Yesterday I had to reboot my server after it was unreachable. It all started with nagios sending me some sms, to many process, http doesn’t respond, https doesn’t respond … As I finally managed to try to login it was already to lade, the server wasn’t responding anymore. After a reboot everything was fine again, but not for long. Again from the same many connections to apache where made so I added the ip to the firewall blacklist and now it’s silent again. But this is not a final solution, I made some new adjustments to Apache, now only limited connections/IP are allowed, I tried first 5 but although I wasn’t doing much I got the “Service temporary unavailable” message so I increased it to 10, further have I set the MaxClients count from apache from 150, to 100 and I am thinking of reducing it further, I will have to do a stress test some day. The next step will be bandwidth limitation, some domains are already limited by mod_bandwidth but I would like to solve it different and not with a apache module. Well some information really comes when you need it, a friend of mine pointed me to TC (traffic control) so I will take a look at that, when I have time.

I was just playing around with some features of Aperture after watching some tutorial movies. Now this is a great piece of software, thank you apple! I would like to demonstrate what big difference you achieve by editing the photos. Of course you could just do it right with the camera, but I don’t earn my money with this so it’s ok for me if my photos are not perfect and need a retouch on the mac. First, the original one, then one edited slightly in iPhoto and the last one just played around in Aperture with Heights and Shadows, now I love the result of the last one.

Just received a mail from Blizznet:

ab sofort verrechnen wir bis Ende des Jahres 2006 kein Zusatzdatenvolumen!

Das heißt, Sie profitieren rückwirkend mit Anfang September von unlimitiertem Datentransfer ohne Einschränkung und ohne Nachverrechnung!

Viel Spaß beim Surfen wünscht Ihnen

Ihr blizznet-Team

This means, 10mbit up/downstream with no limit. I must be in paradise!

Du to the extreme performance that LVM gave me I decided to change my 2 big disks in a raid0 instead. It’s strange, I have a LVM in the same computer with no problems and a LVM on my production server, also no problems. Only the LVM with the two 300GB Disks caused problems. just look at this performance!

dd if=/dev/zero of=dd.txt count=500 bs=4096
500 0 records in
500 0 records out
2048000 bytes transferred
in 10.020213 seconds (204387 bytes/sec)

this is 199 kb/s ! on a local disk! that performance increased to 3.6mb/s after booting with Kernel 2.4 well and here is is the raid0 performance

Fetchmail has a feature where you can tell on what errorcode fetchmail should treat the mail as spam and discard it anyway! Normaly fetchamil would not discard a mail if it wasn’t accepted, but in some cases, like when the sender domain is not valid the mail is rejected with error 450. The lcX mailserver for example does this which reduces spam a little bit. The problem is that fetchmail has a bug and will not discard the message, to fix this and remain using the debian packages, one could do this:

For the frst time since 7 Year I have turned off ALL computers at home. The oldest one, the Firewall, a P1 166MHz is runing without being turned off since about 5 years! Time flies by real fast isn’t it? I’m interested to see the next electricity bill

Good that I always switch of my mobile when I go to sleep. Why? Imagine waking up, switching your mobile on and then the ringing begins, you get one sms after the other … a total of 45 messages. Oh no … not what you might think, it was nagios that was telling me that something is wrong with the server. For some reason (couldn’t find out why) mysql had a cpu usage of 88-99% and my server had a load average of 11 ! There was no way mysql wanted to shut down so the only solution kill -9. Everything is running again but I hate it when something happens and I don’t know why. Now I can just hope it won’t happen again.