Archive for January, 2010

Interesting Analytics

I thought this would be fun to show everyone.

Accident Analytics

The amount of visitors coming to karlherrick.com is fairly consistent, so I was surprised to see such a spike when I was in a car accident recently. There must be some correlation to draw here.

I am thinking of breaking my leg next week to drive the traffic back up. ;-)

Just kidding.

Posted by Karl Herrick on January 19th, 2010 in Web Development | No Comments »

Switching MySQL Databases on 1and1

After wanting to test Wordpress 3.0 on a 1and1 hosting account, I ran into the following issue… the particular setup I was dealing with had only one database available, and it wasn’t MySQL 5, but instead MySQL 4… furthermore, it was a version lower than 4.1.2, which more recent versions of Wordpress require as a minimum.

So after doing a bit of research on what others had done, I went about fixing the problem. Interestingly enough, 1and1 could have made some money in this situation if they would allow customers to simply purchase another database to add to their packages, but no, they want an entire upgrade to be purchased.

The first step was to backup the website and database. I ssh’ed into the web host:

username@localhostname:~$ ssh $username@example.com

Then I backed up the database. The command below will dump all of the databases on the host (in this case, only one MySQL 4.x database) into a dated bzip file, in the home directory.

username@remotehostname:~$ mysqldump -C -A -u $databaseUsername -h $databaseHostName -p$databasePassword | bzip2 -cq9 > ~/`date +%F-%I-%M-%p`-db-backup.sql.bz2

Now to backup the site itself (not only in case disaster struck, but this would get a local copy of the sql dump I just made as well). On a local OS X workstation (or Ubuntu, if that suits your tastes) I ran something similar to the following:

username@localhostname:~$ mkdir ~/website_backups
username@localhostname:~$ rsync -avz –exclude="logs" $username@example.com: ~/website_backups/

From there, I was able to log into the 1and1 control panel and delete the existing database. This allowed me to setup a new one, and in particular, choose MySQL 4 or 5 as the type.

Back to the 1and1 hosting account:

username@localhostname:~$ ssh $username@example.com

I uncompressed the sql dump:

username@remotehostname:~$ bunzip2 2010-01-14-01-59-PM-db-backup.sql.bz2

and was greeted with the raw sql in the file, “2010-01-14-01-59-PM-db-backup.sql”. From here it was only a hop skip and a jump away to restoration. It was necessary to edit the sql file in order to have it restore properly to the newly created database that was just created:

username@remotehostname:~$ nano -w 2010-01-14-01-59-PM-db-backup.sql

And I changed the $oldDatabaseName to $newDatabaseName.

–
– Current Database: `$oldDatabaseName`
–

CREATE DATABASE /*!32312 IF NOT EXISTS*/ `$oldDatabaseName`;

USE `$oldDatabaseName`;

ctrl+o, enter, and ctrl+x, to save the file and exit nano. The sql dump was now ready to restore to the new database.

username@remotehostname:~$ mysql -u $databaseUsername -h $databaseHostName -p$databasePassword $databaseName < 2010-01-14-01-59-PM-db-backup.sql

The only other things to do were to update any existing applications that needed the new database name, username, hostname, and password.

As a note, if you are updating a Wordpress install to point to a new database, this info can be changed in the file, wp-config.php.

Posted by Karl Herrick on January 14th, 2010 in Wordpress, Backups, Apple, Linux, Hosting, Web Development, Bash | No Comments »

WDS Bridging Experiences

At the moment, our best solution for network coverage to multiple buildings is wireless. I have been planning out various solutions to improve our system (fiber optics, dslam, or a better wireless setup) but wanted to share what we have now and how well it has worked in this particular area of our property.

WDS Repeating Map

The image above shows the main buildings that are being linked. The main router sits in an upstairs window and is a:

Linksys WRT300N

The three client WDS routers are also sitting in windows, and are on the first level of the buildings that they are in. They repeat the same SSID, and run on channel 11.

Buffalo WLI-TX4-G54HP

(2) Belkin F5D7230-4 routers

This setup has been going for weeks without an issue, and has served upwards of six families, a two person office, a fifteen to twenty person office, and a classroom with sixteen students.

We have other areas on the same property that have wireless access between buildings, but are nowhere near as complete as this arrangement. If we do end up using wireless to unify the property’s networks, then I will start looking into site to site links, multiple gateways, OLSR, and other mesh technologies. I have my doubts as to how well WDS scales. Has anyone had positive results with professional mesh solutions built on DD-WRT and Linksys hardware?

Posted by Karl Herrick on January 7th, 2010 in Wireless, Linux | No Comments »

Time Machine Size Limits

So I have this new My Book World Edition, and I set it up to allow for Time Machine backups. The problem? On OS X, Time Machine wants to eat up almost the entire amount of free space before it goes about deleting old files… (un)conveniently there is no option to restrict the size of the backups.

Never fear… I google’d a bunch and found that if you run the following command on the Mac doing the backups:

defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine MaxSize 209715200

It doesn’t appear to do anything (or may possibly do something else that isn’t related to what I was after). :-)

So, I went about it in a different manner. If I clicked on the Time Machine icon (rotating clock) in the menu bar, and clicked “Enter Time Machine”… exited the GUI of Time Machine, and then opened terminal, I could do the following:

  1. Become root:
    sudo -s
  2. Goto the /Volumes directory, and look for which folder is mounted for Time Machine backups:
    cd /Volumes && ls -l
  3. Enter the folder that is mounted for Time Machine backups:
    cd $Mount_Point_For_Backups
  4. Look for the .sparsebundle file that is being used for backing up the workstation:
    ls -l
  5. Resize the sparsebundle file:
    hdiutil resize -size 200g $hostname.sparsebundle

The sparse image is then resized, and Time Machine will report that there is only around 200 gigabytes total available space rather than around a terabyte (which is the original size of the drive). :-)

Posted by Karl Herrick on January 2nd, 2010 in Backups, Apple, Linux, Bash | 1 Comment »