^{Photo by MarkyBon}

About last week my Windows Server [2003] (I had 2008 on there, then went back to 2003) server wouldn't boot. Since it's not accessed externally, I run TVersity to transcode by movies of which I watch on my 360.  

So, it wouldn't boot up which was great. Kept going into an endless loop, after POST it would keep rebooting. Dead RAM? You'd think it would beep if it was. But nope. Swapped the power supply and still nothing. Loose connection to the case fan? Still, nothing. Only other object that was still plugged in was the hard drive. Unplugged it. Booted normally (though it couldn't since it was the only one). Awesome. Ended up re-installing Server 2003 last night, turned out fine. 

Still puzzles me that it wouldn't boot at all. BIOS detected it fine, but once it tried to boot from the hard drive an endless loop occurred. Working well now, which is a surprise.

I finally put together a load balancing setup together this weekend, and I'm surprised it was this easy.

What you'll need is three servers, two web servers and one server for the load balancer. It's not recommended that you only use one load balancer since it's a single point of failure (SPOF) but I only had one extra server on hand. For this tutorial, I used Debian Lenny.

First thing's first, download and install pound on your load balancer. 

^{Photo by Vankuso (D.Starosz)}

Life has been comme ci, comme ça lately. I've been on SSRI's (Zoloft!) the last 7 weeks or so. Apparently they work like magic for some people. Not for me. 

 For the last week or so, my server(s) externally have been slow as hell. Now, me being not so investigative didn't check my routers logs. Well, let's just say someone was DDoS'ing me. Oh no, not the web servers. Just the tracker (Torrentino's tracker). Not someone, but a crapload of IP's. Still, making it virtually impossible to access the webserver. So naturally, me being a dumbass didn't have iptables configured....at all. Long story short, fixed it up with some iptables rules and blocking the offending IP's. The router is reporting that it's dropping the [bad!] packets, but I'm not so sure on that.

It's finally Friday, been waiting all week. I now have four spare processors, dual Xeon socket 604 processors. It'd be great if I could use them.... Also have some RAM too, 4GB's in total!

Torrentino has been running fine so far, server load has been low. PunBB uses a small amount of CPU usage, Torrentino itself (the system) uses next to nothing. One server for the front end + PHP, another for static content (CSS, images, etc.). I could have another server just for PHP processing, if needed. Well, atleast I'll have the hardware to expand ;)

Bought some stuff from the Canonical store recently, supposedly it'll take anywhere from 2 to 12 weeks. Awesome.

I took down all my local servers and building one larger one. For the last 8 hours or so, I've been trying to get it to work but no luck. Alright, check this out: Install Debian on HDD. Try to boot => instant restart. Back to the BIOS.
Like WTF?

Sale is over!

4Box Hosting has two spare dedicated servers up for sale. Below are the specs:
CPU: Intel  @ 2.1GHz
HDD: 80GB

(We'll have to re-check)

CPU: Intel Pentium III @ 860MHz

RAM:128MB

HDD: 40GB

Both include:
1 IP included

Full root access!
Canada based location
Around $8.99/month (prices can change), yearly also available. If you're interested, post a comment below.

We've experienced some downtime last night and this morning but we're back up and its all good.
 
 I thought of a new project the other day. In a nutshell, it is similar to Twitter but is used for development, beit web, software or whatever. So, for example say you have 5 other team members across the world. They would all have an account on the site. They could post what they are doing, ask for help, etc.. so other team members could respond. Post a comment if you have any ideas :D
 
 Anyway, today's Sunday, so I might go ahead and relax.

Thought I'd take it upon myself to create a mail server on 'roppie' (me server). It's now a log server also, I even got my router to send logs to it too. Interesting it is though, I have 'jlap' sending all its logs to roppie too. 'roppie' also runs a minimal web server (lighttpd + mysql, same as jlap) but also serves the logs out on HTTP so I can view them anywhere.

I've been busy with things lately but now since basketball season is over, I'm sure I'll be more productive. Anyway, I'll try to work on Server Stat(demo) a bit today then probably release it.

It's about time I get my dead server up and running, I've just been procrastinating. Anyway, I'm gonna do a little maintenance on my servers, then go work on something.

Oh, by the way, does anyone want the MailX script I made? It lets you mail other members, sorta like a private messaging system. There is also a iWebKit version of it too. Comments are appreciated :D