Other posts related to server
Apologies again about the light blogging. It might have something to do with the fact that my computer got infected by a nasty evil demon virus from HELL yesterday, which took me over 6 hours to get rid of completely. This evil monster blocked me from accessing antivirus related sites, hijacked my Google searches, crippled my AV software so I couldn’t download updates, blocked my attempts to use Regedit (so I could go into the registry), and constantly crashed Firefox. It also corrupted any antivirus software I tried to download too. Only by renaming Regedit and figuring out where the virus was getting its cues from in the registry was I finally able to disable it and download the needed software to remove it from the system altogether. Gads.
And that might have been the end of it, except that I’m minding my own business watching a Netflix movie and trying to unwind from all the stress before, when I get an IM from a friend letting me know my blog was down.
Uhhhhhh?
So I surf in and sure enough the only thing left of my blog was a weird PHP error. After doing some quick googling, the error usually occurs when the site has been hacked.
Oh no, oh no no no no no….
I logged in, checked some of my files and noticed right away many of them had been changed only minutes before. Upon opening the PHP files I saw malicious javascript code had been injected at the top, explaining why my blog was no longer functioning. Left to itself, once the code was operational it would have spread and potentially infected any subsequent visitor to the site who didn’t have their browsers appropriately shielded (you know, like dumbass me.) The irony of it is that the unique setup of my blog prevented the code from working properly, the one saving grace from having so much junk on my blog to begin with.
I contacted support in a panic, and they responded almost immediately, and restored my entire site within a few short minutes. I asked them to investigate and they found FTP logins that were out of the ordinary and didn’t match the IP addresses I normally used. After some investigating of my own, I confirmed it was the same group that infected my PC with a virus before. Evidently the trojan I was infected with had sent them my FTP passwords, and the hackers’ server later used that info to log in and inject my blog with all kinds of malicious crap. Fun times.
My host sent me the FTP logs and from there I was able to determine exactly who the culprit was, a server in Norway that appears to be a clearinghouse for Russian criminal activity. I’m pretty sure what happened to me was all automated, and that I was just one of many victims of what’s become a well organized setup designed to do what else, make money. The Google searches I tried when I was infected hijacked my searches and redirected me to spam sites instead. I also discovered 419 type scams as well coming from the same server (including my personal favorite, one from a Russian “single mother” pleading for money so she could feed her starving family, and oh by the way, she’s 30 and a hottie too.)
Glad the nightmare’s finally over though (I think). Can I go back to watching my movie now? 
Tags: antivirus, blog, code, computer, criminal, firefox, googling, hackers, javascript, nightmare, norway, pc, registry, scams, script, server, software, spam, support, trojan, virus
Categories: Tangled Webs
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Owner of a Lonely Heart!
Lincoln Adams | February 14, 2009 @ 9:00 amMOVE YOURSELF!
You always live your life,
Never thinking of the future…
PROVE YOURSELF!
You are the move you make,
Take your chances winner/loser…
I was planning to blog a short series of posts given the unusual lineup of Friday the 13th being followed by Valentine’s Day this year. Ironically enough both days have significant meanings to me. One of the worst days of my life happened on Valentine’s Day, while my career plans to attend law school effectively ended on a Friday the 13th.
Instead I got caught up staring at my server logs all day long because my blog kept going down in flames during heavy traffic spikes, and I couldn’t figure out why. It got to the point that I was ready to quit blogging once and for all. That’s how upset I was.
In a way I feel like this is it, the last option I have in weaving a career and a life that I could be happy with. And given the times we live in today, I don’t think I could have picked anything as monumentally stupid to stake my future on than this. But I felt like I had no choice. God had closed every other door I tried, to the point that it seems like my destiny will amount to nothing more than working a deadend job and living with Mommy dearest until I die of a brain tumor.
And just to make sure I absolutely know what a miserable failure I am, let’s have a blogging success story that I can only dream about thrown in my face the very same day I spend hours crying and tearing my hair out over my own malfunctioning blog. Yes, let’s do that, because God knows my batter and bruised esteem simply hasn’t been stomped on enough throughout the years.
Why does that happen anyway? Am I imagining this? Because it seems like whenever I’m at a pivotal point where I endure a major setback or failure, right at my lowest moment I get bashed over the head by the prosperity and success of others close to me. What the hell, dude.
It seems like the entire universe is conspiring together to either drive me to suicide or a catatonic state where I spend the rest of my days staring at the wall of a padded room at the Sunshine and Happy Happy Home. I don’t get it. I don’t get why all of life is determined to crush whatever hope is left in me, and that it actually seems to step up its efforts to do so on Valentine’s Day.
SEE YOURSELF!
You are the steps you take,
You and you – and that’s the only way…
SHAKE - SHAKE YOURSELF!
You’re every move you make,
So the story goes…
There does come a point where I have to shake the hurt off and move on though. And I guess this year is going to be all about accomplishing just that. I can either move forward and push just as hard as life keeps pushing me until I finally prevail, or I can lay down and die, both spiritual and physically. But no matter how beaten down I’ve been, that hope that’s still flickering somewhere inside me continues to survive, and as long as it’s there, I don’t think I’ll ever truly give up. I may despair and cry and whine and wail at times (ok, a lot of times), but though I am cast down, I am not defeated, and my heart may be lonely, but it isn’t broken yet.
So go blow it out your ying yang Valentine’s Day, and whatever dark forces that keep conspiring to put an end to me, because I am not going to go silently into that good night. Bring on the noise. 
WATCH IT NOW – the eagle in the sky,
How he dancin’ one and only…
YOU – lose yourself,
No not for pity’s sake,
There’s no real reason to be lonely…
BE YOURSELF - give your free will a chance,
You’ve got to work to succeed!
Tags: blog, blogging, career, career plan, conspiracy, destiny, failure, fight, friday the 13th, future, God, job, law school, life, lonely, meaning, server, success, Valentine
Categories: Lincoln's Personal Log
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Building a blog is *&^%ing hard work!
Lincoln Adams | February 1, 2009 @ 5:13 pmBlogging had been super light lately, mainly because I’ve been spending an awful amount of time under the blogging hood, trying to boost the speed and performance as much as possible without sacrificing any of its major features. Speed is everything when it comes to traffic and keeping people on your blog. If your site doesn’t load fast enough you not only lose traffic, but a potential audience too.
So I spent the better part of the week testing the load times and discovered to my horror that it would take an average of 3-4 seconds for my blog to load, when the typical load for other blogs would only be half a second. Oy.
Improving speed meant I had to sacrifice a lot of much needed plugins though, including my emoticons. 
So I carefully went through each plugin I had to see which ones were acting as bottlenecks, and which ones I could afford to get rid of. Then I read up on MySQL databases (since MySQL powers my blog) to see how I could optimize my settings to the max without taxing the server. I’m not exaggerating when I tell you I must have spent over 50 hours doing all this. Yes I can be a little obsessive like that. 
In the end, I made a compromise that allowed me to keep most of my plugins’ functionality by simply switching off a few things here and there, and managed to cut my load times down to 1.5 seconds. It’s still not where I’d like it to be, but at least it’s MUCH better than before.
The only major difference you’ll notice is that “Related Posts” no longer show in my individual posts, except in my feeds. I hate to see that go but it did improve speed times markedly. I’m pretty much done now, but if you happen to notice things moving really slow here, let me know.
And now, MAYBE I can finally move on from this and resume my regularly blogging schedule, this being a new month and all too. 
Tags: blog, blogging, bottlenecks, load time, mysql databases, performance, plugin, server, testing, traffic
Categories: Blog Fog
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A Ho and a Hum, and a Ho Hum Ho
Lincoln Adams | January 24, 2009 @ 5:03 pmYep, it’s been that kind of exciting weekend for me. I’ve trying to monitor my blog for performance and on a whim I happened to sign up for a monitoring service with a 30 day free trial just for kicks. It can ping my blog every minute and report back to me if something goes wrong.
Well something went wrong. 
As it turns out, my site had been going offline for minutes at a time in the wee hours of the morning, either timing out or returning internal server errors, and I never even knew it. I submitted a ticket to support and they promptly checked my configurations, fixed a few things and since then I haven’t gotten any error reports.
But wow, if it hadn’t been for the pinging service I never would have known something was up. After the trial is over I’m going to sign up for a year. It’s $10 a month normally, but for the first year I get a 70% discount, so for now it will only cost me 3 bucks a month. Definitely seems worth it.
Interesting, I now have a new server with a high ceiling for growth and a monitoring service to boot, almost as if I were preparing myself for unpredecented amount of traffic that may be coming soon. 
But if not, I’ll settle for a girl. A nice girl. Or maybe pizza. Sicilian pizza, with extra cheese.
Tags: blog, monitoring, offline, performance, server, service, support, traffic
Categories: Blog Fog
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My frain is bried!
Lincoln Adams | January 19, 2009 @ 3:09 pm Whoa, I’m all woozy after finally pulling my head out the gaping buttinkos of my finicky and power hungry blog. I just spent the last 3 days hunting down every bug and problem that popped up during my migration to a new VPS hosting service, and it seemed like wave after wave of issues would keep coming at me. First my photo gallery wouldn’t work, then it worked but wouldn’t let me log in. Then I try to upload files at the same exact moment that my cable modem decided to act like a dialup modem. Then my plugins would bomb out, then I’d get connection timeouts, then I’d suddenly get a brownout at my apartment that shuts down my computer and erases all the troubleshooting I’ve been doing. The whole weekend was just a blur of logging into the server, logging on to my blog, logging in here and logging in there, enabling this, disabling that, then enabling this and that only to find that it disabled something else that I really needed, so I have to go back and disable them again so it reenables a setting I needed more, and then I need to test it all by deleting my browser cache, flushing my cookies and refreshing the page, then refreshing it again. And again.
Can I DIE now??? 
Lord am I glad that’s over. I hope. I’m gonna go take a nice hot shower now, and after that I’m going full on hobo with pizza, Cape Cod chips and Coke Zero. If anyone needs me I’ll be in my captain’s chair watching the latest DVDs from Netflix. 
Tags: blog, bug, hosting service, issues, migration, plugins, server, troubleshoot, troubleshooting, VPS
Categories: Blog Fog
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Tweaking Under The Hood
Lincoln Adams | September 8, 2008 @ 6:46 pmGot bored last weekend, so I’ve been making some tweaks here and there to improve the speed and performance of my site. The biggest change was dropping the ad server that’s been serving my ads, and hard coding it into my blog instead. No matter what, I could never get it to execute fast enough, which I’m guessing is partly a limitation of using a shared hosting account. If I ever go dedicated though, I’ll probably give it another shot, but that might be a while (a dedicated account would cost me almost $200 a month!)
If you’re wondering what the flip I’m talking about, using an ad server basically allows me carte blanche control over how ads are served, so if someone outside my current ad networks wanted to book an ad, I could easily set up an account for them and then temporarily disable the ads that were already running. Unfortunately now I won’t be able to do this, but I don’t think it will be an issue until I get far more traffic to my site, at which point I should have enough of a budget to get an ad server running again.
And what’s a dedicated account you ask? Well right now I’m using a shared account at $10 a month, which means I’m sharing a server with a bazillion other users, and thus am only alloted a fraction of the server’s power. If I get a dedicated account however, I’ll have a server all to myself to do as I please, which means a LOT more computing power and significantly better performance for my site as well. It may be another year though before I can afford such a solution, if ever. If you want to help me achieve this goal though, spread the word and link to my blog, dangit. Bunch of stingy freeloaders, y’all.
Anyhoo, I also darkened the background a little and dropped the MyBlogLog and Blog Catalog widgets. Seriously, I’m fed up with both services. It’s like I’m advertising their networks on my blog and in return I’m getting, well, nothing. It’s nice that my blog is registered in their directories so people can find me, but I could count on one hand how much traffic I’ve gotten from either network as a result. Not enough to justify the 1-2 second lag they were adding to my blog’s load times. And besides, both networks are getting bogged down in spam too. I can’t tell you how many contacts I have now that live in China. Evidently I’m a pretty popular guy over there.
But most disappointedly, I was hoping surfing these networks would help me find like-minded hot babes that I could play love snuggles with. Sad to say though, I find that I am such a unique individual that it is yea nigh impossible to find someone who thinks just like me. 
But anyways, do me a favor and let me know if you’ve noticed any improvement in load times and performance. I’ve definitely noticed a difference, but I want to make sure others are seeing it as well.
Tags: blog, blog catalog, coding, lag, load time, mybloglog, network, performance, server, service, spam, traffic, tweaking, widgets
Categories: Blog Fog
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Servers Upgraded, and I’m Still Alive!
Lincoln Adams | May 13, 2008 @ 2:11 amRemember those upgrades I said my host would be doing waaaaay back in March? They finally got around to doing it today. My server is now running PHP5 and MySQL5, and so far the only hiccup was a useless module I was using for Commission Junction that caused a fatal error and prevented my blog from loading. But since I don’t use their affiliate network anymore I got rid of it and my site immediately came back online again. I haven’t noticed any other errors, so I think it’s safe for me to breathe again. Yay!
I have another post lined up too, just need to finish polishing it before uploading it. Too tired to do it now though, but I promise I’ll post it first thing tomorrow… errr today. Whatever.
Tags: blog, hostgator, mysql5, PHP5, server, upgrades
Categories: Blog Fog
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