One of my service providers have forwarded me an update to the latest SEACOM outage:
According to the update, SEACOM has sent out notification that they are currently localising the fault from both Mumbai and Dar-es-Salaam (in Tanzania). (more…)
Archive for the ‘sysadmin’ Category
SEACOM down again – cable break in Kenya
2010
07.05
07.05
Afrihost, as well as a range of other resellers of SEACOM bandwidth, again had to post notifications today of network downtime:
We are experiencing an intermittent International ADSL connectivity problem. Our upstream service providers’ engineers are investigating the cause of the problem. We will post more details here shortly once we have more information.
Services such as Instant Messenger and websites hosted overseas(google,facebook) have been affected.
From my datacentres’ notification reports, I can say that this is related to a failure on the SEACOM link in Kenya; as Afrihost’s only redundancy would be their hosting infrastructure, which their proxy is running on, they’re pointing users to http://www.afrihost.co.za/proxy.pac as the proxy solution for now.
Data centres are using other redundancy links through London and DC on a very congested local network with now high latency… (more…)
Symbolic links in Windows
2010
06.28
06.28
Windows Vista and 7, if not before, allow symbolic links — mklink is your command-line friend!
Creates a symbolic link. (more...)
Firefox 3.6.6 Crash Protection – crashing?
2010
06.28
06.28
Is it just me or is the new version of Crash Protection which pushed itself via a new release of Firefox up to 3.6.6 marking every instance of Flash as crashed? On the one hand, this may be a little salute to the Flash – Apple situation (though I hardly think it likely).
Am I the only one who’s experiencing this? Hmmm…
Oh, yes – remember to make sure your add-ons are up-to-date…
Create a Tar file from Directory and all Subdirectories
2010
06.28
06.28
It’s a simple one-liner that one tends to forget (that is, one that I forget as I untar more than I manually tar). So creating a tar file from directory and all subdirectories is as simple as
tar -cvf file.tar directory (more…)
Secure SSH Tunneling – at no extra cost
2010
06.19
06.19
Assuming you have a Windows machine and you interact with Linux boxen at any stage, chances are high that you have used and interacted with PuTTY at one stage or another. That beautiful, less than 2 sec, 444K download of a tool (currently at version 0.60 beta) allows you to SSH, COM-direct, RSH, Telnet etc from the desktop. Both examples below relate to MySQL port tunneling.
SSH Tunnels using the Bash command line
Running on a proper machine (or even a Windows with Cygwin or a Mac Terminal) allows you to quickly tunnel a session to a remote server: (more…)
Upgrade and update WordPress without the FTP/FTPS options
2010
06.18
06.18
You may not have FTP or FTPS running on your server (either by choice or decision).
In order to manage that, there is a simple workaround you can implement. (more…)
#Twitter taking #WorldCup strain during matches like #FRA v #MEX
2010
06.17
06.17
http://status.twitter.com/ is reporting the High Error Rate on Twitter.com since yesterday already, and #Trends have been temporarily disabled since the 15th of June.
On Monday the 14th of June, #Twitter blamed the site availability issues on the failed enhancements to their #Timeline Cache. At that stage, it took them a good 5 hours to restore the site to full status, but there were ongoing hassles, dragging on into the next day – at that stage, Twitter #Places needed to be switched off.
June shows 5 hours of #downtime, with 98.64% availability of the site.
Under #WorldCup traffic, matches like #France vs #Mexico, #Uruguay vs #South Africa, and other #CapeTown or #SoccerSCity matches are causing a huge amount of traffic and tweets, specifically due to the #Twitter/Worldcup link… Trying to #pepper this post with #keywords about #uptime, #availability, #highavailability and #twitter overall.
How many hashes does it take? 
WordPress 3.0 is out!
2010
06.17
06.17
Just a quick note – remember to upgrade now! But you knew that already!
218 people helped fixing the 1217 bugs, with a new default theme called Twenty Ten and a whole lot more.
(more…)
[SOLVED] phpSysInfo – failed to open stream on Ubuntu 10.04?
2010
06.15
06.15
phpsysinfo eval : 2 Message : parse_ini_file(/usr/share/phpsysinfo/data/distros.ini): failed to open stream: No such file or directory File
There is a simple fix for this in version 3.0.5:
(more…)
[SOLVED] mysql-server5.1.5.141-3ubuntu12.1 hangs on upgrade
2010
06.15
06.15
There are a lot of words about the MySQL upgrade on Ubuntu 10.04 (64 bit specifically, perhaps the 32bit version too?) — it just hangs:
You get the hopeful message:
Preparing to replace mysql-server-5.1 5.1.41-3ubuntu12.1
but then nothing happens and everything just hangs. (more…)
Adobe Flash and Adobe PDF zero-day critical vulnerability in the wild.
2010
06.05
06.05
A critical vulnerability exists in Adobe Flash Player 10.0.45.2 and earlier versions for Windows, Macintosh, Linux and Solaris operating systems, and the authplay.dll component that ships with Adobe Reader and Acrobat 9.x for Windows, Macintosh and UNIX operating systems. This vulnerability (CVE-2010-1297) could cause a crash and potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system. There are reports that this vulnerability is being actively exploited in the wild against both Adobe Flash Player, and Adobe Reader and Acrobat. This advisory will be updated once a schedule has been determined for releasing a fix.
Adobe Flash Player 10.0.45.2, 9.0.262, and earlier 10.0.x and 9.0.x versions on Windows, Macintosh, Linux and Solaris are affected, as well as Adobe Reader and Acrobat 9.3.2 and earlier 9.x versions for Windows, Macintosh and UNIX. So it’s kinda big. What to do? (more…)
Symlinks (symbolic links) in Samba Ubuntu for Windows
2010
06.04
06.04
To enable symlinks in Samba for filesharing across platforms inWindows, modify
/etc/smb/samba.conf
and add in the [global] section:
follow symlinks = yes
unix extensions = no
There has been some discussion about
wide symlinks = yes
However, due to the attack vector on Samba servers from Windows allowing file traversion, back in February 2010, you may want to force-set wide symlinks to no– it works without that declaration and is set to no by default.
Samba cheat sheet – Ubuntu
2010
06.02
06.02
Samba. Whopping goodness. Here are a few notes that help in the setup – from user creation, to directory settings etc
This blog post contains a few lessons learnt and thus by extension a migration plan from a Windows file server to a Samba-based one running on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. I look at users, system vs smbpasswd user creation and linking (set that up in Webmin before you start, as well as for groups), share setups, general permissions and some very basic troubleshooting (as there weren’t many troubles, just headaches.) (more…)
Install Webmin on Ubuntu
2010
05.31
05.31
Just a quick note (as I keep forgetting, and a cut-and-paste solution is a quicker time to market) – but you knew that already. Installing Webmin is quite simple (download directly, or from the mirrors). Currently, 1.510-2 is the latest version – check on www.webmin.com for further details. As an aside, the book Webmin Kompakt – by Holger Reibold – is available for download!
So here’s a simple step-by-step: (more…)
Goodbye Facebook
2010
05.30
05.30
That’s it – I’m out – got to wait for the 14 days now before the account is deleted from Facebook.
As promised, I was asked whether I’m really sure that I want to delete my account – have to enter your password and the 2 CAPTCHAs before getting the confirmation:
Last step before account deletion?
Doesn’t quite end there: next, I get an email, Subject: “Account scheduled for deletion”, as below (just that WordPress handles the incorrect <br/> tags sent via mail correctly, corrects, and compensates):
Hi Sven,
We have received a request to permanently delete your account. Your account has been deactivated from the site and will be permanently deleted within 14 days. (more...)
Google services now hosting in South Africa and whois.co.za
2010
05.30
05.30
Google.co.za is doing it, Gmail is doing it — resolving to 196.23.168.147 – hosted by Internet Solutions, and reverse-IP’ing to za196-23-168-147.cache.googlevideo.com (which suggests the implemenation of local youtube caching (youtube.co.za is in the offing for some time now)) – full rundown here. Youtube.co.za — registered by MarkMonitor on behalf of Google – was last updated on 15 May 2010, so it’s not far away – well, at the moment, it’s just redirecting to http://www.youtube.com/?gl=ZA&hl=en-GB They weren’t that lucky with gmail.co.za though
While we’re on domain names – did you know that whois.co.za is no longer functional? You need to browse directly to http://co.za/whois.shtml – I’ll put a little something together for that…
Just kind of interesting
Completely removing and deleting your Facebook account
2010
05.26
05.26
Assuming you don’t have any link shares in place (Digg, OpenID, MySpace etc), the process should be quite simple:
Go direct:
http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=delete_account (you have to be logged in to use the link) and then don’t access the account for 21 days. Some say 14 days, but what’s the hurry? Some recommend no interaction with Facebook at all (pages, groups, public content) – this is related to cookie updates and FBCDN backtracks.
Once completed, that should move from “deactivated” to “deleted” status.
Is anything going to be really removed? Facebook alone know(s)…
More? See WikiHow and a variety of other sources using a Google Search (hmm…) or the Bing equivalent…
I’ve written about this before on blog.sven.co.za, though
Delete Facebook Account
2010
05.17
05.17
Only a few days to go before the end of my use of Facebook — 31 May 2010.
I’ve written about it before. The New York Times has written about it.
With security loopholes that allow any (non-)user to search any user’s content, what security model is in place, anyway (with full-size profile picture)? Want to know who commented about the “Good Food and Wine Show“? How about “I hate my boss“? (more…)