Wel zorgde dit ervoor dat er ruim voldoende tijd over was om eens te gaan kijken naar alle stands op de expo.
Hier stonden behoorlijk wat interessante dingen bij, maar jammer genoeg meer gericht op grotere bedrijven, dan op MKB.

Novell & SuSe
Zucht…
Een aantal lezingen waren georganiseerd door Novell. Op zich waren de onderwerpen erg interessant, maar jammer genoeg meer gericht op het genereren van verkopen, dan op het verstrekken van informatie.
Desalniettemin zijn er toch behoorlijk wat interessante dingen besproken, al vraag ik me bij sommige punten toch af of het niet te duidelijk was dat het verkooppraatjes waren.

Norman
Een erg interessante lezing was de lezing van Norman, over malware detectie en sandboxes om uit te zoeken wat bepaalde malware precies doet.
Dit blijkt veelal gebruikt te worden binnen forensische wetenschap, om er zo achter te kunnen komen waar malware vandaan komt, wie het gemaakt heeft, en wie het bestuurd.
Hierbij werd uiteindelijk nog een mooi voorbeeld getoond, een virus (de naam is me even ontschoten), wat de sandbox liet connecten naar een IRC server, en daar stond te wachten op instructies voor aanvallen of spamruns.
Spijtig genoeg is deze software nog niet voor Linux beschikbaar, dus was het een beetje een vreemde eend in de bijt op LinuxWorld, maar wel een zeer interessante.

MythTV
De laatste lezing die ik op mijn agenda had staan, was er eentje over de implementatie van MythTV als mediacenter. Binnen de lezing werd besproken wat voor mogelijkheden er precies zijn in de laatste versie van MythTV, en werd er besproken wat voor hardware het handigste zou zijn.
Zelf heb ik al geruime tijd een MythTV mediacenter, en ben aan de hand van deze lezing toch nog even gaan knutselen.
Inmiddels heb ik de Mythstream plugin volledig werkend, wat er nu voor zorgt dat het ook mogelijk is om on demand dingen te bekijken, denk hierbij aan uitzending gemist, of de Shoutcast directory.

Al met al was het een zeer interessante dag, en waarschijnlijk toch iets te kort. Het blijkt later dat dit toch het type expo / conferentie is waar je eigenlijk 2 dagen naartoe zou moeten gaan.

Yeah, back from the dead (at least temporarily), that’s me, not the game…

Roman, thank you for your comments!
As far as Total Domination is concerned; I still have the sources here somewhere. Including the database designs, and all the modifications.
So yes, it’s possible to revive Total Domination. However, what I wonder about these days, are people still interested in something like a turn based, text only, strategy game?
If so, would it be possible to find admins to admin the game? - As for hosting, that’s no problem. I can host it on the same server, it’s always been on, for free.
My problem is;
I don’t have the time to develop and admin the game, I might be able to do some development, but being admin requires you to be active. As long as I am not possible to do so, I cannot be admin. So, if you want Total Domination back, please mail me or just leave something in the comments, pointing me to possible players and admins ;).

Just like this blog, the game can be revived.

As for the Asterisk series I was planning on writing, well, I’ve yet to write the ’second week’, it was a nice plan, I didn’t however count on being this busy!
I will however post some stuff soon about what the heck I’ve been upto the last few weeks / months.

Why do I want to do this?
Well, I have experience with Asterisk 1.0 and 1.2, but never had the patience to get 1.4 to work.

Okay, what are ya gonna do?
So what I want to do is create a base system with Etch, install the dependencies from apt, and install Asterisk (together with the web interface) from source.

Well, first of all, you will need something to install it on.
For these kind of cases, I abuse VMWare.

So after first creating a new virtual machine in VMWare Server Console, I logged into ssh to the host server.
Note that I’m using bridged networking to make sure I could use the normal ways for using networking (with minimal delay’s).
I had to download the netinstall iso image for Etch, so I went to my iso dir (/usr/src/installers) where all installer iso’s reside.

Then I mounted the Etch netinstall image in the cd drive of the virtual machine, and booted it.

Due to the fact I hate working with the VMWare Server Console, I used the ‘expert’ installation, which will allow me to continue using ssh in a later stage.
Also note that I didn’t select the new GUI, but use text only.

The following screenshots were captured during the installation:

Right, after that, it was time to configure the network.
As this is a server in a datacenter, DHCP is not possible, so I went ahead and configured it manually.

A few minutes later, I could finally switch to ssh installation mode.

After logging in to the remote installation ssh interface, and selecting the ‘go to menu’ option, I was able to select a mirror which would be the installation source.

After this I could continue to the detect disks. And partition disks.
These aren’t really interesting now, as we want to install just one program and play with it a bit.
For your convenience, I added the rest of the installation sequence.

Right, and now to the experiment, the of this has been added as ‘video’ here;
http://www.icheb.nl/icheb_info_blog/FLV/Asterisk/ast14install/ast14install.html

Or just click here to allow javascript to fix it for ya (I don’t know if this will work):
Click here to open movie in thickbox kind of window

Well, my article (here) doesn’t appear to be the only article about Dreamhost.

Just taking a look at stuff like this is almost fun to see (note this customer is on a totally different server): http://elliottback.com/wp/archives/2007/05/03/dreamhost-sucks-at-hosting/.

Or other stories, at:

• http://www.upstartblogger.com/why-dreamhost-sucks
• http://gerard.wordpress.com/2006/01/07/dreamhost-hosting-sucks-big-time/
• http://scobleizer.com/2006/09/28/dreamhost-getting-sucky-pr-out-on-blogs/
• http://www.azeemazeez.com/blogs/boo-dreamhost/
• http://www.thelastminuteblog.com/2006/07/27/dreamhost-is-really-starting-to-suck/
• http://www.rc3.org/2005/12/trash_dreamhost_here.php

I really hope these kind of messages gets picked up by the community some time, to force Dreamhost to get their act together!

Note, I tried some of the same kind of commands to prove it’s just policy to place too many users on their servers:

willie:~$ wc -l /etc/passwd
921 /etc/passwd

Meaning there’s a stunning amount of 921 users on the server. Will, let’s just say there’s about 20 to 30 users needed for normal system operation, it still leaves over 800 users!! - Note, I usually won’t place more than 200 to 300 domains (that’s about 75 users) on a server.

Furthermore, this is something I know as well;

Dreamhost and I have been having conversations now for a while about a site which gets 1-2k visitors, and hosts 51GB of transferred static content a day. I thought you might be interested in reading them. On 4/30/2007, I received this email from Brian S. about my site:

Connections to your domain ( static.imgfly.com ) crashed the shared apache service several times this morning. A connection limit has been placed on your site. Being on a shared server means you need to share the resources with other customers. Due to the heavy volume of traffic, other domains on the same service were not able to load. Once the traffic to your site has taperd off, we will gladly remove the connection limit. Please read the appropriate section of our Terms of Service and let us know if you have any questions.

dreamhost.com/tos.html

Okay, granted, I use a ‘little bit’ more traffic (I use about 1 TB per month), but still, the same issues!

People, please realize, Dreamhost is cheap. Cheap doesn’t mean good!

I ordered the ‘Crazy domain insane’ package, with 200 GB space, and 2 TB traffic. Which was supposed to be for $190.80 (for 2 years), but due to a coupon code, I was able to get this reduced with another $70 or something.

It sounded too good to be true. Well it was (and is).

Is it really crap?
First of all, they provide SSH access, nice and all, but you can clearly see the domain names of other customers, so you aren’t chrooted.
Note that I didn’t continue to ‘penetrate’ their security much further, as I don’t want to be suspended.

But allowing all users to work in a non-chrooted environment with ssh access is really the best way to go as a budget webhosting provider! (NOT)
Secondly, I know when someone logs in, as the ‘last’ command displays all output (ftp / ssh) for opened sessions.
Furthermore, the load is always above 3.something for the server I’m on. Even when it’s freakin’ midnight in the USA.

07:49:58 up 2 days, 21:24, 3 users, load average: 6.77, 6.80, 7.29

Oh and yeah, I can see the IP addresses of others with the ‘last’ command.

Benchmarking budget webhosting
Well, some time after I got the account, a friend asked me if I could sponsor him a few 100 GB’s of traffic on my own company’s hosting platform. Well, after thinking about it, it was a nice test for this account. So after some time, he linked his site nfshome.com to have all the demo’s retrieved from my site (icheb.nl).
After a while, everyone started getting 503 messages from Apache (’service temporarily unavailable’), so I mailed Dreamhost.com.
It appeared my site was maxing out their capabilities (at less than 1 TB of traffic per month).
So they increased the available resources to the site. (Thanks Javier :))

But 2 months later, after trying to deploy some test script, I made a mistake.
I accidentally used the wrong php-cli binary, effectively using almost all the resources the server had to offer (side effect of that program with PHP 4). So my account got suspended with the following message:

Hello,

We have turned off your website icheb.nl due to resourse usage, your user
account is at 1934.05cp when an avaerage user is around .1 thats less
then one, your using 49.00% of the whole server, this is not acceptible.
I see that most of the traffic is going to

GET /mirrors/nfshome/nfsmwdemo.exe

Remove this file as you are not permitted to offer the Need for Speed:
Most Wanted demo on our server to distribute. These servers are note made
for this, if you wanted to do this you would have to get a dedicated
server

You will need to contact us to let us know that you have removed it and
all other files like it before we will turn the site back on.

Thanks!

Javier

So, I guess hosting a few demo’s of games requires an dedicated server. Even when you’re buying enough bandwidth.
My reply was as follows:

Hello Javier,

I’ve taken the PHP-CLI script possibly causing the problem offline.
The PHP-CLI script in question requires more uptime to function correctly, it failed horribly with the power outage downtime / maintenance.

The nfsmwdemo.exe file isn’t something I’d like to take offline, as this is *not* using PHP.
Furthermore, the Dreamhost TOS doesn’t say anything about not being allowed to mirror / host demo’s.
I mostly hate this because the site was taken offline without contacting me first, which at this time is causing problems for some open source projects as well.

Dreamhost offers 2352 GB of traffic at this time, on a monthly basis, which is something, at least the first 2000 GB, I paid for. At least, that was the general intention.
Furthermore, in the last few days most stuff on the server is very slow, and the load seems a bit high. A load avarage of ‘load average: 11.72, 11.66, 13.46′ is quite about what a server with just two processors should have…

So, to clarify, I do not want to remove the .exe, however, the php-cli application causing the problem is no longer online. I actually do know what caused the problem. It tends to use a lot of cpu when started in php 4, but works nicely in php 5…

Wanting to sell me a dedicated server, just to host something taking less than 60% of the traffic limit, is just insane; how are your customers ever going to even reach the traffic limit, if that’s made impossible?
Just to clarify a few points; I own a webhosting company in my country, and am just using Dreamhosts services for some personal stuff… So I know what I’m talking about. A dedicated server based on the amount of traffic caused by one file is totally insane…

I hope we can get this problem out of the world, as the php-cli script causing the problem has been ‘disabled’, so to say.

With regards,
Icheb

Half a day later, the account was back online and I even got apologies (”I’m very sorry for the confusion, but as long as that file isn’t copyrighted then you’re free to host it with us if you need to.”), furthermore ‘Mike S’ agreed with me the load was a bit highish, and they would take care of it. Which later resulted in a bit more normal load, or at least something the server could technically handle.

Two months later, there was another problem, this time Apache wasn’t ‘balanced’ anymore, so it could not handle the requests. Whatever they did helped, and my site was available again.

But today, I received:

Hello,

I had to place a throttle on your domain icheb.nl due to the very large
number of hits it was recieving, effectively crashing the webserver.

James

So, what I think about it?
Well, > 70% of the requests to icheb.nl now receive a nice 503 error from Apache (it took me more than 20 tries to get into my own freakin’ site stats!!). Nice and all, but ehm, I’m still below 1.5 TB of the 2.2TB I’m able to use.

So what’s the big problem?
Well, Dreamhosts effectively seems to disable sites that do more traffic than they want you to use. So offering 2 TB traffic (that 2000 GB traffic) is nice, but they are limiting you before you even get close to it.
The Need for Speed demo’s I host are quite large, so there only is disk activity and Apache activity, the mirror doesn’t use any PHP (yeah, it does do some php, but that’s handled by one of my own Dutch servers).

Furthermore, the speed is limited. Download speed to The Netherlands seems to be limited to some random value around 50 to 400 KB/sec. While writing this, I’ve enabled a download (www.icheb.nl/100mb.bin which is 100 mb of random data) to a dutch server (with 100 MBit connection to the Internet).
To prove something is wrong, I enabled two more downloads, one from another dutch datacenter & one from a school network I have a shell account on.
Below you can see the output of wget (Linux download tool), and the speed measured:
Dutch 100 Mbit connection:

–14:11:32– http://www.icheb.nl/100mb.bin
=> `/dev/null’
Resolving www.icheb.nl… 66.33.223.235
Connecting to www.icheb.nl[66.33.223.235]:80… connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response… 200 OK
Length: 104,857,600 [application/octet-stream]

100%[====================================================>] 104,857,600 67.18K/s ETA 00:00

14:35:26 (71.43 KB/s) - `/dev/null’ saved [104857600/104857600]

So, that’s 71 kilobytes per second, not very much eh?

Other Dutch datacenter:

Resolving www.icheb.nl… 66.33.223.235
Connecting to www.icheb.nl|66.33.223.235|:80… connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response… 200 OK
Length: 104,857,600 (100M) [application/octet-stream]

100%[=======================================================>] 104,857,600 65.31K/s ETA 00:00

16:52:14 (86.99 KB/s) - `/dev/null’ saved [104857600/104857600]

W00t, a whopping 86.99 kilobytes per second.
(Note, this is almost FIVE times as slow as the download of my ADSL connection)

The school network (at least 10 mbit):

Resolving www.icheb.nl… 66.33.223.235
Connecting to www.icheb.nl[66.33.223.235]:80… connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response… 200 OK
Length: 104,857,600 [application/octet-stream]

100%[====================================>] 104,857,600 57.48K/s ETA 00:00l

16:55:53 (77.11 KB/s) - `/dev/null’ saved [104857600/104857600]

This is more than FIVE and a half times as slow as my own ADSL download (I have 4 mbit).

My end conclusion
I think I have successfully proved Dreamhost is unable to give you what you buy, if you’re using more than 50% of what you buy. So they’re overselling, and people are just falling for it!.
Furthermore, their on server security is not 100% of what it should be.
I should not be able to see the domains of other users, or even their usernames. Example:

~$ ls -alh /home/rcc7369.wtf.22875/
total 40K
drwxr-sr-x 4 root staff 4.0K Oct 3 2006 .
drwxrwsr-x 454 root staff 28K May 4 04:03 ..
drwxr-sr-x 3 root staff 4.0K Oct 3 2006 XXXXXXXXXXX (removed by me).com
drwxr-sr-x 2 root staff 4.0K Oct 3 2006 ninjaweasel

I should not be able to see stuff like this:

~$ locate mysql.php
/home/rcc7369.wtf.22875/.com/home/mambots/content/geshi/geshi/mysql.php
/home/robotstephe.wtf.22203/.com/mambots/content/geshi/geshi/mysql.php
/home/swoleary.wtf.18742/.com/forum/db/mysql.php
/home/timesup.wtf.1954/.com/mambots/content/geshi/geshi/mysql.php

Furthermore, I’m even able to SEE the contents of the files locate give back!!!!
So, I can actually see files from other users. Granted, it depends on the chmod of a file (global read has to be on).

And yeah, they’re still running Linux kernel 2.4:
~$ uname -a
Linux willie 2.4.32-grsec+f6b+gr217+nfs+a32+fuse23+tg+++opt+c8+gr2b-v6.194 #1 SMP Tue Jun 6 15:52:09 PDT 2006 i686 GNU/Linux

But it isn’t a real issue, I too still have a few servers running on 2.4 (custom) kernels ;).

So, what the heck are these guys doing exactly?!!
Is this the way shared hosting is supposed to be done?

Note: I am not writing this just to be negative, but hopefully to allow people to realize it’s not wise to just go for the most cheapass hosting account they can find anywhere.
I hope someone at Dreamhost will take this seriously, and try to fix the problems. (And no, I don’t want my account to be suspended, I was planning to post an Asterisk howto today, but the flash movie is hosted at icheb.nl, so I don’t want to that yet…)

Hello,

Unfortunately, we cannot allow one user to negatively effect the server
we offer other users. All bandwidth is not created equal. Even if you’re
not hitting your bandwidth limit, you can still cause problems.

We cannot allow you to effect other users, so if you plan on
maintaining this amount of traffic, you’ll need to move to a dedicated
server, as you would have outgrown shared hosting.

If you need anything else, please let us know.

Thanks!

Brian

Furthermore, please understand, I can’t just arrange it on another server, bandwidth in the Netherlands is too expensive for these mirrors at this time. Also, please don’t DDoS me for this… If you really want to DDoS anyone for not getting your downloads, please do that with dreamhost ;).

But there was more… Today, a friend mailed me with a problem (and solution) for a new problem everyone has missed so far.
I’ve placed a modified version online at: http://www.icheb.nl/icheb_info_blog/IXR/IXR_Library.inc.php_2.txt

If you actually want to know what’s wrong, and why, click the more button below ;).

Recently, I had to create some webservices using the IXR Library.

A pretty normal XML request for IXR looks as follows (without the xml declaration):
[xml]

ixr.test.fetchVar

Take note of the fact that this request has NO typing information, for it cannot be generated by the JS libraries I use.
Under normal circumstances (using the IXRClient), the parameter type information would have shown, as in e.g.:
[xml] testvar testvar2[/xml]

It is exactly this however, that creates the issue. Where the normal IXRCLient will correctly return data,
The AJAX based client will not show anything.

The code for the ‘value’ tag, however, is NOT:
[php] case ‘value’:
// “If no type is indicated, the type is string.”
if (trim($this->_currentTagContents) != ”) {
$value = (string)$this->_currentTagContents;
$this->_currentTagContents = ”;
$valueFlag = true;
}
break;
[/php]

As one can see from the code above, the if-statement does a trim, but the trimmed string is NEVER assigned.
One possible solution for the code above could be (I decided to break down in two lines):
[php]
if (trim($this->_currentTagContents) != ”) {
$value = trim($this->_currentTagContents);
$value = (string)$value;
$this->_currentTagContents = ”;
$valueFlag = true;
}
break;
[/php]

This solution now also strips the surrounding whitespace, tabs, newlines, etc from the input, as can be expected!

Rogier van Dongen, thank you for this patch :).

En inmiddels blijkt dat de nieuwe huisstijl van de omroep SIDN online staat. Het is natuurlijk nog niet officieel, want dat is morgen pas.
Maar het staat al wel online natuurlijk.

De reden dat ik de SIDN een omroep noem is als volgt. Het oude logo was duidelijk, het werd goed begrepen en het bestond natuurlijk al een lange tijd.
Maar nu, het nieuwe logo…

Zeg nou zelf, dat is toch niet het logo van het stelletje geldkloppers dat .nl domeinnaam registraties zou moeten verzorgen?

Ik ben benieuwd naar hoeveel dit nou weer heeft moeten kosten. Daar zal een complete groep managers, en een ontwikkelteam met designers natuurlijk wel een half jaar mee bezig zijn geweest… (om even een lekkere set stereotypen naast elkaar te kunnen neerzetten).

Maar goed, wil je .nl domeinen, dan moet je wel.

Het lijkt wel alsof iedereen die inmiddels een blog heeft (wat ook serieus bezocht wordt), daarna nog een blog wilt beginnen…
Bijvoorbeeld ispam.nl die als eerste (zover ik weet) begon met bloggen over (enkel) hosting gerelateerde onderwerpen.
Daarna kwam van dezelfde initiatiefnemer (mr het is mijn werk om op IRC te hangen) met de roddelsite ispx.nl en nu blijkt dat er blijkbaar zoveel interesse in de Nederlandse taal is, dat er op web-hosting-blog.be nog eentje begonnen is.

In ieder geval bij deze succes aan iedereen die dergelijk nieuws wil publiceren ;).

So I was very glad to find this. But due to me not using a verified SSL certificate, I ran into some problems.

I kept getting the following error:

* SSL certificate problem, verify that the CA cert is OK. Details:
error:14090086:SSL routines:SSL3_GET_SERVER_CERTIFICATE:certificate verify failed
After reading through the code, I created a modified version that solves this issue (just added an additional CURL command to ignore the problem), you can download it from this location.