Posts

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Einstein@Home is officially active!

The Einstein@Home project has officially gone public! Go help find gravitational waves!

I’ve had a couple of computers crunching part time for the past couple of weeks during the beta testing (2 computers 12 h/day) and like most other distributed computing projects, it’s pretty unobtrusive. Download and install the BOINC client and follow the instructions. With E@H, you can tell it the start and end times you want the client to crunch away. When the client detects any user activity it stops, giving you back the CPU until you’re finished. Then it goes back to work.

And if gravitational waves aren’t your thing, well then check out the other BOINC projects

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Not much longer now

The driveway, walkway to the front door and back patio have been laid down, cabinets in the kitchen and bathrooms installed and painter guys have started working. Doesn’t look like it’ll be too much longer now, and everything seems to be moving along nicely. Now if only I could get someone to let me know when they expect the house to be finished so I can give the 60 days notice on my apartment and let the appraiser guy know when to check out the place!

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What File Extension Are You?

You are .ogg Even though many people consider you cool and happening, a lot still find that you're a bit too weird to hang out with.
Which File Extension are You?
From BBSpot.com.

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What Website Are You?

You are google.com People love you because you are so helpful. When somebody needs an answer they come to you. You are simple, fast and flexible.
Which Website are You?
From BBSpot.com.

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httpd go boom

For the past few weeks I’ve been dealing with a puzzling problem where this server becomes completely unresponsive. The first few times I caught I had to hit the power button to bring the system down. The third time I managed to catch it in the act with top(1) and discovered the httpd processes going absolutely bonkers. I also happened to be tail -f-ing the webserver access log at the time too. Oddly enough, there were httpd processes going nuts spawning and terminating processes over and over (load average spiked to over 100), but there were very few pages being served up. Took me a while to stop everything and kill off the httpd daemon. A check of the error logs didn’t reveal anything enlightening unfortunately.
An upgrade to Apache 2.0.53 didn’t seem to make things any better. It actually seems to have made things a little worse, since the problem seems to be cropping up more frequently.
At the moment, my prime suspect is mod_security, although I haven’t read or seen anything about mod_security causing this kind of problem. But it started happening a few weeks ago on a previously stable server with no other changes other than adding mod_security to the mix. I haven’t ruled out bad configuration on account of my own stupidity though. Also haven’t ruled out that it could be because of using the 1.9dev1 version of mod_security either. I suppose I ought to test that out first.