Work In Progress

I just completed moving the abercrombie-family.org hosted websites from RCTHOST.COM to HOSTMONSTER.COM.

I started hosting at RCTHOST back in 2002, when they were just starting up, and they gave me a pretty good deal as an early customer (unlimited disk and bandwidth for $30 p.a., subject to reasonable restrictions). Initially I had some problems getting CGI to run, but had positive interactions with their live support people and was pretty happy.

Over the years though, I’ve found their servers unreliable and slow, and their support non-existent.

• I’ve seen server outages as often as monthly
• The administrative pages and ftp server seem to be nice’d down to a level that they’re unusable. Recently the ftp server can’t maintain a connection long enough for “mirror” to push the deltas to abercrombie-family.org from my local system, so I have nearly a full year of pending family photos to upload.
• Support emails go into a black hole. There is no support forums or wiki showing any activity.
• The straw on the camel’s back was to do with email: I configure DNS with RCTHOST’s server as the MX destination for all abercrombie-family.org email. That server then forwards mail for various recipients to better places for reading mail. Recently however, OMEGA.RCTHOST.COM got onto a mail blacklist, so the various well behaved places that we want to read our email at were refusing to accept forward from RCTHOST.  We can’t live with unreliable email!

So I read some reviews and went shopping, and ended up with HOSTMONSTER’s cheapo plan, $5 per month (twice as expensive).  Everything pretty much the same except for a few details, some good, some bad.

• Admin pages and FTP server respond very well
• No down time yet
• ssh access to my server! This is really good news. Not that I particularly need shell access, but I love being able to mirror my local copy of the website using rsync. If I try to update the mirror with no deltas outstanding, rsync takes 6s to do nothing, instead of about 90s using ftp mirror.
• Excellent customer support responsiveness.  I’ve sent three email requests and had resolutions to all of them within half an hour.
• Now the bad stuff:
  • No “catch-all” email address for a domain.  Typically you can direct all otherwise unrouted email for a domain to a single mailbox. Hostmonster doesn’t do this, so mail to joe.random@abercrombie-family.org would be dropped. I prefer to catch all mail somewhere. Some day I’ll document my creative solution.
  • Can’t forward email to an address containing a “+” symbol. This doesn’t sound like a big deal, but my preferred email host, fastmail.fm, lets me send mail to pabercrombie+folder@fastmail.fm to have the mail automatically put into a folder. Turns out there is a workaround at the fastmail end, so this was not a big deal either.
  • That’s all.  So far

The migration was easy.

• I first established the account with hostmonster.
• Then I used the administrative pages at RCTHOST.COM to create a full backup of my filespace there (a gzipped tar file of all my files was dumped in my ~ directory, and I ftp’d it back home).
• I also created a backup of my mysql databases (this bl0g is backed by a mysql database. Nothing else of interest). The backup is a sql file, again dumped into my ~ directory, again I ftp’d it home.
• Now I modified my DNS records (hosted at MYDOMAIN.COM) to point to NS1.HOSTMONSTER.COM and NS2.HOSTMONSTER.COM as nameservers.  That means that as that percolates out into DNS, clients will start being pointed to the hostmonster servers for www.abercrombie-family.org instead of the rcthost servers
• Then I remirrored my local copy of the web pages up to hostmonster, and was mostly ready to roll
• Getting the mysql stuff configured right took a while longer

All in all, I’m pleased with the result and surprised it went so smoothly.

Hope these notes help anybody else trying anything similar.

One of the great things about modern Linuxes is that you get security updates, and other application updates, pushed to you via your update manager : all you have to do is accept the changes and sit back and watch the install. It’s just like Windows Update but without the spyware.

But of course every piece of silver has a cloudy lining. If you don’t choose when, and what, to update (and with this volume of updates, you don’t have time to research and choose), then you have lost control of the software running on your box (and so, really you’ve lost control of your box).

A recent automatic update to Gnome Terminal added the keyboard accelerator CTRL-A to have the function “New Terminal Window”. Who thought of this one I wonder? Presumably not somebody that used CTRL-A regularly – so if you use bash, or screen, your screwed. Of course you can turn off the accelerator (Edit->Keyboard Shortcuts…), but as I get older I find the arguments against running in a highly customized environment grow stronger, and so it takes about 100 instances of new terminal windows being created on my screen when I’m trying to go back to the start of the line in the shell, before I’m ready to go and make the necessary customization.

Ok. I’ve done it now. I’ll shut up.

I don’t know why it should be; when I first boot up BANANA, the debian box, and try to access a windows share via autofs, I get completely incorrect results.

phil@banana:~$ ls /smb/turnip/RADIO4/bin
APPIQ  DVDISO  ITUNES-XML    PHOTO  RADIO4      SharedDocs
DATA   ITUNES  phil-Desktop  print  RADIO4-MP3  temp

But If I restart the automount service, things sometimes go fine thereafter.

I can see a session with strace in my future, unless google gets me there first.

I want to set up network shares so that any windows machine on the home net can get to them via \\banana\vol1 etc. No authentication or shared secret worries – let the host doing the sharing decide if it can permit write access or not. This is inside my firewall, and only has to be as secure as anything else inside my house.

The way to get this to happen in Samba is to make sure you have these lines in smb.conf

security = share
guest account = nobody

Then set the shares up through the gui or through smb.conf, and ensure that the local nobody user has appropriate access to the files or directories.

Mail up and running, now I want my local network to work well. I’d like to be able to share volumes from the linux system (BANANA) with windows clients, and I’d like to be able to do the reverse without too much agony.

First, let’s figure out how to access windows file shares on other systems. I’d like to have /smb/turnip/TEMP be a way to access transparently the \\TURNIP\TEMP share.

I know how to do this. First install winbind and edit /etc/nsswitch.conf to append wins to the hosts search list. Then install autofs, and edit /etc/auto.master to uncomment the “smb auto.smb” line.

After restarting the autofs daemon, here’s what I get:

phil@banana:~$ ls /smb/turnip/temp
APPIQ  DVD     ITUNES      phil-Desktop  print   RADIO4-MP3  temp
DATA   DVDISO  ITUNES-XML  PHOTO         RADIO4  SharedDocs

That’s not quite right – it’s listing all the services but not the content of the share. Here’s what /var/log/messages says:

Jul  5 16:40:09 banana automount[10285]: >> mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on //turnip/temp,
Jul  5 16:40:09 banana automount[10285]: >>        missing codepage or other error
Jul  5 16:40:09 banana automount[10285]: >>        In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
Jul  5 16:40:09 banana automount[10285]: >>        dmesg | tail  or so
Jul  5 16:40:09 banana automount[10285]: mount(generic): failed to mount //turnip/temp (type smbfs) on /smb/turnip/temp

It turns out this is Debian’s helpful way of telling you you don’t have the smbfs package installed. Soon fixed.

phil@banana:~$ ls /smb/turnip/temp
1300.ram            2549.mp3  772.mp3        FOR ENGLAND TRIP              ns.tiff               rtsp.pl~
2005-10-01-004.JPG  2550.mp3  941.mp3        idris 4th birthday share      nthapi_3-RC.dll       s_dougherty_ref1.doc

So far so good. Flawless install of Ubuntu 6.06 (desktop) from cd, (well, flawless the second time – first time hung creating the ext3 filesystem after 15%).

I have no idea what the root password on this system is. I can sudo anything I want, so why would I care (I think that’s the reasoning).

Firefox is up and running like a champion.

First job was to fetch and install Thunderbird and configure it to point to fastmail.fm. Thunderbird is going to be a better choice than Evolution because last time I checked (about 4 days ago) Evolution still couldn’t cope with the zillions of public folders that my work IMAP server publishes, whereas Thunderbird happily ignores them. Next job is to configure Thunderbird to point to mail.hp.com and confirm this assertion.

It’s time to try moving to a Linux desktop.
I have a spare x86 desktop, and I have a couple of reasons to want a Linux setup at home (a decent toolchain for the NSLU2, a build and debug system for mt-daapd, and the ability to script and automate the applications I run regularly). I don’t do much on the windows system, but what I do, I need to have working efficiently. Here are the activities I think I care about, (with the incumbent helper apps):

• Web browsing
• Email
• Occasional spreadsheets and documents (MS Excel and MS Word)
• Photo management
• Upload via USB
• Management and editing (Picasa)
• Publishing to www.abercrombie-family.org (Frontpage)
• Layout and printing (PowerPoint)
• Rotating AVI movies through 90 degrees (Virtual Dub)
• Audio tools
• download from the BBC (HiDownload, RealPlayer)
• upload to iPod (iTunes)
• rip from CD (iTunes)
• manage music, generate playlists compatible with mt-daapd (iTunes)
• record from tape (Audacity) and cut up into tracks (CD Wave)
• Share and Backup to/from NSLU2

Idris’s games can stay on the old windows system. Need to keep the old thing up for (at least) turbotax, google earth, printing key ring inserts, updating iPod firmware, making floppies for bios flashes.

I’ll be trying Ubuntu 6.06; I’ve had good experiences with Debian before (better than with RedHat), and I’ve read one or two favourable things recently about switching from OS X to Ubuntu (http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/03/1934251)

Let’s see how this goes