Category: Technology

phpBB 3.1 Ascraeus Released

Just a quick heads-up for those that use it, phpBB 3.1 Ascraeus as been released. It’s a feature release, so the upgrade is a bit messy. I did the “automatic” upgrade. There was so much manual work involved, I would recommend you take the approach of deleting the old files, replacing with the new ones, then running the database upgrade from there. I’ve not tried that approach, but the docs say it is OK to do it that way…

I figured I might as well upgrade, even though the forum is locked. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Website Outage Warning : 26 Oct 2014 20:00-00:00 GMT

DiagnosticsJust a quick note to say the website will be out of action this evening for 3-4 hours.

There have been a couple of random failures recently. With nothing in the logs to work with, I figured I’d try testing the hardware. Yesterday I tested the disks and they came back OK. Tonight it’s the turn of the memory. The plan is for the site to go down about 20:00 UK Time (GMT) and be up by midnight.

Sorry if this annoys anyone, but I’ve been looking through the site statistics trying to find the best time to do this and Sunday night seems to be the quietest time.

I’ll let you know how it goes. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

PS. You can read the stuff from Google’s cache in the short term. Search for the item on Google. When you get it, click the down-arrow next to the URL and select “Cached”. No need to miss anything… 🙂

GoogleCache

Update: It didn’t happen as the data centre people got back to me too late to start it (this morning). I’ll pencil this in for next week…

The Ad Hoc Reporting Myth

Empowering users! Giving users access to the information they need, when they need it! Allowing users to decide what they need! These are all great ideas and there are plenty of products out there that can be used to achieve this. The question must be, is it really necessary?

There will always be some users that need this functionality. They will need up-to-the-second ad hoc reporting and will invest their time into getting the most from the tools they are given. There is also a large portion of the user base that will quite happily use what they are given and will *never* invest in the tool set. They don’t see it as part of their job and basically just don’t care.

Back when I started IT, most projects had some concept of a reporting function. A group of people that would discuss with the user base the type of reporting that was needed and identify what was *really needed* and what were just the never ending wish list of things that would never really be used. They would build these reports and they would go through user acceptance and be signed off. It sounds like the bad old days, but what you were left with were a bunch of well defined reports, written by people who were “relatively speaking” skilled at reporting. What’s more, the reporting function could influence the application design. The quickest way to notice that “One True Lookup Table” is a bad design is to try and do some reporting queries. You will soon change your approach.

With the advent of ad hoc reporting, the skills base gradually eroded. We don’t need a reporting function any more! The users are in charge! All we need is this semantic layer and the users can do it all for themselves! Then the people building the semantic layers got lazy and just generated what amounts to a direct copy of the schema. Look at any database that sits behind one of these abominations and I can pretty much guarantee the most horrendous SQL in the system is generated by ad hoc reporting tools! You can blame the users for not investing more time in becoming an expert in the tool. You can blame the people who built the semantic layer for doing a poor job. You can blame the tools. What it really comes down to is the people who used ad hoc reporting as a “quick and easy” substitute for doing the right thing.

There will always be a concept of “standard reports” in any project. Stuff that is known from day one that the business relies on. These should be developed by experts who do it using efficient SQL. If they are not time-critical, they can be scheduled to spread out the load on the system, yet still be present when they are needed. This would relieve some of the sh*t-storm of badly formed queries hitting the database from ad hoc reporting.

I’m going to file this under #ThoseWereTheDays, #GrumpyOldMen and #ItProbablyWasntAsGoodAsIRemember…

Cheers

Tim…

ReadyNAS 104

My old NAS went pop a little while ago and I’ve spent the last few weeks backing up to alternate servers while trying to decide what to get to replace it.

Reading the reviews on Amazon is a bit of a nightmare because there are always scare stories, regardless how much you pay. In the end I decided to go for the “cheap and cheerful” option and bought a ReadyNAS 104. I got the diskless one and bought a couple of 3TB WD Red disks, which were pretty cheap. It supports the 4TB disks, but they are half the price again and I’m mean. Having just two disks means I’ve got a single 3TB RAID 1 volume. I can add a third and fourth disk, which will give me approximately 6 or 9 TB. It switches to RAID 5 by default with more than 2 disks.

The setup was all web based, so I didn’t have any OS compatibility issues. Installation was really simple. Slipped in the disks. Plugged the ethernet cable to my router and turned on the power. I went to the website (readycloud.netgear.com), discovered my device and ran through the setup wizard. Job done. I left it building my RAID 1 volume overnight, but I was able to store files almost immediately, while the volume was building.

The web interface for the device is really simple to use. I can define SMB/AFP/NFS shares in a couple of clicks. Security is really obvious. I can define iSCSI LUNs for use with my Linux machines and it has TimeMachine integration if you want that.

The cloud-related functionality is optional, so if you are worried about opening up a potential security hole, you can easily avoid it. I chose not to configure it during the setup wizard.

I was originally going to spend a lot more on a NAS, but I thought I would chance this unit. So far I’m glad I did. It’s small, solid and silent. Fingers crossed it won’t go pair-shaped. 🙂

I’ve got all the vital stuff on it now. I’ll start backing up some of my more useful VMs to it and see if I need to buy some more disks. I’ve got about 10TB of storage on servers, but most of it is taken up with old VMs I don’t care about, so I will probably be a bit selective.

Cheers

Tim…

PS. I think NetGear might be doing a revamp of their NAS lineup soon, so you might get one of these extra cheap in the near future. They’re already claim to be about 50% RRP, but most RRPs are lies. 🙂

 

Yosemite : It’s like OS X, but more boring to look at!

I went on my MacBook last night and saw I had updates available on the App Store. I figured this was one of those Twitter updates that seem to happen every time you blink. Much to my surprise it was a new version of OS X. You can tell how little of an Apple fanboy I am. I didn’t even know this was due, let alone here already. 🙂

I figured, what the heck and let it start. About 20 minutes later it was done and now I have Yosemite on my MacBook Pro (mid 2009). I wasn’t really timing, so that’s a guess.

First impressions.

  • It’s like OS X, but more boring to look at! Everything is flat and looks a little bland. I’m told this is the look and feel from the iPhone, but I don’t have one of those so I don’t know. I’m sure in a week I won’t remember the old look. The only reminder is the icons for all the non-Apple software I have installed, which still look like they are trying to fit in with the old look. 🙂
  • I asked one of my colleagues at work and he said it is meant to be faster. I don’t see that myself, but this is a 5 year old bit of kit.
  • Launchpad is straight out of GNOME3. I never use it anyway. Perhaps it always looked like this???
  • Mission Control and Dashboard are also things I never use, so I can’t tell if they have changed for the better or not. 🙂
  • The light colour background of the Application menu looks odd. Not bad, but different.

What’s broken? So far nothing. I can run VirtualBox, iTerm, Chrome and PowerPoint, so that is pretty much all I do with the laptop.

So in conclusion, Yosemite has completely changed my whole world and Apple are a bunch of geniuses right? Well, actually it’s a pretty mundane change as far as my usage is concerned. I’m sure it’s all terribly cloudy and someone will throw a “rewritten from the ground up” in there somewhere, kinda like Microsoft do when they release the same stuff year after year with a different skin…

By the way, it didn’t cost me anything to upgrade from pretty to bland!

Cheers

Tim…

 

 

Site Hosting Update : The Proxy Wars

This site hosting thing really is the gift that keeps giving. 🙂

I wrote a little over a week ago about an outstanding issue with the website, which seemed to be related to people’s company proxy servers, rather than my web server. While I was staying at the Sofitel, I started to get the issue where the HTTP address for my website was giving me the following error.

Forbidden
You don’t have permission to access / on this server.

By the time I was in a position to look at it, I had already moved to the Hilton, which did not exhibit the same problem. After Googling around and discounting the obvious stuff, like missing pages, bad configuration and file/directory permission issues, I came across a reference to some proxy servers (including Squid) producing the same error because they use HTTP 1.0 rather than HTTP 1.1. A suggestion to solve this was to set the following in the “/etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf” file.

SetEnv force-response-1.0

If a HTTP 1.0 request is sent to Apache, this setting will make sure a HTTP 1.0 response is sent back. Any HTTP 1.1 requests are dealt with in the normal fashion. It sounded like it was worth a try, but I had no way to test the impact. That is until Eric Grancher contacted me to say his hotel had the same issue. I added the setting and asked him to check again. Problem solved…

So I think/hope that issue is solved now… 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Altering Hosting Service : The Gift That Keeps Giving

I moved my website to a new dedicated server about 3 weeks ago. As well as the usual DNS nonsense, I found out today that a whole load of emails have been blocked…

I have a mailbox at the hosting company to handle all my email. That all gets sucked into Gmail. That’s the way it has been for ages and life has been good. Since I made the move, the “new” mailbox looked like it was working fine, but I hadn’t noticed the spam filtering was turned on to a really high level and it was blocking loads of good emails. As a result, a lot of really important emails were gathering in the spam folder of my mailbox at the hosting company, something I never check.

I’ve now turned off the spam filtering on that mailbox, so it all gets sucked into Gmail and that handles my spam, the way it always did…

I’ve been working through the emails this evening, but it is highly likely some have fallen by the wayside, so if you were trying to send me something important over the last few weeks and I’ve not replied, it’s possible I’ve not actually received it. 🙁

This all came to light because people were talking about the ACED OpenWorld emails, which I hadn’t got. 🙁 Thanks to some emails from Debra and Doug (who was mostly at the pub) and some Twitter DM-ing from Vikki, I got the information, registered for OpenWorld and booked my hotel. The deadline was tomorrow. Phew! 🙂 Just got to sort the flights now….

Cheers

Tim…