2010
2010 is already going pretty quickly (hell, its almost time for 2011). I was reminded by the fact that an arbitrary number advanced by one by the yearly e-mail telling me I need to renew this domain name (which is done by the way – damnleet.com is mine and stays mine!). Not that counting years means anything to me. The earth made (approximately) one revolution around the sun from completely arbitrary and meaningless starting point. And at a completely random moment in history (or well, not entirely random – mankind made a couple of other really stupid decisions at the time, most of them involving a carpenter and a few pieces of wood) we decided to start counting those revolutions. But guess what, the earth’s gonna keep doing that for a couple billion years to come. Big deal. Looking at it like that, it’s kinda like celebrating every time you’ve taken a step on a 50 km hike. It doesn’t mean anything, it’s not significant in any way, and yet, we celebrate it.
That can only lead me back to the conclusion that lots of things lead me back to: people are weird.
But I can understand that they need to celebrate something. There is so much going on that isn’t worth celebrating, that we try to make the most out of the things we can be more or less happy about. On the grand scale of the universe it’s as significant as a single drop of water is on a planet filled with nothing but oceans, but for a creature as proud of himself as a human, one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of perspective.
On a smaller scale of things, I’m (temporarily!!) taking a few things offline (specifically some of the more space-consuming parts of the photo album). I really need to upgrade the disk space I have on this server (a few minutes ago there were 7 megabytes of it available), and getting a few GB’s freed up will help to keep everything going until there is more space available. Don’t worry – everything will be back online as soon as possible!
Upgrades
I’ve just upgraded PHP to version 5.2.7 and tweaked the configuration a bit. The site has been offline for a few minutes due to this process. I hope to be repeating the process but then for 5.3.0 soon, but it seems that the PHP development team isn’t in a hurry to get it released 
Foundry
I’ve been receiving a couple of very nice parcels the last few days. 
A shiny Foundry BigIron 4000 switch/router (it does all sorts of fun stuff like BGP4 and VRRP ^^), which currently has a single RPS3 power supply (550W) and a B8GM management blade, which has 8 gigabit fiber ports. I’m planning to get it in a flightcase at the end of the month (it’ll be carried around a fair bit, and these things are way too expensive to throw around unprotected), and of course there’ll be more blades and a second power supply coming some time as well. The plan for now is to load it with two power supplies (redundant; if one fails, the other still has enough juice to power the whole system), two additional B8G blades and a B24E, making for a total of 24 gigabit fiber and 24 10/100 copper ports. The only real downside on these units is that they’re quite heavy (especially when fully loaded) and that they produce a lot of noise. You could probably use the fans to dry your hands if you wanted to.
I’ve been playing with it (of course), and its management system is a thing to get used to. It’s either the command-line interface (which takes time to learn all the commands and stuff like that), or the web interface (which is not much more than clicking commands instead of typing, requires some things to be set up in the command-line anyway).
Naturally I have some pictures online (and more may be added at any time).
mv /easynet/* /databarn
Today I got home and found a letter on the doorstep, addressed to me, which appeared to come from my hosting provider. I already received the bill for this month’s colocation, and to my knowledge there’s nothing illegal on the server (or at least not that they would bother about), so I was wondering what it could possibly be. So the logical action to take is to open the envelope and read the letter.
So far this server has been doing it’s thing from the Easynet datacenter, and so far that’s been going pretty well. Okay, a day or so ago the AMS-IX went unstable (apparantly they were doing maintenance in one half of the redundant network but a failover triggered, switching links to the part of the network that was down for maintenance) causing packetloss and slow links for most of the world, but that affected about every Ducth datacenter and probably a major part of the world (as you may know, the AMS-IX is by far the largest internet exchange in the world). But that was pretty much the only issue in several months, we even seemed to escape from the wave of power outages in data centers that has been going on for the last couple of months. Many data centers suffered blackouts, including LCL in Diegem (Belgium), which – up to now – had a zero uptime reputation of which they were kinda proud.
The point is that, starting June 1st, the server won’t be doing it’s thing from Easynet anymore, but move to Databarn. The choice to move was made by the colocation provider. The lack of oil is affecting datacenters badly, because energy prices are rising. And if there’s one thing a data center needs lots of, it’s power. Easynet has apparantly raised the price for electricity by a whopping 87%, up to 72 euros per ampere, whereas other datacenters usually charge about half that. Of course this rise is considered ridiculous, and since the costs in having a cage in a DC isn’t about the space but the power usage, the decision has been made to move to Databarn.
Naturally that will mean downtime, however I’m going to see if I can combine moving equipemt with the already planned maintenance to reduce it as much as possible. More info to come.
Templating
I’ve been spending quite a couple of hours lately getting my new template engine to work. This piece of software, written in PHP (naturally), takes HTML templates and has the ability to substitute variables in that page, include other files in it, and hide or replicate sections of code (blocks). The positive upshot of this is that it allows you to keep the PHP and HTML code for a website as good as completely separated, which keeps both PHP and HTML clean and easy to modify something.
However, writing a template engine is everything except easy. I attempted it once before but gave up after having wasted lots of hours, but I finally decided to have another go. There’s a lot of pretty complex string parsing going on, and especially including other templates is a major pain in the ass. It can take forever to debug issues (such as pieces of HTML showing up in completely the wrong location). One bug that kept me busy in particular just added code to a template for no apparant reason. After long searching I finally found that the problem was the function that actually reads the files, which wasn’t cleaning up its buffer. And all that for a total of 23 kilobytes of code.
The engine works pretty smoothly though. Unlike many other template engines it does not make use of slow, complex and resource-intensive regular expressions. Not a single one. The result: 13 milliseconds average parsing time and 0.1 millisecond processing time, using a simple test template (that does use every feature the engine has several times over).
For the moment I’m using this for a litl’ project, but some time I might share the engine with the rest of the world.
Change of policy
In the first post on this shiny new DamnLeet.com site, I’ve announced that from now on you must register and be logged in to post comments. From now, that is no longer necessary and anyone can post comments without logging in, however keep in mind that if it requires me to delete spam comments on a daily basis it’ll soon again be turned back the way it was.
Also I’ve updated the WordPress software to the shiny new version number 2.5-RC1. This may have caused everything to be unreachable for a short period of time.
Odd
Yesterday I decided more or less randomly to check up on the server’s bandwith consumption. I found a somewhat massive spike in it around 10:00 AM (which is very odd considering it was on a Sunday). It lasted for about 20-30 minutes, at 10 megabit per second (10% of the uplink capacity). The result was over 3 GB of traffic, but considering I’ve got more than enough it doesn’t make a lot of difference (except that this bigass spike looks supid on the graphs).
Now we’re talking bandwith statistics anyway, I managed to get Cacti working on server 3 (one of my local machines). It basically polls network equipment and uses the data to make nice graphs (it monitors the backplane and each switch port). It’ll also be running on any LAN-party I either organize or visit, so for all those who are going to CampZone 2008 and are in our tent: I know how much pr0n you’re downloading.
The 2nd FoF song I announced in the previous post is still pending, I havn’t really had the time (read: didn’t feel like) finishing it currently.
Also I’m investing more and more time in a little software project of mine. I won’t run into any details of it yet, but it should some day run behind the scenes on this server. It’ll be quite neat actually. Of course it’s written in PHP, and it does quite a few things which most of the people didn’t even know it was at all possible with PHP. Anyway, the SVN repository is growing on an almost-daily basis. Gotta love SVN: once you get it working, it’s quite useful. Branching/tagging, reverting back if you did something wrong, etc etc etc – not to mention that now my precious code is stored on 4 different computers (my desktop, laptop, this server which hosts SVN and the backup server).
Oh well. Soon I’ll be posting my l33t story about Roy. Roy is a triangle who becomes king in the country of the circles. It’s very interesting.