Dark Side of the Carton

I recently setup the free/open source version of SugarCRM to manage some of my business contacts in the gaming industry. I went with a web based solution so I could open up portions of the data to my staff. After selecting SugarCRM as my tool of choice, I setup space for it and got to the installation portion. On step 2 of the installation, I got a nasty message

Writable Session Save Path (/tmp) Not A Valid Directory

I started doing a little research and realized it was the php configuration value for the session.save_path variable. My webshost runs phpsuexec, which is related to security and resource usage and is really out of the scope of this conversation. What that means is that you have to override php.ini configuration values through a php.ini file and not through .htaccess. Using the htaccess method results in a wonderful 500 error message.

Resolving the issue, which I figured would take 5 minutes, was actually a rather frustrating process. In theory, I should have been able to slap a php.ini file in this new directory with the following line:

session.save_path = /tmp

That didn’t seem to work. After trying variations of paths for the save_path I realized that the wonderful installer was also telling me that the version of PHP I was running, 5.x, was an untested version. I run PHP 5 for it’s OO/class support and it was apparently cascading down to this new directory. I went ahead and changed my .htaccess file to use PHP 4.x instead. To do this, add the following line to your .htaccess file:

AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .php

instead of the following, which utilizes PHP 5 on my webspace:

AddHandler application/x-httpd-php5 .php

Once I did that, I started to make a little progress, but it wasn’t until I happened upon a posting about the session.save_path value that I got things working. Apparently using absolute paths isn’t necessary and simply changing the value in your php.ini to the following resolved my problems and allowed me to get past the second step of my installation:

session.save_path = tmp

So there you have it, if your install is throwing the above error, just update your files to include these values and get to using SugarCRM.

.htaccess

AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .php

php.ini

session.save_path = tmp

There are a lot of tools out there for doing basic port scans on your edge devices. These tools are unnecessary if you access to a remote machine outside your network, but they come in real handy if you don’t. I saw this new tool on LifeHacker.com today and it’s a very nice simple tool that also packs in a GeoLocation feature that was more accurate than anything I’ve seen to date.

So if you find yourself in a situation where you need a remote port scanner, be sure to think YouGetSignal.com… or don’t.

Back when I had a disposable income that would buy more than a pack of chewing gun I used to buy all sorts of expensive gadgets. Those days are long gone. Having a family tends to do that, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. The reality is that having a family keeps things in focus for me and forces me to be this frugal person. Trust me when I say that I’ve become a total bargain shopper. I don’t buy anything at full price anymore and that is ok.

Switching gears a bit, the next generation console war is pointless. I mean, the competition generated by the ebb and flow of the industry is good for everyone involved. The next generation dvd format war, however, is totally stupid. So stupid that I sometimes want to bang my head against the wall until I pass out. Ok, I’m not that invested in the format war that I’d knock myself out over it, but it still irritates me.

From an IT standpoint I really like Blu-Ray. The higher disc capacity rocks and the idea of a 4 or 8 layer disc with 25-50GB per layer makes me salivate. On the other hand, I don’t trust Sony and their licensing. I also don’t want my old DVD collection to be useless and have to keep another player around to play them. HD-DVD satisfies that aspect of my needs.

The other factor is price. HD-DVD players are dropping like rocks in price and the Blu-Ray ones are not dropping as quick. With that said, Wal-Mart went all Black Friday a little early today with a special on Toshiba’s HD-A2 HD-DVD player. They had the things marked down to $98. $98 borders on insanity and would definitely move a lot of players. I know it convinced me to go buy one, and at present the only way a Blu-Ray player is going in my home is if I somehow end up with a PS3.

I also bought Transformers on HD-DVD. Now I can’t wait to get this setup and running. I’m so very excited. $10 says I can’t find my extra HDMI cable now that I need it.

In my spare time I am an IT consultant for a remodeling company here in town. They don’t have a full time tech, so I do all the stuff they need with most of it happening remotely. They run SBS, but I’ve been putting off their upgrade for too long now. They are (were) on version 2000 up until today. Today went something like this for me:

2:15pm - Leave My Office for Client Office
2:35pm - Arrive at Client Office
3:00pm - Locate software and begin prep for in place upgrade
4:00pm - Wait for data copy/image to complete
5:00pm - Wait for data copy/image to complete
6:00pm - Wait for data copy/image to complete

See a pattern here?

6:50pm - Begin actual upgrade
10:45pm - Complete initial OS upgrade

There were a lot more steps involved in the actual upgrade process, but there was one thing that sticks in my mind in general and that happens to be the hour that we sat while the system failed to read a file from the CD… After an hour of waiting and no progress we checked the event logs to find out the file on the cd was corrupt or otherwise unreadable. We popped in another copy of the media and viola it zipped along. After 8 hours at the client site on top of my regular work day I got to come home to a very exhausted family that is not used to their dad being away at night.

In a nutshell there is no real tale hidden in this post, but I just wanted to tell anyone considering an SBS 2003 R2 upgrade to plan for 6-10 hours to get it done. When I do server work my wife refers to time as “Chris Time” as my estimate of 2-3 hours always turns into 8-10. That said, set aside 6-10 hours of real time or 2-3 hours of chris time.

P.S. I know I am going to re-read this post on Monday morning and think to myself, “What in the hell was the point of that post?” Mark my words.

I work in the vast world of “IT”. All that means to most people is that I have some sort of job related to computers. It could range from cleaning out the inside of computer cases all the way up to managing a multi-regional network complete with complex data links between each location. That is not really what this post is about though.  What it is about is the fact that I want Microsoft to release a Home Edition of Exchange.

You see, I have a full time day job complete with in-house Exchange server. I can access that email from anywhere via the web or remote desktop. I have 1 copy of those emails and I know how to get to them. I also run a side business if you will. That business revolves around communicating with PR people via email. Much to my frustration, I have a copy of those emails here at the office and at home in Outlook. Messages sent from the office, do not get put into my Sent Items folder at home and vice versa. This has created an email synchronization nightmare for me.

Sure, I could shell out for the full version of Exchange and the hardware to run it, but that is a pain and I’d prefer not to mess with it. What I really want is a version of Outlook or Exchange that is super light weight and meant for home users to access their email globally. I know I’m not the only person that jumps through hoops to check external email accounts.

I have found a few possible solutions that include a combination of hMailServer and Roundcube webmail as well as just using remote desktop or LogMeIn to get back to my home machine, but that’s a little cumbersome. I mean, they both work, but it ends up being slow.

In all honesty, I am not sure that a lightweight version of OWA would be all that much faster, but it would be nice to be able to get to that email via the web. Glad I finally got that off my chest.

As the clock ticks past 1 in the morning, I am winding down the daily ritual of picking up the house. You see I have a 3yr old that more closely resembles a hurricane than an actual child sometimes. From room to room he goes, leaving a path of destruction in his wake. As I finished this evening, or morning in actuality, a thought hit me. Wouldn’t it be grand if I could actually clean the floor while it is actually spotless?

So I have a proposition for someone, and I’m looking at you James Dyson. Make a veritably silent vacuum. This vacuum would allow me to vacuum while my entire family is cheerfully dreaming of who knows what, but this thing would have to be super silent. We are talking like 30-45 db quiet. If someone knows of something like this already on the market, please let me know about it.

Otherwise, I’ll have to keep using my DC07 after I’ve picked up all the toys for the 2nd or 3rd time for the day.

I had a simple problem, I am unable to issue INSERT commands to my DB. This should be a simple verification of the users’ db permissions. I called support and instead of the technician ensuring that he fully understood the problem, he merely asked for the url I was having trouble with. Upon furnishing it to him, he put me on hold to diagnose the problem, something I could have saved him the trouble of doing. The problem was then escalated to a higher level where I was told the problem was in my code, of which I had already verified that it wasn’t.

I emailed the support tech back to show him the results of my testing via scripting, phpMyAdmin, and command line MySQL tools further proving it is a permissions issue. It has now been over 2 hours since that email was sent. What was a minor problem has now taken portions of my site completely offline for the entire day.

Having previously worked on a support team for Rackspace Managed Hosting, I can tell you that this is not the way to treat customers should you wish to keep them. I understand that $10/month does not entitle me to immediate issue resolution and top of the line technical expertise, but it should at least entitle me to great customer support.

A minor issue that could have been resolved quickly now has me reconsidering my long term relationship with 1&1. Consider for a moment if this were to happen to 500 or 1000 of your $10/month customers.

Above is the comment I just left for 1&1 regarding an issue that has taken down the forums for The Cover Project. The issue is still unresolved at the present time.

2/7/2007 9:46am - Still no response from 1&1 on the problem. I dropped their support line another email regarding the ticket at 8:30 this morning. Let’s see if that one gets a reply.

2/7/2007 3:30pm - After giving up all hope regarding 1&1 support helping me out on this one I decided to fix the issue myself. I dumped the existing db and imported the data into a new db. When I did this I found out that the SMF Forum software I use had generated a massive error log about 150MB in size which far exceeded the 100MB limit on MySQL dbs in a 1&1 shared environment thus dropping the db into read only mode. These errors had to be generated almost instantly in order for the db to exceed 100MB. I cleared out the offending records and it still took the old db a few hours to realize it wasn’t over capacity. In the end, the support staff should have gone “what makes one of our dbs go into read only mode? Oh yes, exceeding your capacity.” Realizing these people are no better than trained monkeys, I am going to move to Surpass Hosting sometime in the future.

Masaaki Nagumo, an engineer at Japan’s machinery maker Sakakibara Kikai, has built an 11 foot tall 2 legged robot that he has named “Land Walker. The mech shuffles on feet with wheels as opposed to truly walking, but what it lacks in that department it makes up for with its side mounted guns. You can see a picture of it here or check out an older video on YouTube.

Source: Gizmodo

I saw this on Digg this morning and it was too funny to not post.

An old coworker from Rackspace re-invited me to LinkedIn yesterday. I had signed up a long time ago, but didn’t realize the full potential of LI as a professional networking tool. I went a little hog wild building my network, but it is coming along nicely. I am networking with people I hadn’t previously known and building lots of contacts in the gaming world which is a great thing.

At the risk of giving away too much info about myself, you can check out my profile here. If you join, be sure to drop me an invite.