BenV's notes

A week or two ago I installed the latest teamspeak 3 beta on our server to check out how well it works these days.
I was impressed by how far they have come. Back when I still played WoW we always used Ventrilo version 2. We never ugpraded to the new 3 version (even though thats illegal according to them….) because version 3 had a 10 slot limitation on the free server version. Of course they don’t tell you how much a license for version 3 costs, unless you want to host more than 1000 slots. Paying for Ventrilo would be fine, but paying for 1000 slots? Ha. And yeah, there are hosts that specialize in that (and make you pay through the nose for it), but we wanted to host it ourselves.

Anyway, Teamspeak 3 has a much better view of the world. They offer a -free- personal (that means non commercial!) non-profit license. This means if you’re a guild you can obtain a license
from them for free over here which allows you to host your own Teamspeak 3 server with 10 virtual servers and 512 slots. That’s more like it!
And if you ARE commercial, their licenses are well defined and very affordable. For instance a 1 year license for 25 slots is only $25. Compare that to Ventrilo 2 providers that ask you E10,- per month. Ha.
Oh, did I mention that they DO have a linux client? And windows and mac of course…. including the 64 bit versions. Lovely 🙂

However, as it’s still in beta I run into some problems every now and then. Today I was asked to upgade the b12 server to the latest. So I tried.
Result:

2010-01-22 15:16:11.447045|INFO |ServerLibPriv | | Server Version: 3.0.0-beta16 [Build: 9929]
[ blabla ]
terminate called after throwing an instance of 'boost::exception_detail::clone_impl >'
what(): epoll: Function not implemented
Aborted

…. welcome back my friend…. BOOST …. always the fucking same with that piece of rubbish.
However, to be fair this could very well be a “learn to code” problem by teamspeak, but still… it’s always boost the brings the curses.
So what is it complaining now? I don’t have epoll? Seriously? Let’s see about that.

# uname -a
Linux blue 2.6.32.2-xenU #1 SMP Thu Dec 24 15:55:52 CET 2009 i686 athlon-4 i386 GNU/Linux
# zcat /proc/config.gz | grep -i epol
CONFIG_EPOLL=y

So that’s not it.
The forum has this thread suggesting it might be glibc that’s too old.
However, this particular slackware 11 server has glibc version 2.3.6, which should be old enough (according to that forum thread at least). Just in case it’s not I’ll try upgrading that later.
In the meanwhile I created a thread on this problem on the forums, let’s see what they suggest. I’ll put updates here.

Today I was scripting up some commandline tools and found myself in need of doing some MySQL commands on the commandline.
Or to be more specific: I wanted to create a database and grant some permissions. So I figured “Admin stuff… let’s try mysqladmin“. (continue reading…)

A few weeks ago I implemented a FastCGI setup for a magento website. (details Here). That site also runs google analytics.
Here’s what analytics had to show about the speed of the site:

Can you guess when FastCGI was enabled? 😉
For those of you who are graphically challenged, the above graph shows a loading time of 2.1-2.5 seconds on the left and then crashes down to only 1.0-1.3 seconds at the date that I enabled FastCGI. Neat huh? 🙂

Google analytics also notes that “this site is faster than 83% of the sites”, whatever that means. Oh well, we’re happy.

This morning I noticed my torrent daemon (aka Deluge) was down. (continue reading…)

Since I keep forgetting how the heck I create these favicon.ico files (or favicon or Favorites Icon), it’s time to put it here. (continue reading…)

As I love to tinker around with apache/php installations to get them to work as fast as possible while still keeping some security in tact, I found myself messing around with FastCGI today. But why?! Here’s why:
On this machine I previously installed suPhP to get php scripts to run as a normal unix user instead of user apache (so users have the ability to completely lock out their database settings etc for other users on that machine). However, to speed stuff up on a magento webshop I wanted to have a PHP opcode cache running (I tried out APC). (continue reading…)

Here we go again, wordpress has an update to version 2.9 this time.

New features include “automatic database optimization support”, which you can enable by putting define('WP_ALLOW_REPAIR', true); in your wp-config.php file.
The rest you’ll run into yourself, it’s a ton of new stuff and fixes but some cool stuff like a built-in image editor and easier embedding of your favorite youtube junk.

Needless to say the automatic upgrade failed AGAIN for me:

Downloading update from http://wordpress.org/wordpress-2.9.zip.

Download failed.: Operation timed out after 60 seconds with 1560944 bytes received

Installation Failed

Fortunately, my previous patch still works. Get it here if you want.

After patching that single line the automagic upgrade ended with: WordPress upgraded successfully. Jeeeej.
However, they still left the timeout at 60 seconds in the newer version 🙁

# grep wp_remote_get wp-admin/includes/file.php
$response = wp_remote_get($url, array('timeout' => 60));

Failers. They deserve a 56k6 modem for their servers so they can find out about these issues themselves 😉

Don’t ask me why, but for some greasemonkey script that I wanted to run in Firefox I needed Google Gears.
So I went to the gears site with Firefox, and it told me that it needed to install some plugin. Yeah, whatever.
I hit the big Install Gears button, completely ignoring the tiny and almost invisible for my eyes 32-bit OS (64-bit not supported) notice below it.
Needless to say it went on to download a 3.5Mb package, started some popups and other junk after which it notified me of my grave mistake.
Aha. So for some reason Google is too incompetent to work with 64 bits software…. even microsoft can deal with that these days guys, geesh. (continue reading…)

Time to continue our adventure into Sieve land from yesterday.

Yesterday the result was that Sieve scripts could be put in place by the system administrator and they work. Needless to say that’s cumbersome and we want users to handle it themselves.
To avoid all possible issues with opening up FTP / DAV / whatever, the clowns at Dovecot and the ietf have decided to create a new protocol for it. Currently still a draft, but it will be an official protocol called ManageSieve. (continue reading…)

Let’s start with a problem description. We start out with a -working- mailer:
A pretty simple qmail/vpopmail installation with Courier IMAP and the pop3d that comes with qmail. This is administered by users with the qmailadmin frontend and allows for creation of mailboxes and forwards by postmasters. Together with spamdyke and spamassassin it works pretty well. So why change it?

The problem: First of all, Courier is a piece of shit. The various parts of it have broken in various ways over the years (authd hanging for no apparent reason or suddenly eating a ton of memory, stuff like that). Not only that, but they decided that vpopmail wasn’t worth supporting anymore, so their latest release of courier-authlib simply doesn’t handle vpopmail anymore. (don’t ask me why, can’t find any details on it).
Second of all, it would be cool to give our users the ability to create their own custom mail filters on our server. Stuff that you can do in thunderbird or through webmail, so they can setup their mailbox filters and vacation messages and whatever without me having to help them. (well…. we’ll see about that). Needless to say we could do that by giving them access to the .qmail files, but those are way out of their league. Not only that, it would be a security nightmare. So to solve that, we’re trying the Sieve disaster. I mean language… or something. (continue reading…)