It’s Been a While…

So it’s finally time for an update!

My entire summer consisted of cleaning up the mess left behind by the flood (album 1 and album 2). This is not exactly what I planned on doing, lol. Of course I and other Tennesseans weren’t counting on record rainfall and the Corps of Engineers releasing millions (or would it be billions?) of gallons of water from the upstream dams AFTER said rainfall. Of course that resulted in the water reaching within inches of getting into the floor, but thankfully it stopped short. We’re much better off than the folks down the street who got it three feet up their walls and all the others that got it far worse. Most everything has been put back together now.

I’ve been back at Lipscomb since the 22nd. Speaking of Lipscomb, here’s my Fall 2010 schedule…calendar_2010-09-12_2010-09-19 That’s what a typical week looks like. Note that I don’t do nightwatch every other Wednesday. The classes this semester have more to do with my major so they should prove to be much more enjoyable. Oh, and the Internet here at Lipscomb is finally fixed.

Aquarius Storage Review

It all started back in October. After much research on Web Hosting Talk, I signed up for the A1 reseller plan (do note that the plan specs have changed vastly since then), and they placed me on stinger.aquariusstorage.com. It was smooth at first and support responded quickly to my request for custom nameservers. I felt that my months of research had paid off and that I had made a good choice.

However after about a week, the server repeatedly became inaccessible due to apparent DOS attacks. After looking at the specs in WHM, it is apparent that they have placed me on a VPS which is absurdly underpowered. I ignore this for now figuring that they will be honest enough to say “hey, we made a mistake…this server doesn’t meet our standards and we would like to offer you the opportunity to move to a better one” or “we increased the power on our stinger vps so there shouldn’t be any more problems” but this never happens.

In November, LiteSpeed stopped working and Apache was put back on the server. Ryan Chaffin (the owner) responded within ten minutes (mind you this was at 2am) and had the problem resolved within twenty minutes. Apparently this was never worked out since LiteSpeed never reappeared and subsequently disappeared from the product information page. At the middle of the month, the load of the server started regularly spiking to 300 and it was inaccessible even more often. A high priority ticket ended up taking six hours to get a response this time. This issue continues reoccurring and the service becomes virtually unusable.

On December 1, they bill me the incorrect amount. That was fixed within minutes.

On December 31, I request to be moved to a different server since stinger had become unusable at this point. I’m surprised to actually get a response on New Year’s Eve. I begin thinking that maybe there is hope that this company may actually be decent.

Per your request, due to stinger slowdowns, we will be moving hostifym to our new server fleet around 3AM EST.

We will keep you updated.

We will get your account move to our new fleet during the morning hours, and everything should be back to normal in the AM. We will provide you with new IPs for your name servers during the night.

3am comes and goes and nothing. Finally, at 9am I receive the new IPs and note that I have been transferred to viper.aquariusstorage.com. Of course I had gone to sleep at 8am since I had given up on them keeping their promise. By the time I awoke, the accounts on stinger had been suspended so my sites experienced even more downtime.

Viper was much better. The server was fast and responsive. The server was also an actual server with decent hardware specs.

Fast-forward to February, and things start to degrade on Viper. MySQL begins to fail intermittently. On February 15 MySQL and Fantastico (among other things) stop working. A quick look at the partitions quickly explains why… /var is full… Why is /var full? Because whoever partitioned the server didn’t do such a hot job at choosing the size of partitions (who in their right mind leaves /var at 1gb???). An hour later, I get a response from Aaron (note that up until this point, all responses were received from Ryan):

We resolved this a while ago. We apologize for the inconveniences.

Sure, if you call resolving it killing Fantastico and Softalicious. Services were still randomly dying and it was still virtually unusable.

On February 18, I requested cancellation since it was clear there were going to be serious issues on any server I was placed on (especially since master reselling had just been introduced and the plan specs/prices changed to what I would consider “unsustainable”).

Now offering master reseller on reseller plan a2 and higher. Order today! http://www.aquariusstorage.com/reseller-web-hosting.php
10:45 PM Feb 17th via web

Throughout the rest of the billing period, everything continued to worsen and the server became unusable.

I’ve checked with some people that still have an account on Viper and the entire thing has imploded. Oh, and apparently there are STILL people on Stinger. It is disturbing that they have not yet addressed the problems with their servers and very sad that the potential of having a wonderful company has been washed down the drain. It seems that it was a mistake for me to place my confidence in this company.

If you are unfortunate enough to still be with Aquarius Storage, I would advise taking backups and getting out of there ASAP.

Fortunately for me, I got a great deal on a FutureHosting VPS back in December. I moved everything to it back in February and haven’t looked back. I get 100% uptime AND more for my money! So far, FutureHosting has provided the dream experience (let’s hope they don’t do something stupid).

Shoutcast Automatic Start Script for CentOS

I found this script and modified it a bit so it starts all three of my Shoutcast servers automatically when/if the server ever restarts. That part works great. However, there’s something I would like to change…I want to be able to manage each server individually. I’m not really sure what to do to accomplish this. At this point it’s not too big of a deal, so I’m not going to worry about it.

I want to be able to do “service shoutcast restart” and somehow be able to choose which one to restart (or restart all of them if no specific server is specified). Restarting them all isn’t acceptable when I’m only making configuration changes to one (kicking all users=bad). There is the method of hunting down the process id and killing it and then typing in the command to start it again, but that’s getting old rather fast.

I’d appreciate any suggestions.

#!/bin/sh
#
# chkconfig: 345 99 01
#
# description: shoutcast server startup script
#
# Init script for SHOUTcast
# by caraoge, modified to work correctly by Thomas R Bailey, modified further for
# use with three servers by Nathan Skelton
#
# Last edited Jan 13 2009

# The init commands
case "$1" in
start)
echo "Starting SHOUTcast server..."
$DAEMON $CONFIG > /dev/null 2>&1 &
$DAEMON $CONFIG2 > /dev/null 2>&1 &
$DAEMON $CONFIG3 > /dev/null 2>&1 &
;;
stop)
echo "Stopping SHOUTcast server..."
kill -9 `ps -C sc_serv -o pid --no-headers`
;;
restart)
echo "Stopping SHOUTcast server..."
kill -9 `ps -C sc_serv -o pid --no-headers`
echo "Starting SHOUTcast server..."
$DAEMON $CONFIG > /dev/null 2>&1 &
$DAEMON $CONFIG2 > /dev/null 2>&1 &
$DAEMON $CONFIG3 > /dev/null 2>&1 &
;;
*)
echo "usage: /etc/init.d/shoutcast"
echo "$0 {start | stop | restart}"
exit 1
;;
esac

And for those interested in this, here are the steps to set this up on CentOS (by memory, so please correct me if I’m wrong):

1. Navigate to the init.d directory
cd /etc/init.d

2. Create a new file named shoutcast by opening up the nano text editor
nano shoutcast

3. Paste in above code (right click if you’re using putty) and save by pressing CTRL + X and then Y.

4. Give the new file the correct permissions.
chmod 0755 /etc/init.d/shoutcast

5. Navigate to the rc.d directory
cd /etc/rc.d/rc5.d

6. Create a sym-link to the shoutcast file we created in init.d
ln -s ../init.d/shoutcast S99shoutcast

7. Register the script with the system.
chkconfig --add shoutcast

8. Enable the service to start automatically
chkconfig shoutcast on

9. Ensure that your servers start as planned.
/etc/init.d/shoutcast start

10. You may wish to reboot the system to ensure that they start up properly as well.

Of course you would remove “$DAEMON $CONFIG2 > /dev/null 2>&1 &,” “$DAEMON $CONFIG3 > /dev/null 2>&1 &,” etc, unless you are running more than one server (or add some with higher numbers if you have more servers). Setting $DAEMON and $CONFIG ($CONFIG, $CONFIG2, $CONFIG3 should each be unique) to wherever you placed Shoutcast is also necessary. I’m assuming you have enough Linux knowledge to accomplish this. If not, feel free to ask in the comments and I’ll try to help you the best I can.

Christians Fail

Christians Failing on Facebook

Honestly, I don’t want to be friends with people that think and act in this way, so I’m kind of happy that Jon and Denise decided to de-friend me. How can one that claims to be a Christian be opposed to equal rights for everyone and an organization that helps maintain said rights? I think this blog post really sums up what I’m thinking. “The fact is, Christians only want tolerance for themselves, and that isn’t tolerance. That’s CONTROL. And that’s bullshit.”

Updated Schedule

Since I don’t feel like writing anything, this is what you get: Schedule for Spring 2010