Today ended up being a great day, got a great gift from BdG (big thanks sir!) which really set the day in motion, some more research through out the day, also got some reading material on a project website for my Uncle’s tent stakes, follow that up with a check coming in (PTL!) which led to a few other things, like dinner with dad (LJS Chicken Planks + Hush Puppies!), it was a good evening.
Then it was back to work. I started basic prep on Faith for it’s upgrade to PHP5/Apache2 (compiling now) and placed an order for a server to test out over the next 24 hours to see if I want to make the plunge for sure - the project server is lovingly called Trogdor, he’s a dragon-man of a machine, 8 cores, RAID10, *tear* a nice upgrade, got the call confirming my order, had a nice chat with “Jake” the guy on the other end, he loved the server name of Trogdor, suggested Burninator as another option for other projects down the line (It is officially on the list) - but he said he’d have me up in about an hour, and he had me running in 45 minutes.
So far so good though on both fronts, Faith is at 15 minutes now compiling, and Trogdor has gotten some of the royal lock down treatment, while their initial locks were nice, and some of the mods they have in place I am definitely leaving, I run a tight ship, so have to have them help with a few network tweaks and such on their end to make my life happy, but all in all, it’s looking good, speed is amazing, seeing 8 cores in top is a lovely sight but I think it’s going to work. Sure sure, it’ll mean some changes from the current way I monitor, and such, but really, the savings is a motivator, the growth potential is amazing, and of course, it gives me another set of eyes monitoring, keeping up the server etc. which in itself is like hiring a crew to stand watch as I do things like Sleep.
Also today I talked possiblity of a local job, it’s one I am really going to pray about, but it was one of those things that just leapt from my mouth, and just felt right, but then I found myself saying “Why did I say that?” so I am putting it to a God thing, and see where it goes, who knows, may all work out just right, may not, none the less, if it does, possibly means no moving, and maybe, just maybe I’ll be in my own place by my birthday!
But that was my day, as I go into Saturday, I lead into things by having picked up my mom from my sister’s house as they returned from a Lakers game with my Aunt, then its onto a site-by-site check on Faith to see if anything has post PHP5 upgrade blues that I can easily fix, or at the very least point the site owners to upgrade options to get themselves back on track, but after a few month or two that this upgrade was coming - I hope everyone is up to date, or at least one hot-fix shy. So now I am going to find my shoes, and pack up to head towards my sister’s house - one step at a time.
So tonight has been a night of testing, I ate some food, watched Earl, then about 20 minutes ago sat down and begin to really weigh out things in this server plan, speed was one of my main concerns, finding the quickest download out there, and here’s what I came up with downloading a 100MB file from each provider I have been considering (2 Current in the Running) and my current provider, I have a 8Mb/s connection here, and each server is connected via a 100Mb/s connection so in theory I should be able to get around 8Mb/s in a perfect situation - but since that perfect world doesn’t exsist and folks are actively using connections, etc. etc. - I knew some tests would not be as slow, but the results are as such:
Needless to say - #3 is by far my favorite option, nearly a complete minute faster to download via their backbone, than that of my current provider, impressive indeed. So I have been running the numbers, and figuring the servers, I think I may be de-comissioning one of the servers, since hosting numbers are down, I could really almost host 2 servers on one of this configuration vs. 2, but even if not, still - savings are big, and there’s always options to grow and grab another server if needs be in the near future if growth takes off.
So things are panning out to be good, going to rough out a migration schedule, and see if I can get in on this promotion they have for me since it is time sensitive, as it’d be nice to save some cash, lower costs, and increase revenues again, so even if this job doesn’t happen or at least not right away, I’ll have some more float in the budget.
Anywhoo - I think that’s it for me tonight, going to wrap up here, and probably hit the hay and hope the morning greetings me with a better day, Happy Pre-Friday folks, enjoy the weekend - and to Mr. Poon - Happy Pre-Birthday! Hope your birthday is a good one, eat some cake for me (or save me a piece, I’m always down for cake) - Night!
Soooo…. another day, no checks. Not even a call back from the kMan, and the other ones I figure at the latest would be Saturday/Monday as they went out in the mail (the ol “Checks in the mail” bit) on Monday - so hopefully, tomorrow I’ll have some $1200+ in my pocket, and my budget will return to the land of happy.
Server world, things are looking good, company I am looking at to handle my servers looks really amazing, and the public seems to agree, still reading thru some reviews, and praying about it some more, but if I made the move, I’d be looking at nearly $400 in savings a month, and all the goodies I mentioned before - amazing emailing a sales got me a quick response and a great deal, so in then ext 3 days I may be making a big order, and making plans for migrations thru the end of the month.
But there it is, another day, still alive, fighting to stay positive at this point, but even though I am not actively thinking about budget, I know it’s on my brain, so here’s to cash flow returning to it’s proper levels tomorrow… have a good evening folks, going to go try to convince folks to go for food, or simply make myself something tasty.
So here I am - alive after another day - another day of no word from kMan on money, no checks in, so another day running very tight funds - I admit, it’s getting very old, but as always I like to try to find solutions, and so I ran some numbers on things, trying to tweak configurations for servers, look at various providers, see where I could cut some costs - and my plan was to do that before dinner.
I came up with a savings of $250, while actually improving services, and even some room for giving customers some extra love for their patience in the move! I still have to check on 2 things with one customer, but it may line up just peachy with their idea to upgrade their website’s resources so all in all, if all things are agreed upon like it is currently, then I could be looking at $250 less towards servers, and I can start to really pay off bills, and push forward to an Apartment, even if the job at the coast doesn’t happen.
The blog got some touch ups today, really just needed to focus on a web project that wasn’t customer related for a bit, and it was fun, threw in some random code tweaks, changed out the background on the theme I found, and I think it looks good - granted there are no edit buttons per article when I am logged in, but I can probably get em added without issue, just some simple bits of code, and I’ll be good to go.
All in all, not the best week I’ve had to start off a new year, but none the less I am still breathing, and I am pushing forward, hoping for the best, and looking forward to some changes in my personal and business lives very soon.
Anywhoo - I am hungry! Had lunch at 11 with Dan, and now I am hungry here at what is now 6pm, so going to go find something tasty to eat, and sit down and enjoy some random TV! Night folks, keep me in your prayers!
It’s days like Today which re-enforce the desire to get a 9-5 job, two of my larger clients (whom I do servers for) are yet again, later than late - and I’ve already been billed for their connections - so at this point I am playing the waiting game, as I have till 6pm tonight to get money into the account before the charge clears tomorrow and I get the wonderful “Overdrawn” notice, all due to a invoice that’s primarily their bill - ugh indeed.
No new info on the job, still praying about it, more and more it seems like a good thing. Found a possible place at the coast for similar to what I was going to pay here in Bakersfield, 2 bed/2 bath, sent it to my brother to ask if he knew of anything similar/better deals etc. but still no word back from him as of yet, but so far today hasn’t been bad - just can’t seem to get started, I hate this money thing hanging over my head, but seems like it’ll be the case for a while longer.
Anywhoo - that was my Friday rant. I remember when Friday’s were fun, I’d go take pictures, and the power wasn’t flickering like it was about to go out (yay) well back to work while I still can, must make sure my backup (laptop+cell) are all charged and ready to go.
Howdy! Well since my goal of a full night’s sleep failed (bed by 10:30 up by 4am - 5 1/2 hours) - I figured what a better time to sit down and actually blog a bit about the whole Christmas time, as I have only posted blips and flickr links.
Christmas Eve - We went to Barry and Michelle’s for the evening feast, not feeling my best (read: Lack of Sleep) I only had some potatoes and ham, but hey it was tasty none the less - we had some fun, the dogs came in after dinner and we got some fun pictures of them, Beth took over the camera after a while as my head was killing me, and she got some fun shots. Jordan called in from Iraq to wish the family a merry Christmas - was pretty special for them.
So after things wrapped up there we came home and after a while my headache calmed down, which left me awake, so from about 10->12 I worked on developing some of the pictures in Lightroom, great thing to have digital negatives for is a dark room, so cleaned up various levels from the negatives and printed out some to fit in a set Mom got for Beth and Michael, so Christmas morning we could present them, it came out nice, the ol R340 still works like a charm, of course now it’s low on 4 colors, but that’s to be expected with the photos I print that are 8 1/2 x 11 - not being able to sleep I worked on some gift wrapping for my mom, and eventually got to sleep, then woke up early for the next phase. Christmas Waffles.
Christmas Morning - We had fun, another year @ Beth and Michael’s for waffles, freshly cooked bacon (turkey and pork) as well as tasty sausage, then there was the piles of waffles. I had 6 total, delightful. So the fun continued, Cousins were there, and Dave and Jo, so lots of fam, twas fun! Then of course it was getting late thus it meant Mom needed to get to Work to do her Christmas Givings as well as prepare for the afternoon.
Christmas Afternoon - The plan was originally in my mind 4:30, but it turned out to be 2:30, but I am getting ahead of myself, at around noon I get server alarms that a customer server is offline, however - the server is online, so at first I am thinking “phew false alarm” then I get to looking, their primary server is offline (100+ sites) so my worry is to get investigations going at the DC on Christmas day could mean a long outage - well the response time was 5 minutes for them to reboot it, then took a little longer to run a FSCK on the drives. Logs show it was simply as I predicted “Out of Ram” so I am going to drop off a upgrade path for them Today - but thats another story.
So with my expected nap not going to be possible I printed up song sheets, as well as made copies of the music I was playing, and then headed off with Dad to the mini-Christmas service at the nursing home - Beth and Michael came to lend their voices, and it turned out pretty good, was still a tad rocky from the lack of sleep, and forgot that in practicing I lowered 2 songs down an octave as they were un-godly high lol. So when I looked at the song and tried to lower em in my brain, it half worked - ah the joys of the piano.
Christmas Evening gave me a chance to get some sleep under my belt, and most of the day after Christmas was sleep as well, so really I am getting my body some rest finally - but I still have pending orders that of course came in on Christmas day, but I figure since both are from current customers, and I sent out the newsletter explainin it was the holidays, they’ll be good waiting till today.
All in all a fun Christmas, it really wraps up on Friday with Ron, Harm, Goofball - coming to Bakersfield for Christmas BBQ (Burgers! Yum!) I also am planing one way or another to do the Lights at Calm on Friday so need to send out the invites to folks, but it has been a great week - I got 2 Wii games (Pirates of the Caribbean and Meet the Robinson’s) as well as 2 Shirts - and my favorite The Muppet Movie! - been wanting to see that for some time, and it was in my batch of Mom gifts. Good stuff.
Anywhoo - lots to do, going to try and get a lot of work done today across a lot of projects, as well as get some things around town done so hopefully today will be as productive as I have laid out in my head, if not, well there’s always Friday (hehe) Hope you all had a good Christmas, and soon we’ll be in 2008, craziness. Have a good Thursday folks!
So for a while I actually took Friday’s off, not anymore lol. So much to do as this year wraps up, and I want to make sure it goes smoothly, so Christmas day I don’t wake up to a pile of coal waiting in my email from customers - so today was some more dry runs of PHP5/APACHE2 configurations, also tested out the new feature for SPF/DomainKeys in the cPanel interface, the latest build offers the functionality, but it seems to have some glitches when it comes to domains with more than a single domain in the account (ie: accounts with Parked/Add-on Domains) - however it is workable.
Testing seemed fine on SPF/DomainKeys until the dreaded multi-domain account hit it, and the wrench was thrown into the gears, but another side effect is external DNS, there is no mechanism within cPanel to simply display the new DNS entires involved with SPF and DomainKeys, thus someone who is doing their own DNS, will have issues with true deployment, so a bug report was opened on cPanel’s bugzilla requesting the enhancement to display the records which need to be added.
All in all a semi-productive day, wish I had gotten some code time in, but the night is still young, though I may crash out soon and wake back up for the PHP5 run on Shepherd tonight, going to start it around 1am - but since I am going to archive the old build, that means while it builds that things like PHP and such will be broken for a bit, but never had a build take over 30m, and since mail, spam filtering, etc. on Shepherd will continue there is that chance, but I am hoping that with the early hour, (thus in most cases decreased load) I’ll see a quick build, some quick testing, then hit the sack.
Anywhoo - off to break and watch a flick, not sure what, saw Chuck & Larry last night, not horrible, tad too much swearing, but Ving Rhames - hilarious. Well played indeed. So enjoy your weekend, and if I don’t get a chance to post before Christmas, have a safe and happy Christmas folks!
– AT: New anti-fraud checks in WHMCS from MaxMind were officially tested with a new order this evening, did great! Very very happy, glad to see it work so smoothly. Okay going for real this time.
but I think it’s going to work. Sure sure, it’ll mean some changes from the current way I monitor, and such, but really, the savings is a motivator, the growth potential is amazing, and of course, it gives me another set of eyes monitoring, keeping up the server etc. which in itself is like hiring a crew to stand watch as I do things like Sleep.
Night!
