I need to just rebuild the box, but time doesn’t permit that right now.

Sorry for the outage, folks!

Long story short: I made changes to try to fix something and I made it worse. The server has been upgraded about a billion times and really just needs a clean install. I just have to figure out how to do that seamlessly. Easier said than done.

I am trying to move Inanis.net to a new platform and I can’t seem to get the MySQL permissions to work correctly. I use the command mysqldump -u root --all-databases  > filename.sql to dump the data from the old box and something similar to pop it into the new box. I then copy my entire web directory (all the php apps like wordpress and mediawiki sit there) into the same location on the new box. I navigate to any of the web apps and get complaints about the webapps’ permission being denied because my damn SQL username/password combos are invalid.

So, isn’t this -all-databases trick supposed to dump the entire frigging system state, or does it do everything but users and permissions? If the case is the latter, that is the most asinine, inane thing I have seen in a while.

Or maybe I’m just dumb, tired, old, inexperienced or a mix of them all. Maybe I just forgot to do a FLUSH PRIVILEGES after my import- I dunno.

Leave ideas in the comments. Right now, I must go to sleep and dream about another day sitting behind a desk making money, all the while desiring just to get home to the SO and watch Jeopardy.

SimCity 4 still doesn’t run as fast as in Windows. It’s almost passable, but not quite. I’ll keep playing for a week and see what happens.

Oh, and Inanis Glass 1.3 is almost complete. Bugs fixed, features added and translate-ability coming soon. I may even be able to throw in some of the translations for free, with the help of those who volunteered their translation skills, of course.

Oh, and finally – Looks like the Inanis.net server has stabilized. The probable culprit: no swap partition. If it goes down again after this, I swear I am going to blow a gasket.

Heres the read averages of my devices, block sizes ranging from 1KB to 16MB. The first two drives (green) are the ones I was considering using for USB linux, the others (blue) are for comparison. Model numbers and use are at the side in italics.

• A-Data 8GB USB (Unknown Model #)(Extra Pen Drive)
  • Read 24.8 MB/s (14 MB/s on small blocks)
• Kingston 8GB USB (DTI/8GB)(Extra Pen Drive)
  • Read 24.8 MB/s (17 MB/s on small blocks)
• Corsair Flash Survivor (Unknown Model #)(Primary/Work Pen Drive)
  • Read 33 MB/s (25MB/s on small blocks)
• 36GB Western Digital Raptor SATA (WD360GD-00FNA0)(1 for OS, 1 For Apps/Swap)
  • Read 56 MB/s
• 160GB Seagate SATA (ST3160815AS)(Storage/Data Drive)
  • Read 75.4 MB/s

The results are obvious: the Kingston is the right drive. Relatively fast drive with better small block throughput would make it the likely candidate. (And the Corsair Flash Survivor is a kick ass device, BTW. Insanely fast and virtually indestructable. Faster than its reviews, and even faster than my last drive, which I thought was insanely fast to begin with. However, I digress..)

What’s really astonishing is the performance of my WD Raptors. They feel faster when I am using them for my OS/Apps drives compared to other run-of-the-mill SATA drives, even though they are older. However, they test an astonishing 20MB/s slower on reads. I think the fact that they have a 4.6ms seek average instead of an 11ms seek average makes up for the lack in throughput. By a long shot. Really.

Goes to show you that the spindle speed can do quite a bit for performance. Now, if I could only get my hands on some Velociraptors, I would be totally set. Yum.

After all that, I found out that mysqld was not initializing properly on boot. I have no idea why, because the fu–ing syslog says it’s starting and there are no errors anywhere, but mysql status says its not running. Created a startup script and popped it where it’s supposed to go and now it loads. Again, still nothing in the log to show my new script is running. This page was a great deal of help in creating the startup script.

Lets see what else this stupid server has in store for me.

• Grabbed a fresh copy of Ubuntu 8.10
• Ghosted Vista install out to another drive (to restore later)
• Installed Ubuntu, took whole system drive.
• Booted Ubuntu. Took about 10 seconds longer to boot than Vista. (Vista starts off booting slow, but as SuperFetch gets smarter, it boots faster and faster.)
• Downloaded updates.
• Marveled that Ubuntu auto-mounted my NTFS storage and app drives. No surprise there.
• Activated the recommended Restricted nVidia driver for my 8800 GTS and set full resolution, then turned on the eye candy.
  • Fought with this, as I have to do every time I install Ubuntu on this video card, to get 1280×1024 resolution. I’ll spare you all the minute details, but I spent a good 45 minutes on it. Ubuntu refuses to detect this mode automatically and the GUI gives me no option to force my own settings. None of the command line options to force a redetect of video hardware seem to work anymore, or I am using them incorrectly. I have to edit xorg.conf manually to add in the proper modes, refresh rates and the like. It’s a PITA. I SHOULD NOT HAVE TO MANUALLY EDIT ANYTHING TO FORCEFULLY SET A VIDEO MODE THAT I WANT IF THE OS DOESN’T DETECT IT. Windows doesn’t make me do this. 1) It absolutely, 100% of the time, always has and probably always will detect my monitor’s native resolution JUST FINE and sets it to it out of the box and, 2) It just happily shows me all the resolutions the CARD supports and lets me set it to whatever I want in the event the monitor isn’t detected. See, Windows gives me a GUI for advanced options and assumes I know what I’m doing. XWindows on Ubuntu does not. (I cannot stress this enough, that Windows has never, as far as I can remember, failed to detect and either auto-set or allow me to set ANY LCD monitor’s native resolution EVER)
• Marveled at how the default compositing engine is slower in Ubuntu 8.10 than it was in 8.04, and is subsequently slower than Vista’s compositing engine. (8.04 was faster last time I ran it, actually, dunno why that might be). I don’t care if it might benchmark faster, because it LOOKS and FEELS slower. For eye-candy, that’s what’s important.
• Amazed that Firefox on Ubuntu renders this blog more slowly than Vista does, and scrolls pages slower too. It is positively choppy. Everyone says Ubuntu is supposed to be faster on the same hardware. Hmm…
• Installed Wine from Ubuntu repository with Synaptic. Easy.
• Tried to install SimCity4 and RushHour using ISO images.
  • This was a FAIL, most likely due to lack of experience on my part. Apparently, mounting ISO images over an SMB connection and getting them to show up to Wine is more difficult than I am willing to try to figure out. I just used the CD’s last time I did this, but I tried to save time and use my ISO files – no go.
  • Found out that the default way of mounting ISO files in Ubuntu doesn’t like Wine or vice versa, and is generally weird. I had to install gISOMount to get ISOs to mount well, using a GUI, in a proper way. I know, “use the command line, you noob”, but I shouldn’t have to use the command line to do something this simple. I don’t have to use the command line in Windows to do this.
• Installed SimCity4 and RushHour using original CDs instead
  • This worked just fine, although the SimCity4 installer shows a constant 0% completed while installing.
• Copied Plugins and Angel Coast Region from NTFS drive to linux home folder for testing.
• Launched SC4RH for “play”.
  • Launched the game and waited… some more… a bit more.. THERE (about twice as slow loading as Vista/XP)
  • Loaded up Angel Coast/Buena Vista (My HUGE city, almost entire map of skyscrapers and 600k people) and waited. And waited, and waited.
  • Marveled at how slow it was compared to Windows. Thoroughly enjoyed the wonderful 1-3 FPS when scrolling around the city map (in Windows this is more like 6-10fps). Noticed issues with rendering the clouds (could see silohuettes of planes and mission bubbles left behind when scrolling). Watched as the color of the ground would randomly change color when it shouldn’t. Menus took longer to pop out. Options took longer to open up. Was slower trying to lay down roads.
  • Didn’t end up playing, because it took too long to do anything. Hell, its slow enough on Windows, I don’t need anything helping it to be slower.
• Posted this complaint about how Ubuntu 8.10 and SimCity4 are slower on this computer than Windows Vista.
• Went back to loving Ubuntu for servers and Windows for desktops.

The video card was an issue (as always in Ubuntu for some reason), but I got that fixed. Everything else works perfectly fine. Audio and everything. SMB shares. It’s neato.

My favorite feature: the compositing engine. Vista style features with better responsiveness. Doesn’t play SimCity 4 . .maybe . . dunno.

Let’s play with this and see where it goes.

Life goes on.

• Install WordPress
• Get Shell Access
• in the blog’s root
  • touch .htaccess
  • sudo chmod 666 .htaccess
  • Edit said .htaccess fle and add the following
    • Options +FollowSymLinks
• in /etc/apache2/sites-available
  • edit the file called default
  • Line 12 should read AllowOverride All
• do sudo apache2 -k restart
• Log into the blog, and set up your Pretty Permalinks desires.

Note To Self: This procedure may be incorrect. You modified so much crap trying to figure it out that you probably Christmas-Tree’d the server…