INTERDUBS supported the iPhone 40 days after it came out. Last week Wiredrive came out with their iPhone support. Graphically that looks like:
I don’t think that much can be gained by not acting quickly. At this point my clients have already solid experience with their clients in how to use the iPhone, and how not to. We could make good use of those twenty months.
In an act of ‘active procrastination’ (aka as coding things that nobody needs / wants in order to avoid real work) I wrote a view on my database that would sum up the number of INTERDUBS clients over time.
I was very suprised to find the (somewhat smoothed) result to identify so clearly both growth phases that INTERDUBS had so far. In the beginning I did have only a very very rudimentary public website and growth was only word of mouth. This was intended so that I could spend enough time on the needs of everybody that came on board.
Once what people needed was pretty well covered I made the public site a bit more meaningful and growth increased. Nicely enough support efforts have remained on a constant level: New users need a hand here or there. Often enough it is possible to avoid issues from being repeated by adjusting the code to what the users do expect.
In server admin after I had turned on the NFS service I still found a status like:
nfs service is: running
nfsd is: stopped
portmap is: stopped
rpc.lockd is: stopped
rpc.statd is: stopped
Turns out that the other daemons spring into action once you share the first Volume.
shells keep a history. The default seems to be to keep 1000 lines. I have not found a reason to make this huge. And while at it time stamp it as well:
HISTFILESIZE=2000000
HISTSIZE=100000
HISTTIMEFORMAT='%F %T '
export HISTTIMEFORMAT HISTSIZE HISTFILESIZE
in your .bashrc will keep 100,000 lines (2MB “omg” ) of history around and will also time stamp it nicely. That and the grep command make for some nice shortcuts on memory lane.
When I wanted to build php with imap it did complain about:
configure: error: Kerberos libraries not found.
Turns out that this some fallout from lib64 vs. lib differences. So I found
this blog explaining exactly what was going on. Very helpful. Especially the
sh -x ./configure ...options go here...
trick can be very very helpful in the future.
an OS X server got unhappy and seemingly did hang on bootup on the gray screen with the rotating ‘progress’ indicating.
Booting it with text mode enabled (holding command V) revealed that the machine would loop with the following error message snippets:
posix_spawnp ... /usr/sbin/mDNSresponder ... no such file or directory
ls -lsd /
0 drwxrwxr-t 43 root admin 1530 Dec 20 03:57 /
Booting into single mode (command -s) and then doing the suggested fsck and mount -uw / revealed that the permissions actually were set to:
drwwrx---
Meaning that others have not even read permissions. This makes the mDNSresponder seemingly unhappy. I would guess that it quickly gives away its root privileges after launch for security reason. Running what the internet suggested
chmod 775 /
did fix the issue.
I have no idea why, and it os most likely me. But traveling with the same user to another laptop .exrc stopped being looked at for vi. Strange. .vimrc still works. So I put my settings in there and continued to work. Not sure what’s going on. Not time to investigate.
So now I am on laptop number 5 ( Titanium, 12″ G4, 15″ G4, iBook G4, 15″ first gen Macbook Pro) and I am considering to get a second one to put it away so that I can keep on using this kind of machine once I have worn this one out. Storing a computer for 4 years before you use it for the first time is a stupid thing. I still consider it. Apple might have peaked with this machine.
I got a refurb Al 17″ (pre unibody) and it works like a dream. It’s non glossy 1920×1200 screen is gorgeous. Hey even the trackpad works, and the keyboard is a match to the fingers. All things I didn’t like about the unibody flavor. And the price is pretty sweet for a 4GB Ram (nice one) 300GB drive machine I paid $2100.
Being able to drive a 30″ screen and the better sound of the built in speakers are other benefits that I did not consider but certainly appreciate. And the thing is cool. The 15″ was heating my fingers. But only when it was cold. I hope this gfx card lasts longer than the one in the machine before.
If your ftp client reports
500 OOPS: bad bool value in config file for: config_name_here
then that might mean that you have a “YES ” or “NO ” with a trailing space in your config file. Easy enough to fix. I got lucky and found it quickly. Just in case somebody needs to google for this.
Downtime happens. And it is not pretty. But science can help. And all science starts with data. That is why I monitor how sites like INTERDUBS are availabe to their users. A company that shall remain unnamed was down for four hours this morning, which made me wonder how everybody is doing. I also wanted to play with Google Charts a bit more.
Accumulated downtime since April 2008. Less is better:
Congratulations to Adbeast for being clearly better. I am happy about the second place in this case. It is hard to derive the user experience of outages just based on this one measure. It very well mayb be that the customers of Competitor A – C are also happy with how things are going for them.
In anyway I also feel good in light of thise data about offering 99.999% uptime guarantees with a full months money back.
Update March 2009:
It turned out that I probed a static page for Adbeast. So the praise that I would have loved to give is somewhat unjustified. At this point it is early to tell how the real content pages rank. So far they are much less stable INTERDUBS though. Which is almost a shame: Nobody beliefs a statistic that makes the author of the statistic the clear winner …