I’ve been running a web server on Lara, my home server for some time now. It provides a number of useful resources over HTTP to complement a number of websites I run, the most notable one being RouterTech where it plays host to the source code downloads for the firmware releases.

The problem is that apache doesn’t have a default bandwidth limit in place and so when someone downloaded a 40-50Mb firmware source tar ball it would max out my home upload bandwidth throughout the time taken to obtain the file which wasn’t particularly helpful to other things I had running.

As a result I’ve now added a bandwidth control module into apache and have capped the download rate that all clients as a total can achieve over HTTP to Lara at 37.5K/s. This sounds draconian, but it does mean SSH access and other things I and others need at all times to the server will be uninterrupted. I am hoping for a bandwidth increase in the not too distant future when I move broadband providers but in the mean time thank you for your patience in enduring the slower than are desirable speeds.

As I left my house this morning I was confronted with a group of BT engineers bracing themselves to remove our telephone pole and replace it. This of course involves removing all the wires from the box at the top first, then removing the pole, sinking a new one, allowing the concrete to set (they don’t use wires to hold them up these days it seems) and then adding the new box to the top and reconnecting all the wires.

What this means is that during the bulk of this procedure I have no phone lines and no internet connection. My personal and development servers have been down since about 10:30am this morning. Hopefully normal service will have resumed by this evening but if not or if you are wondering why you can’t get access today, then this will be/is why.

Sadly they elected not to give anyone connected to this pole a warning of an outage so I was in the dark till I saw the truck arriving with the new pole. Such is life I guess.

My file and development server, affectionately known as Lara, will be having some downtime over the next few days. I’m moving myself (desk and all) from one room in my house to another and so that this can be done as quickly as possible, I’m making the moving of my stuff, not the setting up of it at the other end, the priority. I hope to have the server up and running again by the weekend, but in the meantime you will have to sit tight. To all those that regularly access Lara for development needs thanks in advance for your patience.

Keen eyes will have noticed that my home server, Lara, is currently experiencing downtime. The server is in fact alive and well under my desk its just the internet connection that is dead. This in fact means that pretty much all my connectivity with the outside world is broken when at home because all my communications are internet bound (my phones and fax machine run over VoIP and TCP/IP respectively).

I’d like to say I’ll have this resolved soon but unfortunately the problem is to do with billing and so I’m not sure how long this is going to take. Matt (one of my house mates) pays the invoices to Bulldog and the rest of the house pays him on a monthly basis by standing order. Up until now this has worked fine but something seems to have gone wrong somewhere and Bulldog have suspended our connection due to lack of payment (as I was informed by a rather poorly marked-up HTML page in my browser this morning when I went to load up my router config page to do a reboot). I will need to speak to Matt about this but as he was still sleep when I left for campus to work in the Library and get my morning e-mail fix things are going to have to wait a little longer.

HUGE apologies to those who are locked out of their file stores and developer accounts on my server due to this outage. I’m doing all I can to get this fixed and will keep you updated.

I never thought I’d actually see the day, but its happened. Flash actually works on my Linux desktop! For a long time the flash player 7 was unstable and problematic with a lareg number of interactive website elements to the extent I had to block all flash images and view them in a different browser if I really wanted to see them to avoid firefox crashing and me losing all my open tabs.

Now that flash player 9 has finally been released things work properly. My browser is no longer trying to use flash 7 to open flash 8 files and committing suicide. 100% CPU utilisation for anything which plays sound or has remotely interesting animations is also a thing of the past. I can honestly say that I may well be unblocking flash if this good behaviour continues.

As for if I’ll start using YouTube the answer is no - browsing it can potentially be a huge waste of time and as such I only believe in its use for the purposes of embedding video on blogs and such, although even then a download of an .mpeg or .avi file would be preferable. Being able to use flash properly does of course mean I’ll be able to view embeded YouTube videos on blogs which is a superb development. I have to say I’m quite excited by it all.