Alex's Adventures on the Infobahn - website

You certainly notice...

2009-08-07T17:19:00+01:00

..when your spam scanner stops working. After carrying out some maintenance to my server yesterday I noticed a sudden upsurge of spam arriving in my mailbox. Sure enough a quick check showed that the spam checking daemon spamd wasn't running. A little poking about pointed to behaviour that looked very much like this bug. However after instituting automatic recover with monit the problem seems to have gone away. I suspect the problem may ultimately be my poor little web-server is finally running out of its rather paltry 240Mb of RAM and there may be a rouge OOM on the loose, I haven't yet caught it in the act though. Examining the system did show it was close to the limit although why mysql needs quite so much memory to serve up a couple of megabytes of blog databases is a little beyond me.

Seeing as I couldn't catch another crash I spent the morning mostly creating new signed SSL certificates for my secure websites. Next task on the list is phoning all the utilities and checking what our current credit/debt status is. After that I may give T-Mobile a call about the HTC Hero and making me an offer I can't refuse :-)

UPDATE: Well it seems the kernel upgrade caused it to miss the 1Gb of swap the system usually has. A quick mknod and swapon later and I've quadrupled the available memory. That should do the trick.

Pictures

2007-07-28T14:40:00+01:00

I've finally pulled my finger out and uploaded the pictures from this years trip to Canada. I didn't take my compact camera in the end so I took them all with my mobile phone. I'm quite pleased with how some of them came out. Any loss of quality due to it being a phone cam (of which I don't think there is much) is more than made up for the ability to whip out the phone and take a snapshot on demand. Of course a digital SLR would be better, but I've not got one yet :-)

I've uploaded some to Facebook as well, but the "simple upload tool" is a pain for mass uploading and the Java based tool keeps crashing firefox.

And in other news

2006-05-09T01:13:00+01:00

I'm happy to present Baby Pictures!

New weblog

2003-04-05T10:54:00+01:00

Well I thought it was about time I added a proper weblog type thing to the system (so I'm not constently hand crafting HTML to add entries). I ended up using Personal Weblog as it seems pretty light weight and easy to add. In other developments I've finally got around to ordering my worm bin so I can make an attempt to work on the garden.In case anyone cares old news can be found here (I guess thats more for googles benefit than anything else).