Gustavo on Information Technology » Uncategorized

GPG Keys Replaced

Gustavo — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 19:38:46 +0000

After the new flaw found in the SHA-1 algorithm, I revoked my old 1024-bit DSA keys 3CF79EB5A445A8F1 (personal stuff) and 6C6EECCDDA5B38DD (GLM stuff).

My new key is EFFAB77E092DD1E2 and you can download it from keyservers such as hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com or hkp://wwwkeys.eu.pgp.net. This new key has been signed with my old keys, to help you decide if you could trust it.

Cracked last week

Gustavo — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 18:14:58 +0000

My VPS provider was cracked last week by an attacker who removed everything on the host machines (yes, the frightening “rm -rf /”!), so my sites (including what.repoze.org) had been down until yesterday night.

The attack was performed on Sunday, but I had to wait until Friday to get a new server (fortunately I don’t host anything sensitive here). Then I spent two more days setting up the new server from scratch (not that it was too complex, but I didn’t have much time to do it). That’s why it took so much time for the sites to be back.

I believe that everything on the repoze.what website and the documentation for my Repoze plugins has been restored. But if you find anything broken (e.g., if an URL changed), please let me know.

Server load: DreamHost vs WebFaction

Gustavo — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 10:35:50 +0000

I got tired of the slowness of DreamHost servers and its consequences, such as sites being down or extremely slow from time to time. So I decided to migrate progressively over the next weeks to WebFaction because:

The costs are the same.
They don’t overload their servers.
They have an excellent reputation in the TurboGears community.

So here I offer a comparison on the server load in my DreamHost shared host vs my WebFaction shared host.

Server load itself

DreamHost

2.83 of mean load during the last 15 minutes!

Please note that DreamHost is hiding the actual amount of connected users.

WebFaction

0.44 of mean load during the last 15 minutes! Of course, WebFaction has nothing to hide.

Users per server

The conclusive proof to demostrate that DreamHost overloads their servers, while WebFaction cares about their servers’ load, is the amount of users per server:

DreamHost

[trans-am]$ wc -l /etc/passwd 875 /etc/passwd

875 users at the same host!

WebFaction

[gnarea@web51 ~]$ wc -l /etc/passwd 178 /etc/passwd

178 users on a server that is much better than DreamHost’s!

Server specs

Before somebody comes up and say “That’s not a conclusive proof, DreamHost’s hardware may be capable of handling more users than WebFaction’s”, here you have some specifications for every server — guess what? This WebFaction server is better than my shared host at DreamHost!

DreamHost

[trans-am]$ free -m total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 4039 3851 188 0 127 1855 -/+ buffers/cache: 1868 2170 Swap: 6165 544 5621 [trans-am]$ cat /proc/cpuinfo processor : 0 vendor_id : AuthenticAMD cpu family : 15 model : 67 model name : Dual-Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 1218 HE stepping : 3 cache size : 1024 KB fdiv_bug : no hlt_bug : no f00f_bug : no coma_bug : no fpu : yes fpu_exception : yes cpuid level : 1 wp : yes flags : fpu vme de pse msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 ht syscall mmxext lm 3dnowext 3dnow pni bogomips : 2588.67 # processor : 1 vendor_id : AuthenticAMD cpu family : 15 model : 67 model name : Dual-Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 1218 HE stepping : 3 cache size : 1024 KB fdiv_bug : no hlt_bug : no f00f_bug : no coma_bug : no fpu : yes fpu_exception : yes cpuid level : 1 wp : yes flags : fpu vme de pse msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 ht syscall mmxext lm 3dnowext 3dnow pni bogomips : 2588.67

WebFaction

[gnarea@web51 ~]$ free -m total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 4054 3869 185 0 103 1371 -/+ buffers/cache: 2394 1660 Swap: 1992 487 1505 [gnarea@web51 ~]$ cat /proc/cpuinfo processor : 0 vendor_id : GenuineIntel cpu family : 6 model : 15 model name : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X3210 @ 2.13GHz stepping : 11 cpu MHz : 2133.601 cache size : 4096 KB physical id : 0 siblings : 4 core id : 0 cpu cores : 4 fdiv_bug : no hlt_bug : no f00f_bug : no coma_bug : no fpu : yes fpu_exception : yes cpuid level : 10 wp : yes flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe nx lm constant_tsc pni monitor ds_cpl vmx est tm2 cx16 xtpr lahf_lm bogomips : 4269.19 # processor : 1 vendor_id : GenuineIntel cpu family : 6 model : 15 model name : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X3210 @ 2.13GHz stepping : 11 cpu MHz : 2133.601 cache size : 4096 KB physical id : 0 siblings : 4 core id : 1 cpu cores : 4 fdiv_bug : no hlt_bug : no f00f_bug : no coma_bug : no fpu : yes fpu_exception : yes cpuid level : 10 wp : yes flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe nx lm constant_tsc pni monitor ds_cpl vmx est tm2 cx16 xtpr lahf_lm bogomips : 4266.80 # processor : 2 vendor_id : GenuineIntel cpu family : 6 model : 15 model name : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X3210 @ 2.13GHz stepping : 11 cpu MHz : 2133.601 cache size : 4096 KB physical id : 0 siblings : 4 core id : 2 cpu cores : 4 fdiv_bug : no hlt_bug : no f00f_bug : no coma_bug : no fpu : yes fpu_exception : yes cpuid level : 10 wp : yes flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe nx lm constant_tsc pni monitor ds_cpl vmx est tm2 cx16 xtpr lahf_lm bogomips : 4266.83 # processor : 3 vendor_id : GenuineIntel cpu family : 6 model : 15 model name : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X3210 @ 2.13GHz stepping : 11 cpu MHz : 2133.601 cache size : 4096 KB physical id : 0 siblings : 4 core id : 3 cpu cores : 4 fdiv_bug : no hlt_bug : no f00f_bug : no coma_bug : no fpu : yes fpu_exception : yes cpuid level : 10 wp : yes flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe nx lm constant_tsc pni monitor ds_cpl vmx est tm2 cx16 xtpr lahf_lm bogomips : 4266.81

Do NOT use IMAP support in Kmail! It will eat your emails

Gustavo — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 17:36:02 +0000

I was not aware that I was losing emails because of Kmail since I switched from POP3 to IMAP in all my email accounts ~1 week ago, until I saw how Kmail deleted all of my unread messages after a crash.

I suspected that I was loosing emails and that was the conclusive proof. I thought it was caused by an issue announced on my provider’s blog some days ago, which was fixed.

What are the consequences? It worries me that I don’t know them all. Among the few consequences I’m aware of, the worst one is that three of our servers were down today for almost 2 hours because I didn’t receive the monthly receipt nor its reminders; fortunately, our highest traffic websites (like GetGNULinux.org and translations) are hosted in other servers.

How to install setlock on Debian?

Gustavo — Wed, 14 May 2008 17:33:45 +0000

That’s the only question Google and IRC don’t answer – but after this post Google will.

About two hours wasted to find out the fucking stupid solution:

aptitude install daemontools-installer build-daemontools

And hit ENTER for every question.

Dreamhost sucks bad

Gustavo — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 20:13:59 +0000

If you love frequent downtimes, you will love this crap.

I’m looking forward to having my plan expired to move to another host.

I have a personal blog for personal stuff

Gustavo — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 17:07:56 +0000

I have created a personal blog for me to talk about things other than Information Technology, mostly my thoughts on many issues.

This blog keeps being aimed at members of the Free Software community, but I’ll also start discussing on truly technical stuff aimed at technicians. I’ll use the new one to make myself heard on the things I love and those I hate around me, as well as to talk about some of my experiences that are worth blogging.

The address of the new blog is http://gustavonarea.name/en/.

I’m back!

Gustavo — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 21:43:16 +0000

I arrived at Madrid yesterday, so I’ve started to catch up with everything; I didn’t do so yesterday because I was very exhausted after traveling from Valencia to Maiquetia, then from Venezuela to Spain.

Hey, Olivier has a website!

Gustavo — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 13:41:44 +0000

My good friend Olivier has released his personal homepage, which is hosted at ariadacapo.net. So you can know learn more about Olivier, his thoughts, where he’s been to and his beliefs… Also, as expected from a good designer, the website looks rather nice!

A new name for my blog

Gustavo — Sun, 05 Aug 2007 13:29:05 +0000

It’s no longer “Gustavo’s Technological Blog”, as technology is a very wide field, so big that I will only be able to blog about one of its subsets: Information Technology.

So, the new name of this blog is “Gustavo’s IT Blog”.