Ewok Hut

Dreamhost’s upgrades Monday night did nothing - initially, the results were promising, but they unfortunately did not last in the long run. Cisco could not even determine the problem, so Dreamhost has ordered brand new routers that boast about 8x the power of their current ones.

Dreamhost sums it up this way, and it puts a lot of fears to rest about server stability:

So, they’re going to be performing this upgrade tonight at 1 AM EST. The server will be down for awhile then, but after everything gets re-cached, all these slowness and downtime problems we’ve had should be solved.

I had to repair 3 computers yesterday. Yes, and one of them was my own. Regardless, I swear, the next person who asks me to do some work on their computer is going to get a dirty bomb UPSed to their house. However, the dirty bomb will not be nuclear - oh no, it will actually spray fecal matter at them.

The first of them was one of the most unbelievably slow computers I’ve ever seen. There was very little reason for it to be slow. However, I should start at the beginning.

Windows simply wouldn’t start up, whether it be in safe mode or normal mode. So, the obvious fix was reinstalling Windows. That went fine and the files remained on the hard drive. That was all I needed to do (I thought), but I just wanted to make sure there was nothing else I could do to improve efficiency. I initially thought it needed defragmentation, badly - it took about 5 minutes in total to get from the XP loading screen to the desktop. However, I was surprised when I found only 5% file fragmentation and only 10 GB used. Additionally, the integrated NIC didn’t work. Luckily I had a PCI card in one of my own computers, so I put that in there to fix the problem.

Apparently the computer actually had SP2 on it when I reinstalled Windows, so that overwrote some stuff and made services not work. It took awhile until I could finally get Windows Update to realize SP2 was not installed on the computer. After that I did spyware and adware checks. I thought that would solve the slowness, but it didn’t. There were a few random programs in the startup at the beginning *cough* AOL, McAffee *cough* so I took them off the routine and it was good as new.

The second computer was one I’ve kept someone waiting 3 months on. It needs a reinstall of Windows Me and I don’t have a disc, so I sent it back to him. I bet he won’t be too happy.

The third computer was my laptop. Awhile back, its DC power in port stopped working correctly. It only sporadically charged the computer. So, I sent it back to HP (with 3 days left on the extended warranty) and they “fixed” it. Don’t get me wrong, they fixed the problem and they replaced the hard drive (which was starting to go as well). However, I received it back with several scratches on the paint and with Windows 98 installed. Yes, you heard me; Windows 98. What company even has a copy of Windows 98 installed on replacement hard drives? Don’t ask me. I wasn’t particularly mad, however, that the hard drive was decimated. The computer was growing slow anyway and starting fresh will do it some good anyway.

Anyone that’s noticed VIII is slow - there’s nothing I can do about this problem at the moment. Dreamhost had another problem earlier, and though I think it’s unrelated, they may have transferred our activity through a slower hub or something until they can fix the problem. My other guess is caching difficulties. This site is also slow, but please leave a comment if you’re NOT receiving the slowness.

Thanks.

UPDATE!!!

Dreamhost has posted some news saying that this problem would be ultimately fixed Monday night. Apparently, since the generators caught fire a few weeks back, they’ve been having intermittant problems. I assume this is one of them. This is an inconsistant problem, so some of you may not be even having it. It has been, however, identified as a network problem, so we’ve probably been avoiding it on just our own happy little server for the past month.

I’m getting quite sick of people complaining that I’m never around. Jeez, some of you act like you’ve never gotten into ruts with posting. I’m burned out. I have been doing school all summer, making virtually no vacation for me. I’m also incredibly bored, something that happens to me every summer. Please, give me a little break, people. You don’t need to rely on Leia or Han or anyone to give you plot. You don’t need faction leaders to hold your hand for you. I’m posting tonight, but I feel I needed to get this out.

Am I at fault? Yes, but it’s nothing intentional. Every time someone badgers me to post, I don’t feel like it. Every time someone hammers on me about a design (don’t worry, Skirata, not you), I get farther and farther away from VIII. Every time someone makes a snide comment about me not being around or not being devoted to the game, I don’t feel like posting.

In the countless many (4) DSL installations I’ve done, it’s always been apparent that there are two proved points about networking: 1) It never goes smoothly unless you’re doing it at home. 2) it makes me want to not be in the field of computers and instead go to baking or something. I’m not complaining about the concept of networking, because it’s one of the greatest ideas out there. The problem is when you get into a home that has an archaic computer or bad wiring. Unfortunately, this job was both.

Networking isn’t my speciality, so I suppose I’ve been lucky on the software end of things. I can do some of the basic non-DHCP stuff, but only between computers and computers or computers and routers. This installation was pretty simple - computer to access point. When I first got there, the computer was probably nine years old. The person using it was surprisingly adept at Windows, so that made things go a lot smoother.

The first problem was with the modem/computer connection. I knew USB on Win98 computers was horrible at best, and it’s understandable why Verizon could have done this, but I think it was cheap anyway - the USB installation in Verizon’s software is disabled for 98 and marked as “unsupported.” The computer didn’t have a network interface card (NIC). This is problem 1.

Following that, I called Verizon’s technical help. I got some lady in Virginia (I’m assuming it’s Virginia from the way she spoke) who had problems hearing us over the speakerphone (remember that). After she had gone down the checklist of things I did, she said that Verizon, in the past, got a bunch of computer inept idiots and those annoying kids that call up thinking they know everything (I’m just the opposite because I do know everything) reporting all kinds of technical problems with Windows 98 and Verizon’s service. Instead of fixing that, they just discontinued support because it was obviously costing them man-hours of free phone support.

That was the first problem.

So, she said that from her support center, they could try to enable USB installation ONCE to see if it work. When she tried to do that, she couldn’t reach the modem. She detected that the line had extreme static. One of the first things I noticed was fluorescent lighting, but I turned that off and it made no difference. I put the modem on other jacks - no difference. I eventually gave up and placed it to just random electromagnetic interference in the house, and she agreed.

That was the second problem.

Awhile later, after the lady who was trying to put the DSL in attempted to cancel the service (I’m not sure why she did), they offered to give her a PCI NIC adapter, which was exactly what she needed. From the get-go I knew this wouldn’t fix her problem (newer modems store their connection details on-site while older ones require a computer to dial in), but it would fix half of it. Today I went over and installed that. Went perfectly, but we still couldn’t figure out why the modem was unable to connect to the server. One of the things that occured to me was something I ran into at my grandfather’s - a dry-loop connection or something. Since his telephone infrastructure was older, something special was required to enable DSL to work. However, this residence was in a new development, so I ruled that out because our house was older and we were able to install DSL right on the phone line.

Later today, I came with my dad (who does wiring, so I figured he could run a dedicated phone line out to the outdoor telephone service box) to fix this problem once and for all. I thought of everything I needed beforehand - Laptop, another identical modem (stolen from my grandfather’s), extension cord. My goal was to at least narrow down the problem; I didn’t know if it was inside the house, or outside the house - the former would cost AT LEAST $90 to just get a technician out there while the latter is the company’s problem. I plugged the modem directly into the telephone access point outside the house and it worked immediately. I was even able to proceed to the account creation screen on the laptop. So, it was inside the house. Just a sidenote; it was a tad odd to be sitting on the ground with a laptop at 8 PM while having a tiny modem attached to an extension cord.

I realize I’m beginning to drag on, so I’ll get more to the point. We knew the problem was now inside the house, so we first wanted to make sure all the connections were fine with the phone jacks themselves. The area we were working in had closed walls, so there was no way we could easily look. My dad wanted to find a terminal so that we could run a new wire. We couldn’t find one in the walls, but we did find something peculiar - in another room, there was a hugeass splitter coming out from a phone jack. The wires in it were leading into other rooms. This was the terminal. We tried the wire to the computer directly in the jack - nothing. We tried another wire, then the modem worked perfectly.

We had narrowed it down again, but this time to just one strand of wire. We were about to give up when my dad noticed something. As soon as he held the plug up, I realized the problem before he even mentioned it, but I have to admit I wouldn’t have caught it if he hadn’t brought attention to it. The wires in the jack were switched. That was the cause of the “static” and it was purely responsible for making the line impure.

So, the night ended well - computer-modem was working and modem-ISP was working. Yay. The practical lesson of this post is to think outside the box. If something should logically work, check the most subtle thing you can. Only you can prevent forest fires. Stuff like that.

About two days ago, Nubis pointed out a slight error with the site. I checked it out and user sessions were not being created, causing a general pandemonium with the entire phpBB system. I traced out the source of the problem to something I still haven’t quite figured out. The user sessions were not being created because the phpBB sessions table was locked, and I assume it was corrupted. Luckily, it wasn’t a data intensive table and I could just discard and recreate it. It still worries me a tad how a table could just get corrupted for seemingly no reason (there is a reason for everything, though) and if it happened this time, it could potentially happen to a more data-intensive table such as the word lists or post text.

If it happens again, I’ll definitely be getting in touch with the host. Thank God for backups.

Yeah, yeah, I realize this is an older issue, but I wanted to come through on my promise that this wasn’t going to be a bunch of emo hogwash.

A long, long time ago, I had an idea - mostly one I ripped off from Vlad over at TM.com - to make a web log that actually informs about stuff. Originally, I was going to make it into a custom program written in the glorious tandem of PHP and MySQL, but I was uninspired so I just pressed the ole’ left mouse button a tad and here you have this meager Wordpress site.

I suppose using WP is fine, though you can bet several things are going to be changing. For instance, who the hell decided to put a long annoying list of subscriptions to which I never wanted to subscribe trailing down my mediocre site. I’ll also attempt to use my…sufficient HTML skills to change a few things about this theme, but it really isn’t too bad.

Now as I said earlier, this isn’t going to be just me ranting. For the people from VIII, you might actually be able to retrieve enough out of my treacherous mind about what I’m doing to screw up your forum today. Also, if the site’s just recovered from an error, most of the time I’ll post a full explanation of the problem and what I did to fix it, just so I can confuse you with overly technical terms (for example, instead of “bread”, it would be “yeast leavened staple composed of grains and infused with dragon blood” (dragon blood might actually be known as multi-grain…your choice)).

I will do a bit of ranting, so I can take the pressure off of my poor cousin and that perverted brat who shall remain nameless. In addition to maintaining the status quo and occasionally reviewing a movie, game or a piece of computer hardware, you’ll also get the periodic soliloquey about how English is the worst language in existence.

For anyone from HG that found their way here - I’ll try to muse about a few things, but as you know, I am obligated as a member of staff not to let you in on anything particularly confidential in our ranks, so don’t bother asking. Try to keep comments clean and with some kind of point to them. I won’t really delete them unless you truely act like an idiot, but don’t betray my trust.

I’ll be working on getting various pages on this site working and to remove stupid things. Tschau!

PS: You didn’t actually think I was going to rip off Dr. Breen’s cliché line, did you?