Jason's Weblog

Posted to the #unixshell forums:

Thankfully, VM3 died just after I’d moved all my clients to different hosting, so I didn’t lose anything—except the thorn in my side #unixshell has been these last six months. The first six were fine except for some occasional downtime, but starting earlier this year (2006), there were long and sometimes unexplained downtimes. Tickets went days without being answered and I couldn’t do anything for my annoyed customers but wait for #Unixshell technicians to fix the problem.

Not that the server performed much better when it was up. IOwait was a killer. I don’t know if it was just my configuration or what, but the box was slow to respond even though I was on the 128 plan. Even when I did a fresh install of Ubuntu (I’d run CentOS before), just typing at the console would sometimes lag.

I have no such problems with my new host. Uptime is excellent, support is responsive, and the server performs beautifully. If only #Unixshell had been the same, I would still be their customer.

I fully expect this post to be deleted [from the #unixshell forums]. Matt, a.k.a. TheWiseOne, is very good about responding to criticism in forums all across the ‘Net. Oh that he (who seems to be the only living techie soul there) were able to be more responsive to customer issues, not trying to salvage a sinking ship.

#unixshell sucks. If you’re not a customer, don’t become one. If you are, I recommend leaving before your VM (and all the data you should have backed up yourself if you read the TOS) dies too.

The e-mail from support:

On Sep 14, 2006, at 6:51 PM, support@unixshell.com wrote:

Dear Valued Customer,

• NOTE: This affects users on vm3.unixshell.com ONLY

Today our RAID controller in VM3 went bad. We have tried 2 other controllers and neither will recognize the array. The array was setup using RAID-10, but when the card died it seems to have overwritten the RAID metadata on the drives.

We have enough room to re-setup all users on VM3 across different host nodes. You will have the same IP address as you previously had. We do not carry backups of customer data (as is shown in our TOS / sticky post in Main Forum) so this should be warning for all other users that a situation like this can and will eventually happen (whether it be 1 year or 100 years).

Full information on the outage, including more technical details, can be found at http://www.unixshell.com/forum/showthread.php?p=6749

• Maybe RAID failures are inevitable, but shouldn’t you save “snapshots” to a different server?
• Shouldn’t Matt Ayres (owner) run the company and hire other people to administer servers?

I just moved up from a PowerBook to a MacBook and had to rebuild my environment so I could work on Collaboa. For posterity’s sake, here’s what you have to do:

1. Install Xcode
2. Download Roll_Ruby_On_Rails.zip from http://sg.validcode.at/articles/2006/03/31/the-best-way-to-install-rails-on-os-x
   • Modify your ~/.bash_login as directed. Or .bash_profile or .bashrc or .profile or whatever you call yours.
   • Source that file
   • Run the script with sudo sh roll_ruby_on_rails.sh
   • Probably do a gem up -y to make sure you’re running the latest.
3. Download and install swig (not really necessary for svn-ruby bindings, but is necessary for sqlite3 on OS X)

   $ ./configure --prefix=/usr/local
   $ make
   $ sudo make install
   $ swig -version # Verify it's installed and the correct version

4. Download and install Subversion

   $ ./configure --prefix=/usr/local --with-openssl --with-ssl --with-zlib
   $ make
   $ sudo make install
   $ svn --version # Verify it's installed and the correct version
   $ make swig-rb
   $ sudo make install-swig-rb
   $ make check-swig-rb # Optional.  Expect errors for FS type 'bdb'

5. sudo gem install prereqs for Collaboa: xhtmldiff, syntax, and whatever else you need (like sqlite3-ruby or mongrel, perhaps).

Here’s an interesting personality test that gives you your results both verbally and with some pretty neat graphics.

I’m an animated inventor. Seems to fit very well.

TextMate is a beautiful little application, but one tiny corner of it wasn’t working and I decided to track down a fix. When I looked for documentation (^H) on an ambiguous Ruby method name (like ‘sort’), the links in the disambiguation page didn’t work.

Allan, the developer, helped me out on his IRC channel. He said the path to ri isn’t in my PATH. He meant that it’s in my bash path, but for whatever reason, this path isn’t read for ri. He said I needed to put an entry in ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist. I copied and pasted from this page and now it works like a charm.