45:21 +0000

This is just a quick one, recently I had some files stored in the public_html directory of one of my websites. This included several software ISOs (quite large) and an entire VMWare Virtual Machine. I had them stored there temporarily so that I could transfer them between a few different locations.

Little did I realise that this particular site was being indexed by Google and therefore my ISOs and Virtual Machines were then made public. Luckily the bandwith was not too much of a killer (this is lesson one… even where you run your own dedicated server… ALWAYS put limits in place, they are there to save you as much as restrict you). However in this I managed to lose control over a Virtual Machine which had a lot of licensed software contained therein.

At least in this case no personal data was lost, however valuable lesson learned, if you are going to store ANYTHING on your personal hosting that you do not want to be seen, make sure you password protect the directory. Just because you have not linked to it anywhere… believe me Google will find a way to find it HAHA.

Peace out people.

Stuart