Loading ...Incompetent people and root access
At my job I got a call from one of our customers, who are webbuilders who said they needed root access and after asking about it we gave it to them. We are normally very strict about handing out ssh access(let alone root access), but they said they’d been doing their developing for many years this way and they seemed competent, plus as a partner we didn’t want to offend them by refusing this.
So I got that call asking why the webserver was giving them a “forbidden” message. I logged in to check the error logs of the domain, however there weren’t any errors for a long time. That’s strange since we were seeing one just now. Then I tried to restart the webserver which generated an error; it couldn’t bind to the socket. So I listed the sockets and saw an apache2 running that definitely wasn’t installed by us. So I shut that version down and restarted ours.
The webbuilder then tried to blame me/us for installing that webserver and I could guarantee that we’d definitely never do that since it would break the VPS with future updates, which is something we’re now going to have to test. I proceeded to explain what it might cause and the testing we’re going to have to do now to be able to guarantee the server stability and updates, after which he finally understood and agreed to remove their root access.
Youtube Partnership offerings
I have just received my third partnership offering message since I “signed” my deal. I don’t know what’s changed lately, but I think google’s policy on partnerships has drastically changed as all these partnership deals are all over the place now. I had some people ask me about certain offers they received asking me if it seemed legit to me.
The very fact that they send them to me shows how automated these messages are, I’m sure they just check either the amount of subscribers or total view count (public stats) and anything above their set threshold will get a message. I definitely shouldn’t be getting one as I am a partner already, yet I do, which shows how “hot” partnership is now compared to years past. Partnership used to be a rare thing which meant that you made special content that set you apart from almost all the other users.
Yet now more and more channels are getting partnered, even small channels like mine. It really does show a change in the way google is handling things; they have definitely started to try and get money from all the content being uploaded. It only makes sense, but it might result in people watching less videos if just about every video will have ads on them. I’m curious how(if?) that will change people’s habits.
It’s pretty funny that 2 days after writing this post I get the following gem on youtube:
Seems legit.
Systems Administrators defined
Stumbled upon this, this is how we SysAdmins generally are. 
Patching the new office in
Working on clearing up the mess of wires in the rack left by the previous company.
Setting up a VPS
I had been thinking of setting up a VPS(Virtual Private Server) to then use for several purposes for a good while. Since my TeamSpeak server was up for renewal I figured it’d be nice to simply be able to host it myself so I could see the back-end of it and see how it all works. So I’ve been looking around for some VPS hosters and since I work in that field I knew some hosters to avoid for sure. Granted it’s hard to determine what makes a good host or not and it ofcourse boils down to if you want service or not and knowing what kind of hardware they’re using.
I had been hearing good things about Rackspace for a good while and it’s one of the few companies that I have a positive feeling with. That means that their marketing has probably worked well on portraying them as nerds with knowledge. Also helped by the fact that I haven’t really heard anything negative about them for as long as I can remember. So I ended up making an account with them, which they verified by calling within minutes. They also asked if I needed any help, which I have to say, makes for a really good first impression.
So they activated my account after that call and I set up a small VPS which got set up within moments as well. They’re really good on setting that stuff up, it gives you the root password and I ssh’d in just fine. To my surprise I noticed that the vps comes with 4 cpu cores, which seems rather generous. Of course it’s overbooked and probably shared, but that’s plenty of power which I didn’t expect. First step was of course to change the ssh pass and restrict access to the ssh server.
After doing that I figured I’d set up TeamSpeak initially and grabbed the free package from their server and ran it. It’s a really smooth install and I had it set up in some minutes, most of that time being spent on looking at the documentation. So I ended up testing it with some friends while playing some Mass Effect 3 and after that just talking for a while while playing some Shogun 2: Total War. It seems to run great out of the box, though I’m still going to see what I can tweak and change. The only thing I’m not necessarily happy about is the amount of ports it starts listening on by default, but I’ll be restricting that.
In the future I’m probably going to use it as a small ftp server to store some files and mess around with nginx, if all goes well I might end up migrating my site over to it so I can fully control the environment myself, but we’ll see.
Reinstalling OS checklist
It has been a good 2-3 years since I did a reinstall of my OS to get a quick and fresh system. I used to do this a lot more frequently but since I have been recording games, I’ve found it to be a good reason keep procrastinating. The reason for this is that I’ve experienced changes such as drivers and savegames not wanting to import and the like and that would stop an LP outright considering I tend to do lengthy ones. So I kept putting it off and now I’ve only got Neverwinter Nights 2 as an active let’s play I’m recording, so that would be a good time, especially considering that there’s an extra backup within the server’s savegame.
So next’ll be a list of savegames I’m backing up and software I’ll have to install again. You might be curious to see what I’m using and maybe recommend me some applications or something. It’s always good to learn of cool software.
Software:
- Chrome
- Firefox
- Notepad++
- VLC
- Songbird
- Trillian
- Skype
- TeamSpeak 3
- Steam
- Newsleecher
- Sony Vegas Pro
- FRAPS
- Recordpad Sound Recorder
- Launchy
- Winrar
+ my little startup script which opens a couple of folders and loads some applications.
Savegames:
- Bastion – %Steam%\userdata\[random numbers]\107100\
- The Binding of Isaac
Serial.txt – %Steam%\SteamApps\common\the binding of isaac\
so.sol - %appdata%\Macromedia\Flash Player\#SharedObjects\<some random string>\localhost\ - Costume Quest - %AppData%\Doublefine\CostumeQuest\
- Skyrim – %My Documents%\My Games\Skyrim\Saves\
- Neverwinter Nights 2 - %My Documents%\Neverwinter Nights 2\localvault\
- Saints Row 3 - %Steam%\userdata\[random numbers]\55230\
- To The Moon - %AppData%\To the Moon – Freebird Games\
(Streaming) Music Services
With there being a couple of big music services out there currently offering unlimited streaming plans, web-based clients, phone clients and being able to download the music to your mobile devices it seems like it would be time to maybe switch over to one of these services as they’ve gone pretty mainstream. Reason for this was that I recently spoke to an intern at work who swears by Spotify. I had checked that service out when it went beta in the UK(and wasn’t available here yet) and it seemed pretty good, except the library of music they had seemed lacking to me. But he claimed that he’d never ran into a band/song that he wanted to listen to but wasn’t available, this sounded very hopeful to me.
More…
Looking for questions
I’ve just started to work again on my other website which I had been neglecting for some months. This mainly due to me having to re-render a lot of videos to place on this site and also to get some videos back on youtube.
For those who don’t know, I registered letsplays.info a while ago and my goal was and is to gather information on let’s plays as it’s a common issue many new let’s players are facing: The information on how to make let’s plays is all spread out and possibly out of date.
Anyhow, I’m currently just looking to get the overall design to look nice as a lot of it is placeholder material, the actual content(the guides themselves) can come after that.
As I’m going to be making a F.A.Q. (Frequently Asked Questions), I’m wondering; what would be good questions? It would be great to get questions from some of you guys to see if I can add them in.
Buying a NAS
So I’ve been thinking about getting a NAS for a while. For those who don’t know; it stands for Network Area Storage. It’s basically a machine that is part of the network with 1 sole purpose: storing data. It can have side-features as a small webserver or ftp, but those really are a side business.
I have probably been thinking about it for over a year but decided that with the storage I currently have I could easily handle it. However I noticed that the main 1TB of storage I use for downloads and random stuff was slowly getting full. It also is the drive I use to record onto. I do have 2 external drives, but those are only 5400rpm and they simply can’t write away the 1080p-recording data away fast enough. So recording onto those is simply not an option. Especially so when I have over 1.5TB of videos that I’m storing as a backup.
More…
Comments now work again
As you may have guessed from the title of this post, commenting on the blog didn’t work and resulted in a white page. This lasted for a couple of days so I’m hoping it didn’t affect too many of you.
So…. sorry about that.
For those wanting to know why and how: It’s to do with the SSL Certificate I placed and me struggling to get the right htaccess rewrite rules to send traffic to www.aeterna.nl and non-https traffic going to /forum to well, redirect to https. Not quite a htaccess-guru yet, but I honestly didn’t expect it to ffect too many people, being the lazy guy I am.