whee, server death!

So, the web server died last weekend, presumably sometime after 3:45pm, because that's the last time anything was recorded in the log.

It died in a rather interesting way, though. Instead of just freezing up or rebooting itself, it just started acting extremely odd. Images and the like on the webpage were broken, files were missing when I checked over FTP, and PHP scripts wouldn't run at all.

Apache would still serve pages though. Severely broken and incomplete pages, but pages nonetheless.

"Huh," I thought. "Gonna be a fun morning at work on Monday. Hope there's no data loss."

Anyway, I get to work and turn on the monitor on the server. Looks like ext3 barfed on something and is now filling the console with error messages. Keyboard doesn't respond, can't do a clean boot despite many attempts.

Left with no other choice, I pressed the big red button on the front and did a hard-reset.

Then, it rebooted, I heard the hard drive spin back up, and... booted perfectly as if nothing had happened.

This incident right here has turned me into a believer of journaling filesystems. Although ext3 is a kind of a kludgy journaling system slapped on top of ext2, it still saved my ass this morning.

So, I logged in and checked all the files for any corruption, and didn't find any. So I brought all the services back up. As far as I could tell, the hard drive spun itself down for some reason and didn't respond to the IDE controller telling it to wake back up.

This didn't manage to kill all processes, though. While sshd couldn't cope and died silently, pure-ftpd and apache lived on. Apache couldn't fork, however, so past a certain number of connections it just stopped taking them. And it could only serve data that was still cached in the buffers. And PHP wasn't in memory, so no PHP code could run. I don't think any scripts were, either.

The hard drive just going to sleep out of the blue doesn't bode well for the hard drive itself, though, so I think I'm going to have to look into getting a backup or replacement of some sort.

So, yeah, there was my interesting server death story. Or something.

Mmm, sexy.

It's like Pepsi Blue, only it sucks. 

More router fun

So, the router hasn't shit itself at all since I left the office on Tuesday. I'm guessing that one of the computers that is currently off is causing it to kill itself, but I can't figure out which yet. Time to do a complete scan of them to narrow it down.

Today was a public holiday of some sort.

So, yeah, I didn't have to go to work today.

I have no idea what kind of holiday it was, but I don't really care at this point. Besides, it's already 10:18pm.

It's a good thing I finally got DSL installed at home, though. Otherwise I would have spent the day OUTSIDE, WALKING AROUND, and then it means I probably would have spent MONEY - which is bad, because I'm shit broke right now. Oh well, payday is on the 31st! Yay!

I found out that it was a holiday today under rather interesting circumstances. It was getting near the time we get off work when one of my co-workers went up to me and said:

"By the way, you're going to have to come into work today."

'Uh... WOW! BIG NEWS! It's a Wednesday, of course I'd have to come into work!', I thought.

Five seconds later: "Just kidding!"

I sit in silence for a few seconds.

".... I don't?"

So, yeah, another half an hour without that joke and I probably would have stupidly and obliviously gone to work this morning. Heh.

Manga blog?

My good friend Ben complained that there were too many anime blogs popping up. He says that while he runs one himself. Apparently it makes him feel less unique, or something.

Anyway, originally I was going to make an anime blog of my own to piss him off. I have a better idea now, though.

I am going to make... a MANGA BLOG!

... or I would, if I read manga more regularly.

Hmm.

Well, I suppose I could give it a shot.


In other news, the stupid router is still shitting itself at regular and short intervals. I have grown to just stop doing stuff that requires persistent connections during the short spurts of downtime, but I guess I can't do that when the big cheese gets back.

Meh.

At least I have DSL at home now. Yay!

Whee, boat cruises!

So, I went on some sort of a... boat cruise, or something, today.

It was... not altogether unpleasant.

We didn't go very far though - just to Lamma Island, which honestly you can take a ferry to ANYWAY without having to rent a private boat for and had a seafood dinner.

The dinner was... it was okay. Not the best quality stuff I've had. The fish, in particular, was relatively disappointing.

The trip itself was nice though. Cruising through both calmer waters in Hong Kong and the more violent channel between Hong Kong Island and Kowloon were pleasant in their own ways.

Seeing the IFC up close from the water was neat. It's so brightly-lit at night that it kind of overshadows the rest of the HK skyline. Too bad my camera sucks at night shots - it would have been nice to get a good shot of it at that angle. Ah well.

Too bad it was overcast, or we would have been able to see lots of stars.

Well, hopefully we'll be able to rent it again this summer on a nice clear night. Last year we got some nice stargazing in on the way back.

ARGH GOD DAMMIT IT DID IT AGAIN!

I guess I should try to update the firmware, or something... god help us if it resets itself WHILE it's updating the firmware.

Okay, it seems to be settling down, somewhat... let's hope it stays that way.

Fucking D-Link!

So, we have a D-Link DI-614+ wireless at work acting as a wireless-wired bridge. It... hasn't always been 100% snappy, but at least it was somewhat consistent.

This morning it just quit on us altogether. Just... poof. No connection.

"Okay, odd..."

So I went up there and reset the router. Reboots fix everything, right?

Well, it seemed to work... until the connection dropped again 5 minutes later.

Okay, go back there, reset once more...

And that's when it started to flip out entirely.

Right now, it's kind-of-sort-of working, except the entire thing just drops offline for 15 seconds once every 5 minutes or so. It appears to be resetting itself, from the log.

This... is not good.

I think the warranty has expired on it already, too.

Shit.

The e-mail of death itself!

Here it is!


Dear IT personnel,

As you may already know, the Chinese government practices censorship on a
rather wide scale. They are very concerned about the ability to control
information and hence one of the conditions that were to be met before the
Chinese public were able to access the Internet was the establishment of
what many of us call "The Great Firewall of China".

The "Great Firewall", as it's rather jokingly called by some, is not
actually a firewall in the strictest sense of the word. It is basically a
list of IP addresses that are inaccessible from inside China. They can
accomplish and implement this because China controls all the major routers
inside the country and also control all backbones leading outside. Every
major router has a copy of this list and it is constantly updated and
changed.

Whenever a request to site is made, the routers check if it is part of the
list of banned servers. If a request to a "blacklisted" site is made, the
router simply discards the packet before it gets outside of the country.
According to the target server, such a request was not made in the first
place.

One thing to note is that the list is constantly updated, and sites do not
always stay on it all the time. While some sites are generally permanently
banned (such as sites known to contain, for example, Falun Gong
propoganda), other sites may only receive temporary placements on that
list. For example, if a news site were to place an unfavourable article on
their site, it may be temporarily blocked until such content is removed.
(In fact, this is one of the most common cases.)

One type of ban that is of note is that they also ban DNS servers of
certain things. One prominent example is of dynamic DNS services such as
dyndns.org or no-ip.com - effectively stopping them from being used in
China.

I have tried to access your site from both Hong Kong and Shenzhen, and
have experienced no problems currently. Thus, your site is currently not
on the aforementioned "blacklist". This, however, does not guaruntee that
it may not be placed on this "list" in the future.

Hong Kong's connection to the Internet was established before the 1997
handover to the Chinese government, and hence their backbones are separate
from China's. (Most of Hong Kong's Internet traffic, as a sidenote, is
routed through to the Chinese University of Hong Kong.) Hong Kong does not
suffer from the same problem, and as such the entire Internet should be
properly accessible from Hong Kong as long as the target site is not
plagued by bandwidth or latency problems.

However, there are other problems plaguing website availability in China.
Because China owns all connections outside the country and nobody else has
any, the link outside is rather badly saturated. Some sites are not
accessible simply because the latency to the DNS servers governing a
domain (or the site itself) is so large that the timeout value has been
exceeded by the time a reply comes back, leading the client into thinking
that it was a failed request.

Even if your site does not contain any unfavourable content, it is still
possible for the server it is hosted on to be placed on the blacklist.
This is because your site is currently placed on shared hosting, where
multiple sites are hosted on the same physical server. Thus, if one of the
websites hosted on the server that your site is located on is placed on
the blacklist, your site will be affected as well.

For this reason, many free web hosting servers are currently on this list,
as people with free accounts are more likely to place provocative or
"illegal" content on their sites. Websites on services such as angelfire
and geocities, as well as several servers on 1and1 Internet's network, are
now no longer accessible from China.

If your site finds its way onto this "blacklist", there are several
courses of action you can take. The first one is to simply wait it out -
for many smaller sites, the ban is only temporary and may only last from
24 to 48 hours. If the downtime continues to persist, you may contact your
hosting provider to see if you can arrange to be moved to a neighbouring
server - usually the blacklist bans single servers and not entire
networks. Finally, you can switch to a different hosting company
altogether. This may be your only course of action if your hosting
provider's entire network has been deemed permanently unsuitable.

I hope this thorough explanation helps you understand the various factors
that affect a site's availability in Hong Kong and China.


From: Renoyd@aol.com
Date sent: Sat, 15 May 2004 11:55:36 EDT
Subject: To anybody at Guyline - we would appreciate your help To:
guyasia@pacific.net.hk

> Hello,
>
> I understand that our Pope website may not be able to be opened in
> Mainland China, and I am not sure about Hong Kong. Could sombody
> there please check on this for us. Also, if you could give us
> examples of USA websites that ARE able to be opened it would be
> helpful.
>
> Thanks very much in advance.
>
> Thanks & regards,
>
> Dean Segal
> VP Sales & Marketing
> Pope Scientific, Inc. USA
> p. +1 262 268 9300 x120
> f. +1 262 268 9400
> e. sales@popeinc.com
> w. www.popeinc.com


So, did I get any of those facts wrong? Anybody? :)

The great firewall of China

So, I spent the weekend at my parents' place in Shenzhen, China. For those who don't know, Shenzhen is one of the largest cities in China and is right across the border seperating Hong Kong with mainland China.

However, being in Shenzhen means that I have to bear with Internet access behind what's commonly referred to as the "Great Firewall of China".

What is the "Great Firewall of China", you ask?

To put it simply, the "Great Firewall" is a giant blacklist of sites (well, IP addresses) that can't be accessed from inside Chinese borders. Packets to banned IPs are simply dropped by internal routers and never make it outside the country.

Anyway, the interesting thing about that was... that the published page of this blog was on the blacklist, but blogger itself wasn't. So, while I was able to post entries to my blog, I was unable to view them once they were posted. The last entry made in here was posted in that manner.

So, yeah, browsing the Internet from inside China kind of sucks, since you always run into sites that the government have deemed not suitable for public consumption, or something. Although I guess I can't complain, since I don't have any Internet access at all in my ghetto apartment here in HK.

Anyway, interstingly, yesterday I was back in HK and at work. About half an hour before the end of office hours, my boss waved me over and asked me to respond to an e-mail from a vendor. Apparently, they were confused as to why their website was not accessible from Beijing, and wanted an explanation.

"Type up an explanation," he said. "Make it as technical as possible."

Of course, I didn't want to overload the poor sap with technical terms, so I ended up spending the last half-hour at work typing up a 3-page e-mail explaining how the entire thing works. I... might have BS'd a little to fill in small gaps in my definite knowledge, but I don't think he noticed. I could have looked them up, but I really wanted to go home on time. Heh.

Decision-making made easy!

<@ed> so, wait, we're only short 40 and 41 for v5?
<@Finalpro> translation at least
<@ed> hmm, nekkid bath scene or nekkid bed scene
<@ed> hard choice <_<
<@cccnnn> ed
<@cccnnn> plz do one of 40 and 41
<@ed> <@ed> hmm, nekkid bath scene or nekkid bed scene
<@ed> <@ed> hard choice <_<
<@ed> i'm trying to decide ya whore :p
<@cccnnn> sigh
<@cccnnn> tell me which one u decide
<@cccnnn> and i'll do the other

off to another channel...
<@_yeah> I'D LIKE TO TAKE A SHORT POLL HERE!
<@JackOHearts> ok
<+kittie|rei> lol
<@JackOHearts> ================================
<@_yeah> WOULD YOU PREFER A NEKKID BATH SCENE OR A NEKKID BED SCENE?!
<@JackOHearts> POLL
<+kittie|rei> bath
<@JackOHearts> damn... we can't have both ?
<+kittie|rei> there's something kinky when they're already wet
<@JackOHearts> a nekkid bath scene viewed from a nekkid bed scene ??
<@JackOHearts> or vice versa
<@hai987> whicever is cuter....
<@JackOHearts> I would say bath scene also
<@_yeah> okay, bath scene huh
<@_yeah> i guess chapter 41 it is then

... and back...

<@ed> i guess i'll go for 41
<@cccnnn> ok cool
<@ed> mm, bath scene
<@cccnnn> i'll take 40


WIN!

well, time to rant

Well.

Let's try this blog thing.

I require... angst! And pain! And... angsty pain!

...

.......

..............

.... it doesn't seem to be working.

Anyway, my laptop - the first thing I've ever bought with money I earned myself, a Toshiba Portege 3480CT - is starting to show its age. I bought it with my first two paycheques ever four years ago, and it cost me an entire 258,000 yen.

I still love it to death, but the bottom PCMCIA slot seems to be malfunctioning. I found out about that when I tried to plug in a CF card inside an adapter and it asked me for a DRIVER.

"Whaaaat?!", I thought. At first, I suspected the CF card itself, but since it worked properly in my camera I decided to try to put my wireless card in the bottom slot too. Lo and behold, it also asked for a driver.

I usually only use the top slot for... reasons I'm not entirely sure of, so I'm not sure how long this has been going on.

I'm guessing the PCMCIA slots are a bit of a weak point in this model's design, though. When I first bought the laptop (from the Duty Free section of LAOX in Akihabara!), I brought it back to the hotel (Shinjuku Prince Hotel, that expensive expensive place to stay), and was eager to play with it.

One of the first things that happen the first time you turn on a brand new 3480CT is, apparently, choosing the operating system you want. You are licensed for EITHER Windows 95 OSR2... OR 98SE. And you can only choose one. So you do, and then it automatically wipes the other one from the hard drive and prepares the one you chose for first use.

I chose 98SE. That much should be obvious.

Anyway, so, it worked. That was great. I wanted to load a bit of stuff on it, however. So I took my El Cheapo "KingNet" 24X external PCMCIA CD-ROM drive that had happily serviced me and my Toshiba Libretto 100CT, and plugged it into... damn, I can't recall if it was the top slot or bottom slot now.

Nothing.

"naaaaaaaaa?"

Eject, plug back in.

Also nothing.

Okay, let's try switching slots, and... we have life!

That was... odd.

At that point, the CD-ROM drive was the only PCMCIA device I had on me, so I didn't have anything else to try it with. In any case, it was certainly not something that should happen, so I brought it to Toshiba's repair centre in Akihabara to see if they knew anything about it.

Now, let me tell you something about Japan. Although the Japanese use lots of bastardized English in their language by putting it all in katakana and using it in everyday words, they generally actually possess very little ability to converse and communicate in English.

This was the case with the employees of the Toshiba repair centre.

Now, at that point in my life, I barely knew any Japanese at all. It's... different now, but at that point, I was unable to communicate in any form using the Japanese language.

So after a LOT of gesturing, broken English sentances, and pointing, it was communicated to me that they recognize that the PCMCIA issue was a problem, and they will look into it, but it will take 2-3 weeks to get it back to me.

Okay, so that was a problem. First of all, I was leaving the country in a little over a week since I'm only here for a vacation, and second of all I bought this damned laptop less than 24 hours ago! Gimme a damned break!

So, the guys at the Toshiba depot called the LAOX store where I bought the laptop, and after another 15 minutes of conversation between them it was agreed that I could return to the store and get an over-the-counter exchange for a brand new identical unit.

Well, identical in every way except this one should WORK PROPERLY.

So, I returned, and found the "Mr. Arai" that the Toshiba guys talked to, and identified myself as the whiny Chinese bastard with the Canadian passport (you need a foreign passport to buy from the duty-free section... without paying duties, you know) with the PCMCIA problem, and asked him where my replacement laptop was.

So there he opened up a fresh 3480CT, and this time I stood there in the store and let it do the initial-system load thing, which itself took maybe 15 minutes, and then tried the CD-ROM drive in both slots, and... LIFE! Woohoo!

...

... I don't know why I typed all that except to relate a story on why I think this PCMCIA slot problem might not be entirely uncommon. Or something.

I have some real work to do, so I'll wrap it up for now. I think.