Over the past year or so I've noticed BinRock getting slower and slower. It got so bad that visitors' web browsers were timing out before BinRock got around to sending them the page they were waiting for. I don't get any notification when a visitor times out, but for the last few months, I've been getting 5-10 error messages a day from my own scripts that load BinRock pages for one reason or another, and I can extrapolate from that and guess that it's been quite a lot.

In Linux, there's a measure of how heavily the machine is loaded, aptly called the "load average." A value between 0.0 and 1.0 means that the machine is only partially being used, and it's spending part of its time idle. A value of 1.0 effectively means that there is something using the CPU at all times, but nothing is being made to wait. That's just about perfect — you're not wasting hardware sitting around doing nothing, but you're also not overloading it. Values above 1.0 mean that the machine is overloaded, and processes are having to sit around waiting for their turn to run. Generally, if you see it reach 2.0 or more, the machine will be running pretty slowly and it'll be really obvious to the users.

For years, BinRock's load average was down around 0.10 — it wasn't even breaking a sweat serving all the web sites, email accounts, etc that are hosted there. But for the last year, the load has started growing steadily, and during the last few months, I'd regularly see it get as high as an astounding 30.0. Hence all the timeouts.

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Well, in the two weeks or so that I had the AdSense ads on the site, my income averaged about $0.18 per day. In all, I raked in a monstrous $2.73. They don't even send you a check until you reach $100, so at this rate, I'd have to wait a year and a half to actually receive any money from this. Yeah, so the ads are gone. I guess I made some invalid assumptions when estimating the number of ad impressions I'd get. Ah well, it's good to know I won't ever again have to struggle with the moral dilemma regarding whether or not it's worth putting ads on the site. Now it is answered definitively in the negative.

I made the switch over to the new server today. Did you notice? I hope you didn't.

On Will Byrd's recommendation, I bought dedicated server hosting at ServerBeach about a week ago. I settled for one of the cheapest options, paying $159/month for an Athlon 2600 server with two 80 GB EIDE drives and 1 GB of RAM, running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4. $159 is a lot of money, but on the plus side, I now have lots more disk space (old BinRock was perilously close to filling up its single 74 GB disk) and more bandwidth than I'll ever use (this server comes with 2000 GB/month, and BinRock usually uses about 30).

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Bah, the comment spammers seem to have discovered my site. I've gotten about 20 spam comments in the last 24 hours. In frustration I wrote up a quick captcha feature for my comment submission form (Captchas are those images with the distorted text that you type in to prove you're a human), but now I'm not sure if I should use it. That puts the burden and inconvenience of preventing spam on the users, rather than on me, and that's not fair. Maybe I should just keep deleting them manually. Of course, 702 of the 891 comments on the site were left by users with BinRock accounts, so I guess I could just require captchas from anonymous users. That might be a good compromise.

In the wake of the recent loss-of-BinRock scare, I've decided to make my backup scheme more robust. I went out and bought a 200 GB hard drive and installed it in my Linux server at home to house the backups, and I'm using a clever script called rsnapshot to do the majority of the work.

Whereas before I was only replicating the database, I'm now going to be backing up pretty much everything important on the server, including everyone's home directories, photos, etc.; about 35 GB worth of data all told. However, because of the clever protocols like rsync (on which rsnapshot is based), I should have no problem maintaining these backups with my little home DSL connection.

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In a fit of vain hope, I tried connecting to BinRock again this evening, and was surprised to find it up and running! I logged in and looked around and everything seemed to be in order. What euphoria! I hadn't realized how empty my life is without BinRock.

OK, maybe that's a little sad.

Anyway, in honor of the prodigal son's return, I will post about a great baby's t-shirt I came across today. Perhaps you remember the big uproar in the early 80's about the Australian woman who claimed a dingo ate her baby (it was made into a movie with Meryl Streep). I read on PlanetDan that a woman has surfaced claiming she is the supposedly eaten baby. But what I really liked was the link a commenter posted to this shirt. It's so ridiculously cute, you almost forget that it's actually pretty damn offensive. Man, I want to have kids so I can buy them shirts like that.

This was interesting. As I was catching up on the various blogs that I read, I came across this entry on Bram Cohen's site. Bram is the inventor of the well-known BitTorrent protocol. The entry discusses the pros and cons of living in a valley between two barely contained bodies of water, but what I found amusing was this comment posted by someone whom I apparently know, and who seems to think I was irresponsible in offering my friends free hosting on my server. It's surprising to find yourself discussed on the website of someone notable.

It's also somewhat annoying to have him suggest that I was "encouraging" people to host their irreplaceable data on my server, and never mind those mountains of water just over the horizon. For one thing, pretty much every one of the users on BinRock asked me if they could have space on my server; I didn't go out recruiting or anything. But even if I had, it's not like I was suggesting people come play on this cliffside with me or something. It's server space. Sure, it sucks to lose the files that were on the server, but nobody is going to suffer any material losses because of what happened. It's an inconvenience, and I apologize to everyone that I wasn't able to keep more complete backups, but I think there's much more significant things to worry about in the wake of this hurricane.

So you might have noticed the site has been down for a week or so. (If you didn't notice then you're a bastard and you don't love me). The server on which BinRock is hosted is (was?) near New Orleans, which is currently underwater thanks to Hurricane Katrina.

The site went down about the time the storm started to hit New Orleans, and has remained inaccessible since then. The server was on the second floor of a building, so it's possible that the only problem is a power outage. However, since I've read that 80% of New Orleans is under up to 20ft of water, I figure there's a very real possibility my server is currently making friends with a family of carp who have taken up residence in its spacious interior.

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For the last month or two I've been toying with Ruby On Rails, a web application framework based on the Ruby programming language. It seems like a very cool way to build web applications; coding is much easier and actually fun, and maintenance should be simpler. It's cool enough that I'm actually considering rewriting the blog and photo gallery in Rails.

Originally I figured I'd just reimplement the existing setup so that, aside from some possible URL changes, most visitors wouldn't even notice the difference. But as long as I'm rewriting things from scratch, I'm considering rethinking the photo gallery's layout.

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When I was on the phone buying my plane ticket for the trip to St. Thomas, the woman taking my order offered to email me a copy of the itinerary, and I gave her my e-mail address. While spelling it out for her, we had an exchange I've had far too many times:

"dan-underscore-mccormack-at-binrock — that's B as in Bravo — .net."
"dan_mccormack@binrock.com, got it."
"No, it's .net."
"Oh, OK."

The www.*.com thing is so wired into people's heads by now that people tend to assume your website ends in .com, and I often have to carefully point out that mine is different.

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Sorry for the outage. BinRock was inaccessible for the weekend. It went down on Friday morning, but I didn't realize it until I woke up Friday evening, just after Bryan had gone home for the day. As a result, he couldn't take a look at it until he got into work today. A weekend without BinRock! Oh, agony.

If you're curious, the problem was that it somehow lost the part of its network configuration that told it how to get out onto the internet, so it was alive and well, it just didn't know how to talk to us. The poor little guy must have been so frustrated.