The Good, The Bad and the Cheap

I have had endless problems with Cheap hosting providers, even if you just want to upload static pages I still don’t think it pays to go with the cheapest. Aside from the possibility of hidden costs somewhere I have found their systems are not reliable and if I care about the content I upload, I want it to have a reasonable uptime which is quite often nowhere close to acceptable from the cheaper options. I had countless problems with a shared hosting package from Dataflame; there would be constant problems with the server I was on – yes with this package you are at the mercy of others, if someone has some crap code or a poor SQL query then it can bring down the server – sometimes it would be down for a long time, rebooted during the day (UK time – it is a UK company). Had problems with the admin side of things, even when I didnt have a site hosted they still managed to remove some DNS entries for a website name I purchased through them.

Things to look for

These are not the only things to identify a good service from a bad one but should help you make a decision, at the end of the day it should come down to your own requirements and opinion.

• Member of a regional Internet registry (RIR) and have their own Autonomous System (AS) – this to me indicates that they operate their own ‘presence’ on the internet, they can allocate their own IP addresses and take their networking seriously. Suggests they know what they are doing and are not just renting a server from someone else and then passing it on to you at an inflated cost.

• Search their support forums and outage notifications – I like reading the outage notifications and if there are common themes or continuing problems or lots of ‘Sorry, human error’ then probably best avoided. The support forums give an idea of the issues customers face from using this provider.

• New technologies? – I like it when a provider has a service using a new technology or is trying something new. For example a provider that I have used is Bytemark and they have developed their own virtual machine platform to provide IaaS, called BigV which I guess is a cloud hosting solution, but designed and built themselves. Things like this to me say they know what their customers want, they know what they’re doing and are happy to build something themselves.

Of course there are other options, you dont always need a shared or dedicated server from a provider like this; there are plenty of ‘cloud’ based IaaS and PaaS providers such as AWS or Heroku. Info about platforms like this needs another post or better explained somewhere else already.

So hectic that have needed about 6 days where I currently am; Koh Toa – a great island in the gulf of Thailand, although is remote is very pretty and has some great diving.

The previous few days were spent on the island of Koh Phi Phi Don – in a group of islands made famous mostly by the scenery but also because of fiilms; amongst others, The Beach, James Bond – The Man with the Golden Gun, Good Morning Vietnam were filmed on these islands.

Unfortunately things have to come to an end and set off back to Bangkok on Thursday for a flight early on Friday morning so will be back Friday night GMT – very distressing to leave!

See all soon!!

PS. have uploaded more photos. Not many the www is very slow!

Unfortunately or fortunately from the Thais point of view that is as far as my Thai goes and luckily have not had to use it much. Thailand is, so far, very well covered for tourism and I am definately travelling along the tourist trail. This isnt a bad thing as this is a great trail and has been fantastic so far.

One week ago I set off from England to Bangkok and have spent a few days around one of the busiest, congested, craziest cities around! The ground space in the commercial parts of Bangkok are so packed they are definately expanding upwards, there are even pavements 20 m up from ground level, right below the ‘Skytrain’ the mid air train. Apart from aclimatising to the heat and humidity spent most of the time walking between temples or stuck in traffic wishing we were in a air-conditioned shopping mall.

The rest of the time has been in and around a northern, much more relaxed town called Chaing Mai. This is in the north and much less humid and as have discovered during a trek through the jungle covered hills very cold at night! Have not only ridden an elephant up here but also been chased by one whilst on a raft down a river! Not the most eco-friendly holiday – riding an elephant that appears to be chained up most of the time and angering a free one.

I have had the customary travel/language barrier issues associated with this type of holiday but is very easy to travel around compared to previous years and there are also a lot of others doing similar things which makes it very interesting.

Right, have to go now; I am currently waiting for a plane to Phuket… and a USB cable/ PC with SD card slot to upload some photos so be patient!

P.S. To all those that are looking after my house; hope it is ok!

I have three weeks coming up of backpacking around a wonderfully inspiring country full of history and beauty, old temples to the most perfect islands and beaches. I’m hoping to see it all.

Keep an eye on my updates and photos from the links below.

1. Assume you have the NAT rule in the policy
2. Go to Voyager; add a proxy arp entry

But on SPLAT I found I had to do the following;

1. Assume you have the NAT rule in the policy
2. In Dashboard; Global Properties / NAT / Untick ‘Automatic ARP configuration’ – install policy if necessary
3. SSH to device and enter expert mode
4. cd $FWDIR/conf ; vi local.arp
5. Add line in the format 123.123.123.123   AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF
6. Save file
7. It seems you have to reboot for the system for these changes to be applied

Only now would the device respond to arp requests for that IP address – ie when creating manual NAT.

This method is assuming you are using Apache and Passenger as your webserver, Passenger is only referenced when you need to stop rails handling that url later.

For example;

example.com/ <-- rails app
example.com/blog <-- wordpress blog

To do this;

Create 2 directories, one for the rails app and one for the PHP/other app – this is not strictly necessary but nice to keep things separate. If not using this method then ignore this and the symlink!

/www/path/to/rails_app/public
/www/path/to/my_blog

Now go into the rails_app/public directory and create a symbolic link to the other directory.

ln -s /www/path/to/my_blog /www/path/to/rails_app/public/blog

ls -la /www/path/to/rails_app/public
blog -> /path/to/my_blog

Now edit your httpd.conf, .htaccess – whichever file apache is using for your rails app and add the following and restart httpd:

<Location /blog>
PassengerEnabled off
</Location>

Now whenever a request for the example.com/blog comes in, passenger does not send to rails, instead looks in the public/blog dir which is actually a sym link to the real dir.

If you are using Capistrano then you can add something like this to your deployment script to automatically create the symlink each deployment.

set :wp_dir, "/path/to/my_blog"

task :buildlinks, :roles => :app do
  run "ln -s #{wp_dir}  #{current_path}/public/blog"
end

In app_root/app/helpers/application_helper.rb create the following method

  # Format and return a title on a per-page basis
  def display_title
    base_title = "mysite.com"
    if @title.nil?
      base_title
    else
      "#{@title} - #{base_title}"
    end
  end

Then in the action in your controller, eg app_root/app/controllers/my_page_controller.rb

  def index
    @title = "additional text to title here"

    respond_to do |format|
      format.html  # index.html.erb
    end

  end

Then, finally in app_root/app/views/layouts/application.html.erb add the following where appropriate

...
 <title><%= display_title %></title>
...

The helper method is called on page view and returns a title. This can be replicated for other layout content that needs to be dynamic.

This website, robertomurray.co.uk was PHP and running (slowly) on a shared hosting server.

> 17 December 2011

The website is now on a new server and the site is mainly Ruby on Rails

Switchover

OK, here there are two major changes; 1) Migrating to new server and 2) re-written using Rails, which actually forced change #1. The previous hosting company was not very good, or rather the product and service I was getting was not very good and the final problem was not able to host rails apps properly so this forced me to migrate to a new server on which I could install whatever I wanted.

The reason for actually using Rails was because changes to dynamic pages – by dynamic I mean server processing and returning data, eg database interaction or just plain old php code – took so long to re-write, create, test, etc because they were mostly custom written, varied dependencies and sometimes overly complex. This meant that development was slow and awkward – not what web development is about.

The goal was fast, easy development, idea to deploy time as short as possible; one method to achieve this was using an MVC framework and so I tried various PHP frameworks such as Symfony, codeigniter but these did not meet the criteria I wanted. And then I got hooked on Ruby on Rails.

With Rails, I found the language, the style of programming and the design fantastic; simple concise and functional.

    @travels = Travels.all(:order => "id DESC")

    respond_to do |format|
      format.html # index.html.erb
      format.json  { render :json => @travels }
    end

The framework fits exactly with agile development methodology, with the addition of some extra tools such as Capistrano I can so easily add/change features, test and deploy in minutes. The site currently is 50% of what I want but I can run the site as it is now and add the extra features incrementally without a problem, each push adding functionality.

I have had to solve a few problems along the way such as;

• WordPress blog integration : my rails app is at / and the blog at /blog/ – how to integrate rails and php
• ActiveAdmin CSS problem : how to fix
• Dynamic page meta tags with Rails : A post on how to do this

Hopefully this will make adding new features quicker and easier, not only to this site but for other projects too. Enjoy and check again soon!

It is a very nice gym, David Lloyd, Southampton; large gym, pool and racquet facilities. I tended to alternate each day such as weights one day, then CV equipment and then swimming. I also juggled playing football around this too.

Do I feel better? I am shattered, some muscles ache, some twitch every now and again and some just dont work but I think that is called fitness.

As a basic example, say you were storing hostnames and IP addresses, basic example table below:

If I wanted to add a new host then I would want to give it a unique IP address so I would have to find the next available IP address (defined as NOT already in this table) in order to allocate. Below is a query that generates a series of inets for the network passed and then looks to see if they are already in the table. An optional extra on the end is not selecting the first 10 or the last 5 IP address of a subnet – if you want to reserve these.

Just substitue the subnet and ip_table tablename;

 
SELECT sub.ip FROM
(SELECT set_masklen(((generate_series(1,
(2 ^ (32 - masklen('10.10.100.0/24'::cidr)))::integer - 2) +
'10.10.100.0/24'::cidr)::inet), 32) as ip) AS sub
WHERE sub.ip NOT IN
(SELECT ip_address from ip_table)
AND sub.ip > set_masklen('10.10.100.0/24', 32)+10
AND sub.ip < set_masklen(broadcast('10.10.100.0/24')::inet, 32)-5;

Here is the create function script to create a function to call for the above query.

 CREATE FUNCTION nextips_for(cidr) RETURNS SETOF inet AS
$$
SELECT sub.ip FROM (SELECT set_masklen(((generate_series(1, (2 ^ (32 -
masklen($1::cidr)))::integer - 2) +
$1::cidr)::inet), 32) as ip) AS sub
WHERE sub.ip NOT IN
(SELECT ip_address from ip_table)
AND sub.ip > set_masklen($1, 32)+10
AND sub.ip < set_masklen(broadcast($1)::inet, 32)-5;
$$ LANGUAGE SQL STABLE STRICT;

Again, just substitue the ip_table tablename for what you’re using;