If you were silly enough to try to use the system at 3 am (ET), you found it was down.
The primary reason was that installed a battery backup that hopefully will keep the system from crashing from momentary outages, and allow for a graceful shutdown if the outage looks more widespread. The system is running from normal residential power, not a conditioned data center.
The second reason was to think about what to do about 1) The end of XP support and 2) the fact that I’m so far behind in Fedora updates that the system realistically can’t be made current without extreme risk that it might fail and never come back.
I also bought a 2 TB USB 3.0 drive at Office Max for around $100 – currently it is serving as the backup of XP Machine so I can restore the system if some unrecoverable malicious thing makes its way on the XP box.
Underneath Fedora there is the copy of WIndows 7 that I’m basically never used – I booted it up to see if it should become my personal machine and switch the web server to the older XP machine. I painted myself in a corner as I gave Fedora all the disk space, and Windows 7 immediately ran out of disk space when I tried to install the 153 Windows updates 🙂
So generally my plan is to install a current version of Linux (probably Ubuntu) on the 2 TB drive and make it a USB bootable linux box that is big enough to handle everything datawise on a single partition. I’ll run that in parallel with the current web server, then some day in the future, move the router port forwarding to the old XP box running with the new disk drive, then make the eMachine WIn7 box my personal machine. Once the web server is self contained entirely on a single drive, ti doesn’t really matter which PC the USB drive is connected to.
The reason I said Ubuntu is I read that’s the distro that Google uses as the basis of their “stuff” – and it is more likely to be kept current and reasonable than Fedora. Keeping “obsolete” versions of the upgrade packages so I could update to each version one at a time would have made it an easy choice to stay on Fedora, but there is now a chasm I’m not wiling to jump over.
Running Linux as a VM under Win7 or WinXP is also a possibility, but more involved and potentially disruptive. Once I’m comfortable with Ubuntu, I’ll make a more definite decision. Of course, by then I may also have zero visitors a day 🙂
Yeah, that was me at 3 am. I was working 4 jobs until about 02:30 or so and after finishing one job was just trying to get a quick update of the state of the blog. OK, back to work, bye-bye!!
I recommend against this option. Windows 8 “has a “secure boot” feature that prevents other operating systems from running. There is a way to hack this, but you’ll need to do some research.” I know you had said Windows XP or 7, but I don’t think you want to be walled into an old OS forever. I personally prefer the new Windows 8.1 with its latest update to Windows 7, and the upgrade cost was very small.
My daughter used to use Ubuntu when she was 5 years old. I had installed it on an old laptop for her to get rid of Vista. I like it and it seemed to have good support, including ways to wrap a Windows device driver if there was no native Linux device driver. Eventually, when the hardware no longer worked, we replaced it with a Windows device.
quote above from https://www.udemy.com/blog/best-linux-os/
Art, based on your overall plan cited above, I wouldn’t go near Windows 8… I think you’ll find Win7 a better VM host than XP for Linux testing and usage. The Win7 kernel seems to have a better scheduler (in Unix parlance) than XP.
Windows-8-Update-Might-Delete-GRUB2-and-Set-UEFI-to-Secure-Boot
And here’s something to get Richard Stallman (GNU/FSF) really riled up. i.e. Microsoft’s proprietary plans for ARM devices, about halfway down the article:
http://www.howtogeek.com/116569/htg-explains-how-windows-8s-secure-boot-feature-works-what-it-means-for-linux/
Win7 buys me a numbe of things – much better virus protection and the biliary to run MSIE > v8 – what I probably lose is the ability to run VB6 code with some of the DLL files. HTML Iframes are just not a substitute for tabs and synced tables. My enthusiasm in nvesting more time or money is waning – and my use of PCs is only to play Runrscape and a few minor things like doing my taxes. I don’t see that trend reversing
Art, are you aware of ‘Windows Compatibility Mode” in Windows 7? It’s available in Win7 Ultimate (and Pro) for running older Windows programs. Right click on an executable or shortcut icon (including ‘installer’ .exe’s), then select Properties, and the Compatibility tab. From there, you can select in which legacy ‘mode’ you want the .exe to install or run. e.g. 95, 98, Vista, XPsp3, etc.
Try this before resorting to a VM for your XP programs.
Also, a VERY useful utility for Win7, if you prefer the cascading menus and other interface features of XP, is a freeware utility called ‘Classic Shell’. It also includes tweaking for File Explorer and IE9. I suggest trying the older version (-prior- to 3.9) first. From 3.9, he added a lot of ‘feature bloat’ (probably to accomodate Win8).
http://www.classicshell.net/
The conplication is the “stuff” that is on the XP box can’t be reinstalled easily onto Wn7 (at least I don’t think so). The software is largely upgrade versions of products where what I upgraded from no longer exists – I threw a lot of stuff out moving twice. I don’t want to buy Office yet again as I rarely use it. Upgrading win7 adds yet more cost. If I can get everything about the web site on one USB drive (the current one is 40 KB, old and slow), then I can easily move it between PCs – either by swapping Ethernet cables on the router or just changing the router’s port forwarding of port 80. I don’t use SSL on the web server, so there is no security certificate to worry about, etc
Art, I’d recommend against buying Microsoft office for you and the average person/family. Unless you have a lot of custom legacy VB code to automate obscure Microsoft Office function, then going with the free LibraOffice is the way to go. It opens and saves documents in native Microsoft Office format and have more or less the same user interface.
It is bundled with and ships for free as part of Ubuntu (also free) but anyone can download the Windows version as well
https://www.libreoffice.org/
I do have lots of AccesBasic code that relies on Microsoft DLLs
Too bad we don’t still have DEC machines. Lasted forever. Worked simply.
Yes… and if you can find one today, it is a good bet that it is VAXinated from today’s viruses. 🙂
How about hosting it on a Kitkat? Or a Jelly Bean or Ice Cream Sandwich? Maybe Honeycomb or Gingerbread? What about Froyo, Eclair or Donut or old Cupcake?
First step completed without incident – win7 now has 300 GB to use – updates downloaded but not all installed 66 GB of FCC and “search engine” data copy to new disk, and copying back
Based on the lack of complaints, I pretty much assume nobody cares about the FCC application history data base and the database of every licensed (non governmental ) stationary transmitter
I do use the FCC application history…. but I am not happy with the search mechanism. For example, searching for WIBG will show you 1020 AM in Ocean City but not its former location of 990 AM in Philadelphia… it was 990 AM in Philadelphia when Joey “Rats in my Room” Reynolds worked there in the 1960s.
The history of WIBG is interesting. It had been a top 40 station in the 60s and early 70s, then switched to a religious broadcaster. Most Philadelphians take day trips to the beach on the Jersey shore, about 50 miles east on a expressway. A local station there wanted to separate itself from the other local stations and picked up the call letters as soon as the Philadelphia station let them go…. circa 1975 (SRG doesn’t show WIBG history that far back)
I can only show what the FCC has in its database. 😉
The FCC’s basic concept is a “facility ID” – so things are linked by what used the transmitter, not who owned the station, what the call sign is, or what programming it carried. If a station changed to a new transmitter site and the old one was decommissioned, the associated history is lost, as the FCC has no role in regulating abandoned radio tower sites. The FAA does however as the tower can be a hazard to aircraft. If nobody is going to keep the tower painted and the lights lit, it has to be taken down if it exceeds 100 feet above ground level.
Wikipedia likes to fight about the same thing – is a “radio station” a call sign, a facility, the community of license or the DJs? The fact that owners like to swap frequencies and call signs, and change call letters when the change music format just makes it harder. Wikipedia just follows the FCC notion of the facility – and in a few situations will have articles about culturally significant defunct stations.
Another similar issue is tracking parties to license applications. Lawyers die or change law firms. They change phone numbers. Knowing who handled the sale of WNBC-AM from the application doesn’t tell you much about the current information of the lawyer on the paperwork.
I hear what you are saying but checked WKTU-FM. It changed transmitter facilities in September 2001 SRG has the history despite the facility changes.
To be clearer, my request is that a SRG station search for WTKK show not just its current location in Knightdale, but also its former location in Boston. The WTKK data is embedded in the facility information for the Boston facility but not searchable on SRG.
I guess what I’m getting at – other than because I asked the question – what is the actual value to you (or others) other than curiosity?
Since you know the radio business, you’re aware that FM transmitters are extremely portable, unlike AM towers. Get the FCC paperwork approved, and you just move the transmitter to a new tower – frequently these days a tower owned by a company in the business of leasing space on their antenna. I don’t know the rules on when the FCC drags history to a new facility ID. I’ll give a look at what is possible. I suspect it may be possible to track every facility a call sign has been used on, but then you get a lot of noise from call signs being dropped and picked up by a new owner with no connection to anything in the past.
Really just a curiosity. No other place to get the data other than SRG, Art.
I don’t listen to radio via any antenna. It is all via the internet except for when I am using SiriusXM in the car.
Win7 box is running Home Premium 64 bit – ran Easy Transfer utility to copy the XP data to Win7, and applied 68 more Windows Update. Browser is up to MSIE 9
Sounds like you’re making progress Art. One caveat about Microsoft’s use of terminology: they’ve managed to confuse end-users regarding XP ‘modes’.
Windows Compatiblity Mode (aka Compatiblity Wizard, Troubleshooter, etc with XP mode as a menu item) is DIFFERENT from ‘Windows XP Mode’.
SevenForums is a good place to get clarification & info on the two features:
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/316-compatibility-mode.html
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/8247-windows-xp-mode-install-setup.html
Since you have Home Premium, you can do an in-place upgrade to Win7 Pro.
BTW, all Win7 editions are actually present on every DVD. i.e. It’s just a matter of removing one small control file (ei.cfg) to make the installer offer you the full menu during installation. i.e. Image DVD to an ISO, delete the file, and burn to a new DVD). This is covered in the SevenForums website as well.
ALSO, IE 10 is known to have issues and ‘break’ things, so I’d suggest either staying with IE 9 or jumping to IE 11 if you feel inclined. The major clue is that MS doesn’t offer IE 10 updates or ‘fixes’… they jump from 9 to 11. ??
This is the typical OEM version loaded into a hidden partition without a physical disk. It had already offered me the option to upgrade Win7 Anytime. It feels like the printer giving me the printer free so I have to buy the ink.
The web is turning into the thing that I stopped watching TV about. The web was a medium that did nothing unless you made it. You were in charge of your destination. Compatibility with any browser was the bedrock of HTML.
Now websites tell me they won’t support my outdated browser, and pages are still downloading 30 seconds later with all the embedded videos, flash animations, google analytics, Facebook tracking, quantcast measuring. “The web” has morphed into Cable TV with a small number of passive entertainment options with nothing I want to watch.
Places with real time interaction fill up with teenagers announcing their use of pot and recreational use of prescription medication and the thrill of gay sex and how much they love Obama. It’s sapping my enthusiasm about the future.
You can turn off some of that tracking and some of the videos, but it is getting harder and harder. Proxies don’t work well for it anymore. The best product for Android phones does it by changing the host file, otherwise all the downloaded apps have embedded ads.
Agree 100% on all the above. I haven’t had TV for 10+ years, and now I see the Media onslaught on my PC.
I’d say it’s at least 10,000 fold worse than cable TV or satellite. All the ‘updates’ seem to be about propriety. It’s clear that they want everybody ‘on the cloud’… P2P appears to be the next target of the thought controllers.
I visit MLB to ‘listen’ to a game ($19.95/year for audio) and Ghostery shows my machine (and bandwidth) is being slammed with 30+ cookies, beacons, analytics, ad-servers… and WE are paying MLB for this intrusion?!
Notice how residential ISP rate prices never go down? Instead they ‘uprate’ your speed (and the montly co$t) because the ‘lifetime $19.95 plan’ has been phased out.
We had 1.5 to 3 Mbs (which was fine for streaming), but that speed is no longer available and were uprated to 5 or 7 Mbs… our monthly cost has doubled and the ISP’s present it as a benefit. Yeah, for the Flash ads & Google.
That’s being driven by the metric that “progress” is measured by the average bandwidth speed of a country, with the FCC doing the pushing.
Nothing I’m doing needs the 24 Mb/sec bandwidth I allegedly have from Time Warner. I only opted for it because of the 4 Mb/sec upstream rate. On the positive side, when I started FindAnISP, that was 3 T1s of bandwitth, which would have cost $4,000 a month just for the lines.
Not much you can download at 24 Mb/sec without P2P (P2P allows you to get different portions from multiple locations, then piece it all back together).
The exception is Netflix – streaming HD video takes about that much bandwidth- especially if it is 4K or 3D.
So nice, you can update it twice…. and then 66 times more after that. 🙂
Curiously, using the fire chat app on the iPhone has convinced me that my priority should be a device with a touchscreen and voice recognition. Even though it requires some touching up, dictating to the iPhone is much faster than typing on a virtual screen or even using a real keyboard. That seems to point to getting a current generation iPad
The iPhone doesn’t have Swype yet. There are copycats, even on Android, but none as good. I have blown people away showing them how fast I can “type” on my small phone – it is literally as fast as a full keyboard but you have to take the tutorial to learn how to use it for things like Caps, special characters, punctuation, and double letters. Watch some of the videos – it is the first thing I recommend to any one getting an Android phone.
http://www.swype.com/
oops, wrong link http://www.swype.com/category/about/about-videos/
Ubuntu day – this is mostly for the Chairman, but also leaving breadcrumbs if have to ditch in the Indian Ocean
So I’m not in serious trouble – yet 😉
The “first” drive in the XP Box is the C: drive of course – there is also an older USB drive connected where I keep the test system (running apache & MySQL under windoze!) and old stuff that is not essential to booting XP, the new 2 TB drive and two USB thumb drives available
So, following my nose…
– downloaded LiveUSB on Desktop and installed
– downloaded Ubuntu server ISO to desktop
– created bootable Ubuntu installation on USB thumb drive
– rebooted – only real option was to “install”
The ideal setup would by that Ubuntu (and all related data, etc) would be in a partition on the 2 TB and be what boots when the computer is rebooted – IF the drive is plugged in
The 2 TB drive has a tiny Linux boot of some type as its current boot partition. When you boot (if the drive is plugged in and the boot process goes to it), it starts a restore program that will do a complete restore of the C: Drive. Then there is an NTFS partition with the C: Backup and backups of everything else. Then a Linux data partition I used to temporarily hold data when I was reconfiguring the Win7/Fedora box.
So let’s roll the dice – it zips along quickly sizing up my system and its possibilities.
Problem #1)
I’m offered two choices that are doable – one offers to “shrink” the partitions on the 2TB drive to give Ubuntu essentially all the disk space. I don’t want that! It also offers to find the biggest unused partition and use all of that space… It goes and looks and fortunately decides that the empty space on 2TB is the place to install and proposes a boot partition and the rest as / – I’m okay with that. So make it so!
Fortunately I know what LAMP is – great… It’s going to install Apache, mySQL and Php without me having to cleanup stuff that doesn’t play well together, and it should be reasonably current (which may or may not be a good thing)
So it zips along, finds the network, downloads what it needs and finishes creating the installation. Now comes the question I’m dreading. Would you like to play a nice game of global thermonuclear GRUB installation? It gives me some theoretical possibilities, but unlike the prior steps, it doesn’t give me a list of actual possibilities – it just wants me to type in the /dev/s??? Partition to install grub, or install it on the first hard drive (shoe horning itself in front of XP) or don’t install GRUB at all. In retrospect I probably should have said don’t install it. I tried to install it on the 2 TB drive, but it failed. Trashing that drive would be unpleasant. So I said – go ahead nd make a dual boot – but that’s not what I want – I want the 2TB drive to boot to uBuntu, but I would prefer to not wipe out the emergency restore software that boots now.
So I reboot and things work as they should – grub boots on the XP drive, and offers to boot Ubuntu or XP. Both work. Everything is intact. If I reboot and tell the BIOS to boot from the 2 TB drive, the emergency restore program starts.
This is workable – the server version is of course command line only and doesn’t do things the Fedora way. My guess is I can get what I want by making the uBuntu partition bootable and turning off the bootable attribute of the Restore partition.
So I’m having a twinge of buyers regret – maybe I should have installed desktop, but will it still offer to install LAMP?
I’ve run kind of like this previously with two linux command line boxes (albeit not in the same room!). I remember getting stuck before when Fedora was set up like this and couldn’t automatically adjust to using a different graphics card in a graceful fallback mode when I moved the Linux USB drive from box to box
Not particularly looking for a lot of advice – I’m not looking to “tinker” – just migrate the web server from Fedora to Ubuntu – initially as a dry run perhaps. I know some stuff is going to break, particularly cron jobs if things aren’t where I’m used to them being. I want phpmyadmin, maybe webmin if I don’t have a GUI. I despise having to remember command line flags and trying to decipher man pages.
Well, that boxed me into a corner!
With the XP box configured as dual boot, if the USB drive is not connected, Grub crashes and dumps me to Grub Emergency mode. Fortunately, I didn’t delete Ubuntu first 🙂 So that’s unacceptable. Of course, typing “help” to grub emergency console offers no help. If you’re here, you should know what you’re doing or you’re too stupid to be using a computer. Web pages on how to restore the Master Boot Record to remove grub are full of snark about why you must be stupid to not love linux – which is one of the reasons I hate it.
So I went down the path when I had my prior fiasco where Fedora wiped out my XP Master Boot Record and created an unbootable system. This time fortunately I can still boot to XP as long as the Ubuntu is present. I downloaded the MbrFix program from some guy from Norway that I’ve never met. Hey, it’s “free”! He got a lot of his information on how to update the MBR behind Winoze’s back from some hacker in Russia who probably writes MBR rootkits in his spare time. What, me worry? 🙂
Since my system was installed from a HD partition and not a Windows CD, most of the instructions were not helpful, as they start by saying “insert your Windows CD”. Rebooting to the recovery partition gave me an HP “program” that basically only offers the ability to reinstall windows, not fix it or start the Recovery Console. So I roll the dice and run the utility from Norway (probably a serious copyright violation of Microsoft’s EULA) and reboot, and Grub is gone.
Maybe I should just run the web site using apache under Win7 and purge myself of Linux entirely… How much trouble could that possibly cause?
I subscribe to the KISS approach- Keep It Short and Simple. Whenever I find myself thinking about dual booting, I just buy another device. Someone had mentioned here a week or so ago that you can buy a Windows device for $350 now, I think through eBay.
Nothing wrong with tinkering, but it adds risk and uncertainty and takes a lot more time than the $350. If $350 is too much, you can can get a used piece of hardware for even less.
…but why settle for that? You can set up your eMachine to dual boot, with each boot containing an embedded virtual machine from a different operating system. How to get to the machine? Why you can set up your own VLAN, of course, keeping it separate from another VLAN you can dedicate to non-server devices. .. and what about setting up your own DNS server? 🙂
The problem with that is I am not able to reinstall software I bought 10 years ago on “floppy disks”. Neither computer even has a floppy drive and I’m not going to buy one.
I now have Fedora Desktop on USB drive. One option would be to just purge most of my recursive backups and that the 2 TB drive and make it a bootable Ubuntu only drive.
Bootable Ubuntu only sounds like an easier option…. keep in mind you can probably get new media for your software purchase either from the vendor or from someone selling it on ebay.
…then again, why kill yourself to save $4.00 plus $4. shipping. A meal at K+W costs more than that.
http://www.cedarpc.com/cgi-bin/commerce.cgi?preadd=action&key=4511&gclid=CKXL6JC-_L0CFUpnOgodLW0Aiw
For masochistic punishment, I decided to see what I can do with Fedora, since it’s what I’ve used (and redhat before) going back to about 1999.
Current stable version of Fedora Redhat is v20 (I’m in v16). Their unreasonable support schedule is a new version every 6 months, and only supporting 2 versions. Part of why upgrading from v16 is impossible is they completely rewrote their process for how to upgrade to a new major version number. Did I mention recently that big corporations are still using Windows XP with is 14 years old and many still use IBM’s s370 style operating system from the 1970s?
So I download the LiveUSB tool which will create a USB stick with a bootable ISO (system image), and it offers me the choices of which ISO to automatically download – variants of v16,v17,v18…. v18 is officially unsupported. So the tool provided to download the ISO doesn’t even include a supported ISO. (it’s not a big deal as the tool doesn’t have to do the download itself – it can just copy it from your download folder from a manual download)
It may work for me, but your grandmother is never ever going to run linux.
Downloading ISOs (which tend to be about 900MB+) is a good way to see “net neutrality” in action. Downloading from a variety of web sites, it appears that someone (Time Warner Cable?) is rate limiting downloads at 500 KB/sec, about 4% of my theoretical 24 Mb/sec cable Internet connection. Comcast/TW say they will give not block folks like netflix, but will only provide a baseline of throughput for free.
If all I can do is 500 KB/sec, I’ll subscribe to AT&T DSL for $25/month [I can’t do that in my case because I need the upstream bandwidth for the web site]
Put it on an old Android phone with Sprint as the carrier – unlimited bandwidth. Android runs linux… it practically is linux.
Things are going better – I downloaded Fedora v20, installed it on the USB thumb drive, then installed it onto the 2 TB USB drive.
The installation created a bootable partition which has grub on it (on the USB drive, not my Windows machine!). I can boot to Fedora, if I unplug the USB drive, my system boots to XP, the NTFS partition is intact where my backups are stored. Life is good.
The only thing I’ve lost (not unexpected) is the ability of the backup software to boot its emergency restore program. The first 100 mb of the disk is “unallocated”, which I take to mean they were using some weird non-standard bootloader/partition that is invisible to both Windows and Linux. Possibly if I made the Fedora boot partition non-bootable it would revert to the restore program, but I tend to doubt that. I can’ live with the situation.
There are now 1008 updates applying themselves to Fedora 20, which is the most current version of Fedora. I’m comfortable with using the desktop version. Once LAMP is installed, I should have a completely portable web server that I can just move from PC to PC based on my future needs. It would even be pretty much self contained if some day I needed to “hand it off” to someone else to run 🙂
The new web server is (almost) ready. You shouldn’t notice any difference, other than maybe it will be faster (not even sure of that until we start pounding it). The new server is up and running and I’ve captured the data in order to set up real time database replication so the two servers have the same data.
The new server is running on Fedora 20 and all the latest greatest stuff including the current version of php [That was the only snag as php removed a function I was using due to it having security implications]. The disk drive is a USB 3.0 drive with 2000 GB of space (currently about 500 GB allocated to Fedora). The PC it’s plugged into is not USB 3.0 capable (yet). The old disk is USB 2.0 and slow and small, forcing me to constantly push data onto a second drive. There is still 400 GB free, and another 450 GB free in a second partition. I have enough disk space now to download the NSA!
When I pull the pin, the web traffic will come to the new server, and I reverse the replication so the slave and master switch roles. I’ve been here, done that – FindAnISP.com had 2 slaves replicating at one point until I decided it was a stupid idea 🙂
If you get that second server onto a different ISP, we’d have fewer outages. 😉
that wasn’t the motivation with FindAnISP – it was partly to influence Google and reduce latency by having the servers closer to the end user, but that was hopelessly naive on my part.
ex NASDAQ guy…. no doubt with that Michael Lewis Flashboy mentality. 🙂
I just did the cutover. Sunday night is not when the heavy stress hits and things might break. So far things look nominal, although I don’t seem to be getting my emails from the server.
If you tried to use the web site between about 4am and 7 am, you just got a blank stare looking at you. One of the lessons learned by epxerience is to avoid doing things while you’re tired or in a panic. You can make a small problem into a huge problem.
I tried moving the USB drive over to the eMachine to verify that I can boot either machine from the USB drive (I can’t – it failed and dumped me to grub recovery mode)…. when I put things back the way they were, the web site was unreachable from the internet. I could see it as 127.0.0.1 or its local ip 192.168.1.xxx, but it couldn’t be reached with its name in DNS, or even by its IP address (from my cell phone running on 4G).
So I’m thinking either something broke in the router or the damn Time Warner just slipped a block in on port 80. Neither of that made sense since this happened with my little experiment and pointed the finger pretty squarely at me. Just to be sure, I rebooted the router, reset the port forwarding, etc… still didn’t work
So I took a brief nap and let my mind rest. The thought arrived that just prior to doing all this stuff, I had added a ban to the linux firewall for some suspicious activity. I looked at my scripts, and sure enough I had banned myself – d’oh!
“(from my cell phone running on 4G).”
Art, have you thought of a college intern to help you on the site, perhaps to develop a SRG app for the iPhone?
Yes.