Backing up my server has been something I’ve been meaning to do for awhile. I currently host websites and tools for over 5 different people and groups, losing all their data would not be a good thing. The complete data loss of Coding Horror and the Stack Overflow Blog were major wakeup calls for me. Luckily they have been able to restore most of their data through their community, something which I’m afraid I can’t do. So on a quiet Monday morning with nothing to do (School is closed due to snow), I decided to finally make a backup.

My master plan for this is downloading important data off vps1 and vps2, including home folder, /srv/http, and configuration files, through SFTP/SCP using FileZilla. I’ll then store them on my currently unused external hard drive, along with a copy on my computer. Seems easy enough.

Downloading everything file-by-file through SFTP though wasn’t as easy and quick as I thought though. I wish I was aware that git repositories had so many folders, but I guess it made sense. The discovery was made while I sat and watched FileZilla going through each and every folder looking for files, until it hit a dead-end, which it then turned around and looked through the next one. This wouldn’t work.

For speed and bandwidth I decided to pack everything in tars and then download. I opened up PuTTY Tray, connected to the server, and one by one, I packed folder. Here’s the command.

tar cvzf <filename>.tar <folder>

This turned out to be a much better solution, and downloads could get a much better speed then they were before. Once all the tars were downloaded I just ctrl/shift-click selected them, and used WinRAR’s explorer integration’s Extract Here command to populate the folders.

Great, now that I have all the files off the servers, there’s just one thing left, and that’s MySQL. As I’m heading into this task, my plan is downloading each DB one by one using HeidiSQL (A very good MySQL GUI client). On vps1, all the DBs on there total to about 32MB. Not very much.

It takes about 10-15 seconds to download and generate the SQL, so backing up all the data took about 10 minutes at most.

So hopefully by doing this I’ve gotten a better idea of how I should be performing backups, this is going to be more important when openpeer goes live and for future projects. I’ll have some more time over the next 2 weeks, I’ll look into automating this whole procedure so I’ll be more happy to do it.

OpenPeer is an idea I had a few weeks ago when brainstorming for original web projects. It could be left at simply a tracker for open source projects, but why just leave it at that. The goal of openpeer is to create a strong community around people who love and use open source software, as well as those who have resources to spare for a charitable cause.

The long term goal for openpeer is to create a service that is used by hundreds of open source developers as a service for distributing their content. Along with that we will have a modified torrent client that allows the user to seed torrents by only setting options such as bandwidth and disk limits. All other functions, including selecting torrents to download, is handled by the client and the openpeer backend.

Right now, the project is in its very early stages, I only just bought a domain name. I am currently working on setting up the tracker, followed by web development. I am in need of web developers as well as a C/C++ dev for modifying transmission as our custom client.

If you would like to help, please contact me.

Since garry seems to be going crazy over WLW, I thought I’d give it a try. This is the first time I’m using it as I’m typing, and so far it looks good. The preview pane is pretty cool, being able to see your post without having to save and reload is a timesaver for me. And he’s right, adding things like images is simple.

I can even insert videos with ease.

This is pretty cool software, I just need to find a good source code posting plugin, but it’s hard with a dark theme. I wish I was using it before.

Test test, posting from science!

For some time now me and my friend have been making referrals on accounts and using multiclicker2 for ad viewing. The process is pretty good, however making those accounts is a pain, mostly because we need to use proxies. Out of frustration we decided to write a program to help us out with this. Mike wrote a this application and gave me some code to work off of.

Mike's base account creator

His tool was basic, but got the job done. It featured form fill, proxy use, and worked with LiveBux. However, it lacked a few features that I felt was important. First of all, the username and email was not generated, a user would need to fill those out. Secondly, it was locked to one site, there was no way to use a different one. Lastly, the user would still need to cycle out the proxies by hand. That being said it was still a step in the right direction.

So, after being handed the code for this, I outlined what I wanted to add.

• Automation of some sort (The less interaction needed the better)
• Multiple site support
• Generation and fill of usernames and emails
• Progress bar/status indicator of what the browser is doing.

I’ve never really coded in VB.Net before, I mainly use C#. However, I found it very nice to use. For some time a year ago I coded in Python for Wikipedia robots, and this was very similar to that. Because I didn’t have VS2008 Pro installed at the time (It was a fresh install of Windows), I used the express edition for VB. I didn’t feel much of a difference between what I would normally use and this, except for when I wanted to manually attach the debugger to a stuck non-debugging instance.

What really annoyed me in the editor is my habit of hitting enter to select whatever is in intellisense. Instead, it would newline, so having to stop and remind myself to hit space slowed me down a bit. Thankfully the IDE cleaned up my formatting regularly, which I highly enjoyed.

After a few hours of straight up coding, here is the result

My account creator

Unfortunately it’s still a bit buggy. However it creates accounts perfectly

It was pretty fun to write, and so worth its time in accounts. In a future post I expect to possibly share some functions and show you how I did a few things, but right now, I think I’ve done enough writing.

Update

Since late June, I’ve been using a Linode 360 VPS to host my services, site, a rawr-irc leaf and the gmod engineers forum. Except for one instance recently and mistakes on my behalf, I have had no downtime with them. Setting up a VPS with them was instant, I was already accessing the server via SSH in under 10 minutes. Their control panel is completely custom, and very useful.

Linode's VPS control panel

The control panel features graphs for CPU, network, and disk IO usage. I wish I could make these public and put them on my site. Another thing Linode offers is a full API for it’s service. I have yet to see something else like this in another VPS provider. Their staff and community are friendly and very helpful, I’ve gotten help from the owner of linode before.

Overall I highly recommend Linode to anyone who is looking for a VPS provider. If you don’t mind use my refferal link, http://www.linode.com/?r=3b651a1dfeada9ef689812fb306e64f19c172ad9

I’ve been running the Windows 7 RC (Build 7100) for the past few months, and I think it’s finally time to reinstall to the RTM. Here’s a list of stuff I’ll need to reinstall

• Steam (Junction E:\__ALLDATA\steam\ to the steamapps folder)
• XChat
• Chrome
• Firefox
  • Firebug
  • Tamper Data
  • YSlow
• FileZilla
• HediSQL
• WLM
• Pidgin
• Twhirl
• Adobe CS4 Master collection
• Adobe Lightroom 2
• Sublime Text
• Launchy
• VS2008 Pro
• Apache+PHP+MySQL
• Office 2007

I’ll move my project files into my Data drive (E:) during the reload, otherwise most of the shit is getting nuked.

Update: My computer doesn’t like getting through POST after being on for awhile, so I shutdown my computer and went to bed, I’ll try again in a few hours.

What’s the deal with the “Super Cow Powers” on apt-get? Is there some joke I’m missing? For those of you not in the know, see this page from the easter egg archive.

apt-get moo on terminal

PostWorks is a PHP framework I’m coding right now, that allows automated posting on popular forum software such as MyBB and vBulletin. The goal is to make automation for forum bots simple and effective. Here’s an example of  the code required to login into a forum and make a thread:

<?php
include "core.php";
$poster->useForum('mybb');
$poster->baseUrl = "http://compwhizii.net/mybbdev/";
$poster->forum->login('bot', 'pass');
$poster->forum->newThread('2', 'Test thread', '4',
  'This is a test of the threadworks posting robot.');

The bot framework will have support for features such as avatars and signatures, and over time more forum software. Also in progress is modules, for features specific to certain sites or addons to stock forum code. An example of this would be MyPS on MyBB.

The code is over at github, fork it and help out http://github.com/compwhizii/PostWorks

vBulletin 4 has been anticipated for almost a year now, and yesterday (10/13/09) vB 4 was made available for Pre-ordering. Pretty sweet. I wasn’t expecting this for another few months, even though they said they had alphas being tested. There’s no release date yet, so that’s a bummer, but all the people whining over the new license scheme. Look at this,

A – OWNED/ACTIVE CUSTOMERS:

* Upgrade to VB4 SUITE for $130 if done before October 30, 2009.
* Upgrade to VB4 SUITE for $250 if done after October 30, 2009.
* Upgrade to VB4 FORUM for free

B – OWNED/EXPIRED CUSTOMERS:

* Buy VB4 SUITE for $235 if done before October 30, 2009.
* Buy VB4 SUITE for $285 if done after October 30, 2009. ($250 according to Wayne Luke’s post here)
* Buy VB4 FORUM for $195 ($175 according to Wayne Luke’s post here)

C – LEASED/ACTIVE CUSTOMERS:

* Same as ‘A’, according to Wayne Luke’s post here

D – LEASED/EXPIRED CUSTOMERS:

* Same as ‘B’, are no longer customers according to Wayne Luke’s post here

Yikes. Honestly they should allow customers of over a year whose licenses ran out in July to Now to be able to renew, a shitton of upgrades/renews are better than a handful of new licenses. On top of all of this, when the site went live, there were no screenshots. Why would anyone drop $190+ without seeing what it looked like. And even now there’s no demo.

Some of these screenshots just remind me of IPB3, the earlier ones were very nice looking, but now it just looks like they are copying IPB. Plus some aren’t really “proper” screenhoots, they’re just quickies from the devlopment forum.

Of course, I don’t have the money for any of this anyway, so I’ll just be sticking to copies I can get my hands on to experiment with.

Update: vB has some new pricing now

Due to an overwhelming response and interest in the pre-sale event for vBulletin 4.0 Publishing Suite, we’ve decided to extend an offer to those customers with inactive licenses.

For licenses that expired in the last 12 months, we are offering an extra $45 discount for advance ordering, in addition to the publicly available pre-sale savings. This means the all new vB 4.0 Publishing Suite will cost you only $190, a total savings of $95.

For licenses that expired more than 12 month ago, we are offering an extra $25 discount for advance ordering, in addition to the publicly available pre-sale savings. This means the all new vB 4.0 Publishing Suite will cost you only $210, a total savings of $75.

These limited time offers expire on October 30, 2009. Beginning on October 31, the price will be $285.

You will be able to take advantage of this offer in the next couple of days – we are currently working to make it an option in your shopping cart. We will notify you once this offer is live on the website.

And vb4 is live on vbulletin.com. Awesome.