DBG/400 Latest News

Updated Debian on the server only to find it broke something in Foswiki I have the same combination of Debian Wheezy and Foswiki 1.1.9 working fine on other systems at work, but on this server (and the backup) it doesn't play nicely. Rolling back Debian isn't an option, so I've temporarily installed this web site on a slightly earlier version of Foswiki, which doesn't appear to have any issues. Hopefully it will be a fairly straight forward fix, and I can get everything current again.

-- MartinRowe - 01 Oct 2014

The latest speed upgrade has kicked in today. No change in upload, but the download has gone from 120Mbit to 152Mbit

-- MartinRowe - 30 Jun 2014

My ISP sent a text to say the issue has been resolved. So far it looks like they're right.

-- MartinRowe - 09 May 2014

The site will be unavailable for much of the time over the next week. Issues with my ISP means our broadband connection stays live for as little as 10 seconds before dropping and attempting to reconnect. I've been given the date of the 15th for it to be fixed, but I hope it will be ready before then.

-- MartinRowe - 08 May 2014

That took longer than I hoped, with the speed upgrade finally kicking in at the end of July. They didn't bother with the upload speed until the final tweak to download speed was completed. It's now 120Mbit down and 12Mbit up.

-- MartinRowe - 06 Aug 2013

The ISP are doing another round of network upgrades. Download has doubled to 100Mbit and the upload should double to 10Mbit soon.

-- MartinRowe - 22 Dec 2012

My ISP finally fixed the upload issue two days ago - six months after it went wrong. In the meantime i've had yet another engineer visit and I had been expecting a call to arrange more detailed analysis of the problem. That didn't materialise so I was resigned to wait until July, when the speed (both upload and download) should be doubled. As of Sunday afternoon the upload has gone back to around 5mbps, so this site should feel swifter.

-- MartinRowe - 08 May 2012

A couple of weeks ago my modem locked up and after a reset it was running again but with the upload reduced back to the old 1.6 mbit setting. I rang up to ask why and the upshot was an engineer visit and a modem swap. No change to upload speed. I rang again on Monday and this time they decided to drop the modem from the network and then reconnect it to see if it picked up the correct settings. The drop worked - the reconnect didn't and our internet connection was gone . I've just had another engineer visit with yet another modem to get broadband going again - still with the low upload settings. Turns out it's a more widespread issue affecting other people in the area. They expect it to be resolved by the middle of next month.

-- MartinRowe - 23 Nov 2011

There have been a few changes since the last update which didn't make it here until now. The virtual machine this runs on was updated to Debian Squeeze earlier in the year. VirtualBox was upgraded to version 4 (currently 4.0.10) which is now much easier, as the OSE versions are now available as prebuilt binaries, including as .debs from their own repository. Foswiki is now at version 1.1.3.

The primary hard drive in my desktop machine failed a couple of weeks ago. Fortunately the only unrecoverable partition was /home, which was fully backed up thanks to Back In Time.

-- MartinRowe - 12 Jul 2011

My ISP Virgin Media have finally delivered the increase in upload speed

-- MartinRowe - 17 Dec 2010

Patched to the latest Foswiki 1.1.2

-- MartinRowe - 23 Nov 2010

Foswiki has been patched to 1.1.1 and VirtualBox is now at version 3.2.10.

-- MartinRowe - 29 Oct 2010

Updated Foswiki to 1.1.0. As this is a minor release, rather than just a patch upgrade, it requires a reinstall (easy) and then copy across the old content (also easy) followed by all the customisations (a bit more time consuming). For the time being I'll run this in parallel with the old site (at http://dbg400.homeip.net) so if you spot an odd behaviour please try it at the old site, and let me know if it is just broken here

Finally got the replacement RAM (the delay was down to me rather than Crucial) and that seems to be working fine.

-- MartinRowe - 07 Oct 2010

VirtualBox updated to 3.2.4

-- MartinRowe - 12 July 2010

Things were fine for a few days then started to get random freezes & crashes on the host server. Same happened with a Debian Live CD so the upgrade to Lucid didn't seem to be the issue. Tested the RAM again and the replacement modules I got two months back kicked out loads of errors. They (Crucial Ballistix) were in different slots to the first set, and the original Kingston RAM is still error free (as far as memtest86+ can determine) after extensive use in both pairs of slots. I can't see that the system could cause the failure so I'm left to assume I've either been very unlucky or that Crucial/Micron don't have particularly good QC checks Currently waiting for an RMA# to try again...

-- MartinRowe - 10 May 2010

Host upgraded to Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. Took just over an hour including the downloads. Boot up time has certainly improved.

-- MartinRowe - 01 May 2010

VirtualBox now at version 3.1.6.

-- MartinRowe - 17 Apr 2010

The server has been running fine with no more problems - which is nice.

We did have a four hour or so internet outage this afternoon which just came back a few minutes ago.

-- MartinRowe - 20 Mar 2010

The RAM was replaced under warranty and I gave that a three hour memory test to be on the safe side. No problems reported so the server is back up with its full complement of RAM.

-- MartinRowe - 05 Mar 2010

After 16 hours of Memtest86+ the original RAM showed no errors, so the server is back up and running with just that. VirtualBox is back at 3.1.4 as the issues on the server & guest VM look to have been down to the faulty RAM. I still want to move the host server to Debian, but hopefully the server will be stable enough for the time being and I can do the upgrade at a more suitable time.

-- MartinRowe - 21 Feb 2010

The server was becoming increasingly erratic, even failing when run from a CD. I took out the original RAM and ran Memtest86+ over the new RAM I bought last month. No errors after an hour but when checking again after five hours there were hundreds reported, clustered around a couple of locations. I'm now retesting the original RAM for longer to double-check that's good. I'm going to install Debian Lenny on the server, as I'd prefer that to be as solid & stable as possible. Just not tomorrow

-- MartinRowe - 19 Feb 2010

Well, it had been running smoothly for a fortnight so of course I decided to upgrade VirtualBox to 3.1.4 which came out at the weekend. Not good. The virtual machine has dropped out three times and taken the server with it twice Back on 3.1.2 for the time being.

-- MartinRowe - 15 Feb 2010

RAM upgrade on the host server, bringing the host up to 8GB and this vm to 3.6GB. As the vm is still a 32bit Debian Lenny install it's not able to use memory beyond that. No recurrence of the page allocation failures since moving to the Realtek NIC so far. Before switching NICs the error cropped up within a day on 2.6.31, so I'm hopeful it's sorted.

-- MartinRowe - 26 Jan 2010

Still more struggles with the server. It managed a week without the allocation errors, running on a 2.6.28 kernel, until I had a large amount of files to move from my desktop to the server over the gigabit link. The error happened again at the start of the transfer. After a reboot into the latest kernel I can trigger the error most times I do transfers, but it happens at other times too. I've now put in a Realtek gigabit card and will see how it goes with that. The errors don't seem to do much beyond expanding the log files, but that doesn't make them any less annoying.

-- MartinRowe - 23 Jan 2010

Foswiki 1.0.9 is now available. This server has been running the release candidate (1.0.9rc2) for the last week and it's worked well.

-- MartinRowe - 18 Jan 2010

I've updated the firmware on my router to the latest version of Jonathan Zarate's Tomato firmware plus Rodney Chua's SpeedMod patches. That seems to squeeze out the best performance from my Linksys WRT54GL:

VirtualBox is at 3.1.2 but I just cannot get a stable host system with the 2.6.31* Karmic kernels. I also think setting the network adapter to use the virtual Intel PRO/1000 device causes instability too. There are no problems with a 2.6.31 kernel and VirtualBox on my backup server. That may be down to it being a 32bit host install - this is on a 64bit Athlon II machine - but I still can't pin down a cause.

-- MartinRowe - 14 Jan 2010

Still getting the occasional page allocation error even with the old kernel from Jaunty. Updated VirtualBox to 3.1.0 without any improvement, so trying again with 3.1.2.

-- MartinRowe - 2 Jan 2010

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