Rubénerd Blog :)

Some more of SegPub’s legendary reliability from earlier this evening. I suppose it’d been a whole month since my last outage ;).

Another SegPub outage this afternoon, this time lasting from around 14:32 to 14:52 South Australia time. Fortunately I wasn’t using the domain for any of my afternoon classes like the last outage did.

This time I did a traceroute and checked the status of the site using a foreign server and recorded the results. I’m hoping this isn’t becoming a regular occurrence, but I’m going to be keeping my own records of such events.

Today has not been a very good one for the intertubes. For the second time in the last couple of days Rubenerd.com went offline for an extended period of time, fourth time if you count database connection errors. SegPub guarantees a free month’s hosting if uptime dips below 99.5%.

The timing could not have been worse, some of the blog posts I had written regarding OpenSolaris and Java were supposed to be used in a practical today because I thought I could get some valuable feedback (which I did) instead of just writing it up in OpenOffice or Word. I showed the results of a well known downtime indicator to the teacher, but he was not impressed. Serves me right for trying to think outside the box.

I got a reply from the SegPub discussion mailing list regarding the matter:

I can assure you we haven’t had any outages recorded today. We monitor all our services from 19 redundant locations, if 2 or more report an issue then we consider a service to be down and we’ll react immediately.

I’m not saying it wasn’t down for you, but just in regards to our monitoring, we haven’t had any outages today. To give you a bit of background, this is the first time since February 2009 that we’ve had any kind of issues, its just unfortunate when things happen they tend to happen all at once.

It’d be great to see if we can get some source IP addresses you were connecting from so we can trace the issues at our edge routers so we can trace back and work out if perhaps there’s a network issue along the way.

I can assure you we take downtime VERY seriously, and we strive to maintain our excellent uptime and stability.

I believe them when they say they take downtime seriously, but respectively their claim that there was no downtime today is simply not true.

I could understand if it was just my isolated IP address or ISP having connection problems, but I was able to confirm with people living in Singapore and London that it was offline, and as you can see from the screenshot from the following website they were reporting it down too.

I’ve had nothing but positive experiences to report with SegPub, they run a tight ship. Here’s hoping these last couple of days were just one off occurrences. If it does happen again I’ll be running a dtrace to see where the problem starts.

For those of you subscribed to my blog through an aggregator using the old URL for the RSS feed instead of the new one, you may have noticed four recent posts with identical timestamps. You probably don’t care why this happened, but I’m so excited I just have to relay it!

When I moved from Servage to Segment Publishing because the former was absolutely awful and because I had so much success with the latter for other projects, I also took the opportunity to move the site back to Rubenerd.com which I had previously lost to domain squatters. RubenerdShow.com was still with Servage, but all it contained was a simple .htaccess script to redirect all requests to the new domain.

Well as of today, I finally got around to moving the domain off Servage and onto Segment Publishing including said text file. This means, FINALLY, I am completely, 110% off Servage. I don’t have anything hosted with them whatsoever. Clear as mud!

I’m putting the finishing touches on my post detailing what an awful webhost Servage is but it won’t be ready for a few days. Another post I’m positive you’re all anxiously awaiting ;-).

Apparently my site summarised in one picture!

Another one of the great things about having your website hosted with SegPub is the Urchin Analytics package is provided and turned on by default. It’s like Google Analytics on steroids and without the need for JavaScript. It’s also light years ahead of Servage’s crude listing of hits and referral pages.

ASIDE: This software does some cool stuff but one thing it does NOT do is log personally identifiable information. I’ve contacted the support team and confirmed this; if it did log such information I would turn it off.

Aside from merging my show and blog together nothing has really changed here, so it means I get a first real look at where my traffic is coming from and what the most popular content is for the first time!

According to the "Top Content" screen, the following are the most accessed parts of this site in descending order, with server only elements like robots.txt removed. After #9 the percentages suddenly drop to statistical insignificance.

Order	URI	Description
#1	/feed/	primary RSS feed
#2	/category/show/feed/	Rubenerd Show podcast feed
#3	/	the home page
#4	/category/anime/	anime related posts… wait what!?
#5	/comments/feed/	people subscribe to the comments?
#6	/category/show/	Rubenerd Show home
#7	/category/thoughts/	people like my rambling?
#8	/tag/whole-wheat-radio/	a Jim Kloss conspiracy
#9	/tag/twitdeck/	a clear misspelling!

While I long suspect as much, it’s now confirmed more people read my blog through RSS readers than visit the site itself. I’ve finally reached the 21st century.

I reckon this picture is even more relevant to this post, but I’d already spent ages on that first picture. Such is life.

What really blew me away was the order of the categories: while I understand the placement of The Show, the Thoughts category is ahead of the primary Software and Internet ones which (at least I thought) were the reasons for this blog’s existence!

What’s more, the Anime category of all things is overwhelmingly the most popular. I’m really taken aback… I mean there are thousands of otaku online who dedicate their entire lives to reviewing each episode of every single anime produced in history in painstaking detail, and yet a couple of silly posts mostly talking about passing interests or that are merely tagged as anime because I used an anime desktop background on a screenshot get a #4 position. Wild!

Given I just talk about what I’m interested in at any given time while ignoring cohesion and the supposed number 1 rule of blogging (pick a speciality and just focus on it), perhaps it would be worthwhile to focus my efforts given these trends are what people want. Henceforth I will only discuss what Twitter clients Asahina Mikuru uses while she’s posting her Thoughts on the Rubenerd Show while listening to Whole Wheat Radio, and the subsequent posts will only be available in RSS. I think.

Or alternatively I could just focus solely on discussing sandwiches of a grilled cheese nature here and that’s it. Don’t think the thought has never crossed my mind. Jaffles.

The flustered rent and webhost episode!

Fun with dealing with broken corrupt backups, misleadingly labelled auto rent payments and my former webhost Servage now that I’m safely typing this from Segment Publishing!

Am particularly flustered and fast talking which saves on file download times for your convenience. Thank you.

Download MP3 to listen 20:55 9.7MiB

You can also view previous episodes, subscribe via iTunes or another client, stream this episode and view its Internet Archive page.

As some of you would no doubt remember, with my previous webhost Servage it was quite normal for the database or web server backing this blog to go offline for anywhere between several hours to several days. For those who have only just stumbled upon my bizarre mix of whatnot here, I’m not exaggerating with those downtime figures!

My new webhost sent me this message this afternoon:

Dear Ruben,

On Sunday 19th April 2009 we will be performing scheduled maintenance on our shared hosting servers. The maintenance will be starting at 3:00PM and finishing at 5:00PM (GMT+10).

We expect minimal downtime, however you may notice your website unavailable for a period of 2-3 minutes during this time. No email will be affected, only your website.

Best Regards,
Segment Publishing Customer Support

You read that right… 2-3 minutes. My old webhost would have blamed an outage of 2-3 minutes on the fact I sneezed and subsequently closed my eyes for the duration of that time. Or worse still, they would have claimed it was the result of me setting my permissions wrong. That was their answer to everything. Hehe, sneeze.

Earlier today I talked about how the best way to treat an online visitor or customer is the same as with any other industry: with respect. I guess having lived without it for so long online, now having it feels weird.

I’m forming a theory that FreeBSD people not only have a better server OS than others, but that they’re cooler too. SegPub is a FreeBSD webhost… perhaps I’m onto something. Or perhaps I’m just on something. I wish I were witty, then I’d have wit.

I can’t say I ever thought I’d be using Perl as a last resort emergency security tool. Sheesh Servage, get your act together.

My first few days back in Singapore have been eventful to say the least. I could have said they were uneventful, but that would have been inaccurate and would also have contradicted what I just wrote. And the last thing I want to do here is look ridiculous. Well, any more ridiculous than I look now walking down from my apartment building to Orchard Road while I type this post on my iPhone.

ASIDE: I used to mock people who spent more time looking at their phones than paying attention to where they were walking; now with this ridiculously useful iPhone I’m guilty of the exact same behaviour. Walking into light poles seems to be my divine punishment for this hypocricy.

Yes back to eventfulness, since coming back here last Saturday morning, I’ve had my first major problems with online hacking of my sites, to a degree I never thought possible. So far RubenerdShow.com and the associated subdirectories such as this blog have been the victim of 12 code injection attacks as a result of poor security standards on my webhost. I dislike it when people shift the blame onto others, but all my permissions are set perfectly and the attacks are coming from within my host’s IP range, so it’s a matter of lax internal security due to what I suspect is poorly enforced group permissions.

As Bruce Schneier said in his Secrets and Lies tome which I admit I’ve read more than three times, internal threats are often more dangerous than external ones, though they often get placed second in priority. I am a huge fan of Bruce Schneier, I even wrote about the Bruce Schneier Facts website back in 2006. Very fun distraction when all this nasty stuff is going on!

For Servage this isn’t new; a quick Google search for Servage Hack returns thousands of results. Even Flickr has a couple of screenshots by people showing their sites and even the Servage host site itself being hacked.

Perhaps as a result of this or because Servage has also been caught hosting hundreds of spam and credit card fraud sites, the StarHub ISP here in Singapore has seemed to start blocking all Servage hosted material. As I sit here at Starbucks now in Tanglin Mall it seems SingTel haven’t filtered it, but given Singaporean ISP’s general low tolerance when it comes to abuse of their systems I worry they may be next.

ASIDE: For those interested in the attacks themselves, it seems shady Servage users have been inserting javascript into the first line of my index.php files and modifying my .htacess files to redirect to other sites. This despite all my permissions being set to allow myself to read and write, but others in the group to only read. I don’t know what else I can do to block these changes.

I’ve written a trivial Perl script to check the modification dates of every file on the server, and if it doesn’t match a list of predetermined values it deletes the hacked/modified file and restores it, then logs the change. This seems to have stopped all the attacks but it really is a clumsy measure. Servage need to get their act together, because it’s not just me this is affecting.

Suffice to say, I am already in the process of moving over all my material to Segment Publishing hosting and Ourmedia instead of using Servage as well. I had kept Segpub for use only for my university blog, but they’ve proven themselves for their stellar reliability and great service. They do cost more than Servage, but as I’ve learned from this experience cost shouldn’t be the primary consideration. As a student I do have a stretched budget, but if I have to pay a few dollars extra a month for peace of mind, a server running FreeBSD and my own dedicated IP address that I don’t have to share with hundreds of other sites — some of which engage in criminal activities — I think it’s worth it.

Segpub Christmas cheer!

What frustrates me is that it’s my own home ISP StarHub that has blocked Servage, which means I have to use a proxy to access my own site. I’ll be doing some serious cleaning up of my MySQL tables and I’ll be exporting them hopefully today or tomorrow.

Interestingly enough, this blog and all the images used within are quite small. Exporting gigabytes worth of Rubenerd Shows recorded since 2005 and re-uploading them to Ourmedia will be a painfully slow process, but I think it will pay for itself pretty quickly.

Will be keeping you up to date, and thank you everyone for your patience. Because of the difficulty I’m having right now accessing this site, if you want to leave comments you may want to just email me instead, rubenschade\\\at///gmail[[[dot]]]com, with the slashes and braces removed.

What a great thing to be dealing with over my preciously short Christmas holiday break. Though I guess had this happened during an exam period it would have been much more disastrous to deal with. Bummer though.

This is a shorter message because I don’t have much time here. It seems the reason why I haven’t been able to access my blog and Servage.net over the last few days here at home hasn’t been because my site is offline or down, but it seems that my webhost (and all the sites they host) is being blocked for some Singapore Starhub internet customers.

I am accessing my site now through a proxy. Google Reader seems unaffected.

This is extremely serious. I have long suspected Servage has been hosting some less than reputable sites, and with the latest code injection attacks which have been happening on my blog since Sunday on my site and on dozens of other Servage customer’s sites, I suspect Starhub have taken action against them.

I will be moving all my Rubenerd Shows which collectively account for around 92% of my bandwidth onto Ourmedia, and I’ll be moving my remaining sites over to Segpub (FreeBSD webhost in Australia with dedicated IP addresses, SFTP and SSH) once and for all. Perhaps this is the final wakeup call I needed to get my arse into gear and make the transition!

Servage were ultra affordable back when I thought the internet was a nice toy, but they’re lack of adequate checks on what they host and these security lapses have made me lose what little shred of confidence I had in them. I don’t approve of Starhub’s move to block all sites hosted by them, but I can at least see their reasoning, and can somewhat understand.

Stay tuned for further developments. This will no doubt be taking me this next week to do. What are you doing for your holidays?

Today it’s official, I’m moving over all my internet paraphernalia to Segment Publishing, a web hosting company in my birth city of Sydney in Australia!

Unlike every other web host I’ve done business with in the past, Segpub give you full SSH access to your home account, secure FTP, they give you your own unique IP address, their logo is a kawaii face… how could I refuse? But probably the two most striking features that drew me to them was the fact they run FreeBSD which just thrills my socks off, and… they’re not Servage. That last point in particular was very important.

Servage… didn’t

If you’re one to revel in Schadenfreude you would have loved reading my woes with my current web host over this last year, especially my latest experience with my MySQL tables being down for a whopping 4 days!

I figured that disaster plus the 2 cumulative days in total from the rest of the year (a conservative estimate, I’m sure it was more) puts the total uptime for 2007 for the Rubenerd Show and Rubenerd Blog to 98.63%, a far cry from their stated 99.98%. That said in either case I wouldn’t have minded so much had they either given me some form of warning or maybe even a discount for the times they weren’t able to provide service for the reason of the month.

Their "intermittently reliable" physical service is a shame because their technical support system is excellent. Support tickets I submitted never took more than a day to answer, and they always seemed happy to elaborate and explain points further when I replied asking for clarification.

Ironically the day I registered with Segpub on the 07th, Servage upgraded the design of their site and added new features. Go figure.

The move is on!

So by the end of this week this whole mess of a site will be lifted up and moved over to Segpub. I’m taking the opportunity to clean out my public_html folder while I’m at it. There are so many orphaned files and old Perl scripts from previous projects that are all just begging to be spring cleaned.