Volusion Review

Volusion Review
Whether you are looking to open your first e-commerce store, or a better deal on your existing one, the e-commerce arena is a minefield that needs to be navigated carefully. Businesses usually always end up paying much more for hosted e-commerce solutions than they originally expected because most e-commerce platforms are not completely upfront about their pricing model. Problems can range from fixed, long term contracts, hidden transaction fees and tiered pricing, as well as frequent network issues and unpleasant customer support. If you accidentally choose the wrong shopping cart it can end up being an expensive mistake, so you need to take the time to make sure you make the right choice.

collectd illegal attempt to update using time when last update time is (minimum one second step)

collectd illegal attempt to update using time when last update time is (minimum one second step)

collectd Whilst debugging our CollectD and Graphite setup, I found that CollectD was generating hundreds of repeated errors.

<br /> Jun 13 17:11:14 hmon collectd[15336]: rrdtool plugin: rrd_update_r (/var/lib/collectd/rrd/hmon/processes/ps_state-running.rrd) failed: /var/lib/collectd/rrd/hmon/processes/ps_state-running.rrd: illegal attempt to update using time 1371136272 when last update time is 1371136272 (minimum one second step)<br /> Jun 13 17:11:14 hmon collectd[15336]: rrdtool plugin: rrd_update_r (/var/lib/collectd/rrd/hmon/processes/ps_state-sleeping.rrd) failed: /var/lib/collectd/rrd/hmon/processes/ps_state-sleeping.rrd: illegal attempt to update using time 1371136272 when last update time is 1371136272 (minimum one second step)<br /> Jun 13 17:11:14 hmon collectd[15336]: rrdtool plugin: rrd_update_r (/var/lib/collectd/rrd/hmon/processes/ps_state-zombies.rrd) failed: /var/lib/collectd/rrd/hmon/processes/ps_state-zombies.rrd: illegal attempt to update using time 1371136272 when last update time is 1371136272 (minimum one second step)<br />

Think Carefully About Your Clever Project Names

Think Carefully About Your Clever Project Names

Idiot We’re building a new exciting cluster at work using Linux HA and stuff to make it work magically.

In the olden days of yore RedHat and co were using Pacemaker with the old crm (Cluster Resource Manager / Cluster Relationship Manager, pick one..) tool for cluster management, which was nice. Now it looks like RedHat have removed the crm command from their repositories and have switched to PCS which stands for either Pacemaker/Corosync Configuration System or is the plural of PC (Personal Computers).

Income Report March 2013

Income Report March 2013

GoogleAdsense Following on from last month’s report March was quite an interesting month. Changing perspective from using this site as a simple memory dump to one that people, other than myself, would find useful lead to some interesting usage patterns, from both myself and my visitors as well as some changes to the blog!

Due to my change of attitude I actually watched my traffic stats, where I noticed some odd things in my logs, I thought I fixed the problem… It turns out having an URL or page with the phrase ‘apache access logs’ in it is a really bad thing as now that page is plagued with bot hits using Russian domains as a referrer, trying to get a back link for their domain in my web stats. It’s receiving about 1500 unique hits a day at the moment which is skewing my stats quite heavily.

Installing Magento

Installing Magento

Installing Magento One of my clients wanted an E-Commerce solution for his website and after a little bit of analysis we opted for the community edition of Magento.

We wanted something based on the usual LAMP stack, that was OpenSource so it could be extended, was free as in beer, had great international support, was fully featured and enterprise ready, could pass PCI DSS compliance, allowed reasonable payment gateway options, could scale and was easy to extend as well as backup. Also we wanted complete control of the deployment, rather than integrating with a 3rd party cloud service provider such as Shopify to keep costs down and retain flexibility.

monit: error connecting to the monit daemon

monit: error connecting to the monit daemon
monit: error connecting to the monit daemon We’re rolling out monit on our new platform at the request of a vendor to manage their new service. I’ve always been dead against these kinds of automated failure recovery tools as they often require human intervention after the fact anyway and all the platforms I’ve managed will have failed the server anyway so why not restart the services after the root cause analysis is done? My tune is slowly changing though and I’m coming to appreciate this method of systems recovery a lot more.

Odd Occurrences In Apache Access Logs

Odd Occurrences In Apache Access Logs

Apache I’ve been watching my Awstats installation this month as idimmu.net is about to peak with over 7000 unique visitors in a month for the first time in it’s history, which is pretty awesome. But there’s been something really weird going on in the results ..

This is kind of ironic as in a recent job interview I was asked

 

What would you look for to ascertain suspicious activity on an instance of Apache serving static image assets?

Experiments In Bitcoin

Experiments In Bitcoin
bitcoin Earlier today I got in to discussing Bitcoin Arbitrage with a mate of mine, with the cunning plan of creating a bot to monitor different exchanges and profit on the difference in trading prices. After an analysis this was deemed a silly idea, or conversely we aren’t good enough, as moving real money or bitcoins around the exchanges seems to be an extremely painful process. The first step though was creating a wallet!