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The Banter Page
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If you're wanting to get something off your chest, make general comments about the server, or post lonely hearts ads, then this is the place for you.
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I thought he seemed a bit quiet. Just my luck :o(
HELLO MORNIVERSE! I'M NIGHTS BLESSED!
AND I'VE SCARED EVERYONE OFF, IT SEEMS! CHORTLE CHORTLE!
not me
Hello nights. It takes a bit more than emboldened shouting to scare me off! How are you? I've got a post holiday cold. Grump.
Where is everyone today? Not very chatty? Cheer up. Its almost the weekend!
Nothing at all
Hello all. It's a long time since I've been in here. Very smart.
Mouth full
Sorry Lib - I was enjoying a bacon sandwich...
[UK] I'd have thought you'd have a bit of a sore head!
[Lib] Well, fortunately it hadn't been cooked too fiercely. But getting the grease out of my hair is going to be a bind...
It doesn't matter how sh*tty the week has been , Friday always lifts the mood, doesn't it? Anyone know of any nice jobs going for someone bossy, intelligent and good at news writing? CV available on request. And The Dutch Miller is coming over again next weekend, :o)
Oh, and a lovely bit of spamming, which is a natural glow-worm or something: "ON fenugreek do maladroit.."
[pen] I think the next line is "beware the Jabberwock, my son!"
Morniverse seems slow today, or am I just toooooooo bored at work?
(UK) Not just today, either. The place seems infected with a kind of ennui. It'll pass, no doubt.
[Rosie] Well, I was hoping that someone might guess my AVMA before I left the office today, as I may well not be back online until Monday morning.
It's always very slow on Fridays. In fact I recall it being even less busy last Friday. Not that I check in here obsessively the whole time, of course.
Saturday was a non-starter.
There was an article in the paper a day or two ago about how boring and irksome working life has become even for people in well-paid professional jobs, what with vast amounts of form-filling and other pointless paperwork, meetings, meetings about meetings etc, etc. The way this place livens up during working hours shows how true that is.
working time directive
The local authority I (used to) work for transferred our dept to Capita at the begining of Feb. I have had to drastically cut back to a minimum amount of browsing during work time. Before there was a woolly policy about internet use. However, my new employer begins their internet use and email policy with the phrase "You have no right to privacy"
I'm glad that my Brian Blessed impression didn't freak EVERYONE out. I'm well, thanks. Final semester. Argh. And I've been getting some lovely poetry in my spam too. But even better is the amount of recipes I get for Spam, being a GMail user.
Crapita
(Inkspot) In that case don't do any more work than you absolutely have to. I hope at least you've retained your salary level.
MCIOS went down at 2.54 am today.
For about 5 minutes. You'd think a guy could take a server down for maintenance at 3 am in the user base's time zone.
FWIW, the timestamps on old moves from the first half of 1998 are now correct.
(Dan) Thanks for your efforts, as ever. Like Michael Howard, I am a creature of the night.
Harrumph
No problem, I didn't mean it the way it probably sounded. Anyway I've just noticed that this so-called asiago cheese I've been munching on was made in Wisconsin. Now a bit of research shows that asiago is Denominazione di Origine Protetta, so they shouldn't be calling it that and I'd be surprised if they could even sell it in the EU under that name. Still, it's a good cheese, but now I have to go and find the real thing so I know the difference.
BTW, I'm off to New Mexico for a week, so this may be the last you hear from me till next Monday. The server will almost surely fall over in about 2-3 hours time. Expect reboots only during office hours in New Zealand. ttfn.
Read on its own, that last message really really looks like rab's part of some international espionage.
[Tuj] What? You mean you're not... one of us?
SHHH!
It is very dark for the time of year.
Incidentally, I'm staying in room 404 which I'm having difficulty locating, for some reason.
[rab] Have you tried leaving the hotel and then coming back in again?
[rab] or trying an alternative door?
[Rab] Clear out all your cash, I guess in the hotel bar...
8 words game
I tried to translate Nights' post with an online translat-y-thing and it came up with "Ave druse! I ÷óñòâóþ as i no clever"
...although ÷óñòâóþ was actually an untranslated russian word, not nonsense.
That's actually pretty close to the mark. It reads "Hello friends! I rather think I'm not clever."
As indeed I appear not to be. Plans for the weekend, anyone?
I'm going to a masquerade ball! Very exciting. What are you up to?
Doing a workshop with actors, for which the freshly-written script still hasn't arrived from the States as yet! Also, writing a sample song from Lolita! - the musical as a college exercise.
Weekend plans
Working. What else? Not getting enough done, though. :-(
doing absolutely nothing
.. well - nothing worth mentioning. It's kinda nice. :-)
housework until this evening, then I shall be waiting for a certain Dutch Windy Miller to step off the plane :o)
My weekend is taken up with work - beer festival time again, this time only 16 beers, but plent y flive music keeping us entertained. Dunnno how I'm going to get up for 6am delivery tomorrow morning, but i'll cross that bridge later. For now,I need to write a quiz by 9pm.
I spent most of the weekend travelling. Have no idea what timezone I'm in again. However I'm not really complaining. Did I tell you about the place they put us up?
[rab] New elopement menu?
I spent the weekend in the library, emerging only on Saturday night to get extremely drunk extremely quickly. It's coursework season in sunny Bath, and we are all working hard to meet arbitrary deadlines, smoking for all we're worth and drinking ourselves into the ground every Saturday night in a vain attempt to flee the horrific situation we find ourselves in once again. Also, why does everyone else in this library, all five floors of it, seem to be a complete idiot? Just asking. Is Library Rage something admissible in court?

I think I'm a bit depressed.
[IS,P!] Yes, that sounds like just the thing that Niall would think of.
Pardon me, unplanned outage at mcios. I called the data center about another issue and they asked me if it was okay to physically move the server, and I told them to go ahead. It will, I hope, be out for less than an hour.
(Dan) It was alright at midnight (GMT). Thanks again.
[Rosie] Who's GMT?
I am.
[GMT] Do you have the time?
As it happens, I may well have ..
Leaning
Well, I've got the inclination...
[GMT] Not for much longer!
It's just struck me that as a Mornington Crescent server, we have no game of MC running. Anyone interested? I'd like to give the new 2007 ruleset a go as it's shortly to be published...
2007beta
[nights] Blimey, that's a bit radical, innit? MC on an MC website? Not sure I can cope. Besides, I've barely got used to HP2000. Do they think they've sorted the new version's DRM issues now, eh?
[SM] Last I heard, most of the national MC bodies had ratified it, with the exceptions of Monaco and East Cornwall. And I think the DRM nightmare will be with us for a while - last I heard, they were trying to make sure you only striled three times, then all your podumes would be deleted without warning. Perhaps better to wait a bit, hm?
Three striles and you're out
All your podume are belong to us.
shiny new things
I'd play the 2007 ruleset. Though my copy hasn't arrived from Amazon so I may make some bad moves (but I'm no stranger to that to be honest!).
Mornington Crescent on the front cover of The Times today (somewhat gratuitously).
Aigh!!
Where is MCiOS?? Or rather, where are all the games? The archive is also empty. I tried to create a new game and got Giant Ant Error. Is it time to panic??
It was there before 9.00AM this morning then it suddenly disappeared in the middle of my move! I guess its been hacked again.
MCiOS
Bloody hell! If anyone's got Dan's e-mail, give him a shout, quick!
MCiOS
It has rather shrunk.. I hope the games haven't been lost!
I've sent Dan a message about it already. 9:30 am in London is 2:30 am in Portland though, so I don't suppose he's up and about.
Yes, the middle of the night problem. We'll just have to wait. Hope it's ok...
MC in The Times
[Tuj] Did you guess the ruleset?
[Kim] No, do tell ;)
Ah. Very odd. I'll take a look.
Well done, Dan - no idea what you did, but you fixed it! :-)
It may be a serious problem. Stay tuned.
It's not behaving very well. I've asked the crew at the facility to cycle the power. I have last night's nightly backup here -- it's automatically fetched on a schedule, so nothing will be lost. But as I say, there may be a hardware problem so things might be iffy for a while.
Okay, it's going to be out of service for a while, as in multiple days, I think. I'm going to need to reconfigure my mail to point somewhere else, too. Very annoying.
(thank you, rab, for allowing me to use your server as a bulletin board.)
[Dan] Nae worries. As you know, I've hardware problems of my own.
BTW if anyone wants to email me -- though I'll be pointing my usual email at another server within a day or so -- there's always my last name at gmail dot com. Normally I don't check it very often but I'm using it now.
Get Well Soon MCiOS!
MCiOS thanks you. It would only take a moment to restart it at my home server and point the domain name at it (though it'd be a day or so before that change propagated through the intarweb), but the site gets a LOT of hits, including various kinds of attacks, and it would be a bad idea to inflict that on my home router for several reasons. Anyway, I'm going to have the machine professionally serviced, which will probably bring us into next week. This feels weird. It hasn't been down for more than a few hours since I launched it. I may give up on this colocation lark and go back to a virtual server of some kind; there are better and easier options for rapid failover when you do it that way.
[Dan] Indeed, there can't have been many days since last century when I didn't at least check in and look around at MCiOS. Still, I'm viewing it as a test of character!
Yeah, I still find myself typing "p" into the address bar as a shortcut to MCiOS. ("d" goes to Orange, "r" goes to here. Obvious reasons. But I'm so used to those shortcuts, if I use another computer it knocks me sideways for a minute.)
[Darren] Same with me! Except I use "pa", "du" and "ra".
shortcuts
How do you do that then? I just got 'em in me favourites.
shortcuts
Sounds like do-re-mi.
Do-re-mi
Nono, do is domaintools.com, re is resource-zone.com and mi is usually nothing, but right now it's mikael.jansson.be/rydis.html.
That's got to be an application for Web 3.0. Opening a webpage by whistling a merry tune.
Sign
Another reboot required this morning. I shall try and move to a different host this week.
I thought I couldn't get in last night.
The Tube
For those who are able to access it - tonight [Sunday] sees a series of programmes on BBC TV 4 beginning at 2100, which are all related to the London Underground. Includes the 'Design Classics' prog about the LU map.
[rab] With server farms you tend to get what you pay for -- decent reliable dedicated servers run at least a hundred a month in dollars and not very much less in pounds. If you want to pay a lot less than that and want top quality hardware and good service, you might consider a Xen host instead. The decent providers use very good hardware and they maintain it with a lot of care because if it goes down, more customers are affected than just you. And you can't tell the difference in terms of availability and performance; if anything it'll be much better than a cheap colo because most of the time the (often very muscular) CPU is way underutilized. You never get less than the share you're paying for and more often than not you get much more when you need it. And it's spectacularly easy to fail over to another machine -- a good provider will be able to switch you to new hardware in a matter of minutes if smoke starts pouring out of the box you're on. Frankly I'm seriously considering going back to that my self, mainly for that last reason.
Some links
xensource's list and hostingfu's. Both list UK providers, though you have to scroll down to find them in the latter.
Oh, for three years I ran mcios and several other sites, both http and https, an SMTP server, a jabber server with several transports, mysql, pop3 and imap, the homebrew chat server of course and a variety of other services that came and went over the years ... all in 64MB instance of User Mode Linux; a poor man's Xen. It was a little swappy but completely responsive and reliable. It was on good hardware though. A 256M Xen host would be an Aston Martin by comparison.
[Dan] Thanks for that - I was considering a 128MB Xen Vps but was slightly concerned it might not be up to the job of serving this site, which gets something like 5k hits a day.
[rab] How about hosting in Edinburgh? Though you'd probably want to traceroute them to find out if it's really close to you in terms of network hops; I'm three miles but 12 hops and 85ms from mine because of a lack of local peering between carriers, but your situation is likely to be different. Very low latency could be handy for maintenance; you could just mount drives remotely.
(Though it's not clear from their site that they offer Xen in their Embra facility, you'd have to phone to find out. And I'm not vouching for them as a provider -- I know nothing about them.)
[Dan] That company was on my shortlist of two. Haven't got round to emailing them yet, but I'll ask if they host Xen in (or, if my hunch as to the actual location is correct, near) Edinburgh.
128 should be fine. I run an identical setup at home on 128MB Xen server, and by far the biggest memory hog is mysql. Here's the memory footprint, 12 days since the last reboot:

dan@flint:~$ free total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 131252 110836 20416 0 4632 38480
-/+ buffers/cache: 67724 63528
Swap: 131064 2228 128836

Those are pretty healthy numbers -- just enough swapping to indicate that it doesn't have more memory than it needs, without being significant.

Yikes, looks like you're discarding newlines. Okay, look in the chat game on mcios.
Whoops, had forgotten there would be instances where white-space would be significant. Hmm, looks like I need a PRE-tag handler.
But thanks for that info - as you (probably) know this thing hangs off a mysql database and although I've tried to minimise the number of queries needed to display any particular page, when it comes down to it you've still got to through a few Mb of tables around.
s/through/throw/. Another thing I want to add is a "whoops" feature that lets you correct typos in your previous move.
Typos
The Banter Page (this page) is wider than the others at the moment, so I have to scroll right to get to the 'up' and 'next' options.
Although it might revert when Dan's post has disappeared offscreen.
Ah, it doesn't do that on Firefox.
I wouldn't object if you modified or replaced it.
BTW, the web host for xtrahost.net appears to be located in the Scotland facility, if node names are anything to go by. I'd be tempted to relocate there myself and damn the exchange rate, but unfortunately I get 160ms ping times to it from my colo and 200ms from my home. That's fine for web stuff but I'd be unhappy with shell access and any other activity involving lots of small round trips.
Not to beat it to death but according to their FAQ the Xen hosting in Scolocate, which according to Google maps is within a reasonable definition of Edinburgh; perhaps 5 miles from the big rock with the funny house on top.
I'll get onto it - work's been a bit crazy today, but this machine just dropped off the internet completely for a bit - was a bit worried cos I'd be poking around with some of the security settings earlier and thought it had been a hack. Ho hum, we all still seem to be here, and the mysql tables are all still up and running.
Geil!
The Gyle, eh? Who'da thought it. A bit closer than Bush, which was guess #1. Definitely worth looking into!
Right
A VPS has been ordered, although I managed to lock myself out of my own online banking service in the process... Anyway, it should be with us over the next few days, so I hope to be able to migrate in the next week or so. Which is just as well, cos this machine needed another reboot last night. And my internet at home has stopped working, which is the next thing to try and sort out.
It's arrived... installing stuff as we speak, but since my internet at home seems to be fubar it'll probably take longer to get sorted than it would normally.
rab's computer woes
VPS? I'm trying to follow this talk of hosting and hardware because I would like to understand how it all goes together, but it's mostly greek to me unfortunately. I read it that the computer that this site is kept on is playing up and so a new one is needed. If you've a mind to explain, rab, I'd love to know whether you own the faulty computer or lease space on someone else's? Please excuse any howlers caused by my ignorance of the technology behind the web.
Also, please excuse howlers caused by my inability to proof read my own punctuation. Sorry.
Tis ok. This should probably all be in 'Let me check my notes' but it seems appropriate here as this will be the last post before shutting down to move elsewhere.

The hosting of this site has a long and chequered history, mostly due to my trying to do it as cheaply as possible. It started off in a user account on a shared linux machine, rented out at 30quid a year. It got hacked into about three times, and the whole thing demolished, which led to downtime and me having to spend a lot of time reconstructing from various "back-ups", including (on one memorable occasion) the Google cache. After the third of these incidents, Nik kindly stepped in and offered - free of charge - disk space and bandwidth on a linux box sitting in his front room and running on his DSL connection, and there things ran happily for a while. But it was not to be forever, and (for various reasons) a new home was needed.

At this time, my good friend Andy informed me he had bought a dedicated server - cheap because it was on old hardware. At the time we thought that old would just mean slow, but the fact that it needs rebooting twice a week indicates that old means crap. We've been trying to get it sorted out, but Andy's been migrating to VPSes, and I was looking into it when Dan gave me the filip I needed to sort it out once and for all.

And with that, I shall begin the process of moving this to there. It should be working in an hour or so - but you may not see it for a couple of days because the DNS will have to propagate. I also won't be on hand over the weekend to sort out any problems because there's a fault on my broadband line and BT are coming round on Monday to look at (and hopefully fix) it.

And here we are...
Who knows if this works or not.
Are we there yet?
good luck - and thanks with all efforts, rab. I shall be migrating to south Holland this weekend, to clean the windows of a windmill and to spend some time with my lovely Dutchman, so I\\\'ll be back on Monday too :o)
Ah, the slassher\'s back
Bani'shed?
Yay! I always forget about that little gotcha. And penelope - congratulations on being the first to see the new place - some people might not get in for a couple of days.
[rab] Thanks, as ever.
[pen] This Dutchman is starting to sound serious...
Heard the one about the windmill?
[Cdm] Yes, he is. Do you know any rib-cracking windmill-based jokes that might make him smile a bit more?
Why to windmills make the best shops? Because they've always got a sail on.
[pen] I hope you get a bunch of flours.
(pen) Don't know any windmill jokes but you could try call him clever clogs. Is he called Wim? One scours the place for names like that. ATB, BTW.
Marvellous
This place is still up and running.
rab the genius
A most wonderful migration, one can hardly see the join. Well done, rab!
[Darren, Projoy] Good efforts.
[Rosie] Nope, he's called Jan - equally typical. I think 'Clever Clogs' is a mainly British expression, innit? He actually brought me klompen the first time he visited. They're unfortunately too big, and might go on ebay next week!;o)
[rab] Thanks for a quick flit. I can see the new place from this part of .ac.uk now.
[rab] Hadn't even noticed the change! Guess that's good praise.
Wow. It's fewer network hops from my house to here than it is to my server. A lot fewer. Farther in terms of latency though, geography won't be completely ignored. And the fact that the route from my house to my server has to go through Los Angeles and San Francisco for what I'm sure are not very good reasons has a lot to do with it. [rab] Out of curiosity, what sort of ping times are you getting?
(pen) I suspect "clever clogs" is simply light-hearted British alliteration but the Dutch are so good at English he might even geddit. (rab) I'm with Tuj, q.v.
I'm finding the site a lot more responsive now.
[Projoy] There was a slow period this morning but that doesn't seem to have happened again since - suspect someone else on the machine was using the CPU time.

[Dan] Ping time from JANET is about 24ms, not sure if that's good or bad. It's a direct hop from JANET to the xtrahost network, but this seems to take place in London rather than Edinburgh... so there you go.

[rab] pssht. 24ms is less than the distance to my DSLAM from my router. (Which I really, really don't understand.) Good enough for pretty much anything. Though I imagine in the UK low latency is probably fairly normal.
[Dan] I am quoting the right figure: "64 bytes from rab.org.uk: icmp_seq=0 ttl=54 time=24.1ms"? www.google.com comes in at about 21.6ms, and www.bbc.co.uk at 11.0ms by the same measure.
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