This is a bit boring for non-techies, but useful for me as reference when I install a new server.

Sets up a a DNS caching server for the computer in question in order to speed up apache lookup, mail resolving etc.
Below assumes that server has no daemontools yadda yadda installed.

Setup in a shell script, and run as root. (If you trust me.)

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As other web developers in China (and other non-latin language locations) probably know, UTF-8 is something that we need for Chinese to work correctly, however despite asking for UTF8 in the table structure, it doesn’t mean that MySQL or PHP is going to accede to our wishes.

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We experienced an outage this morning when one of our mail server hard drives failed, causing mail to stop.

The hard drives will need to be replaced in order to ensure data is protected.   As replacement will necessitate some downtime while spare drives are being installed, and existing ones replaced, I have scheduled this for later tonight, or early tomorrow morning.

The new drives have been ordered, and we are waiting on their arrival.

Replacement will be done out of normal office hours in order to minimize further inconvenience to clients.

We expect the server to be down for 20 minutes when we first add the new drive, then for a further 20 minutes  2-3 hours later once online backups have been copied over to the new drive.   We will update the blog with expected outage times once we have further details.

UPDATE

Seems the drive failure(s) are due to a firmware bug in the hard drives..

http://mswhs.com/2009/01/21/seagate-hard-drive-firmware-bug/

We’ve replaced drives in 2 servers so far (I replace drives yearly as a matter of principle), and still need to change another 2.
Unfortunately as one of our other servers drives decided to crap out in sympathy, the 2 drives I had for replacements had to be used immediately in different machines (thank you very much Seagate for ruining my day)

61.129.88.213 and 61.129.88.233 have both been replaced with Western Digital drives
61.129.88.121 and 61.129.49.190 both need to be replaced still.  This will get done as soon as I can arrange additional units this week (26th Jan+-).
72.51.39.20 and 61.129.65.217 are not using Seagate drives, so don’t need to be changed thankfully!

We have also replaced the fan’s in all the servers while we were doing maintenance.
Please bear with us while we complete our replacements.

Last time we buy Seagate…

Further reading –

http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=207931

http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09%2F01%2F17%2F0115207&from=rss

Shanghai Telecom is experiencing routing issues in some area’s to some of our servers.
This is not/not a problem with our servers or service, but a routing issue at the telecom side (essentially some area’s don’t know how to talk to other area’s)

Shanghai Telecom are working on it, and we will update when we have more information. [Resolved as of 9th Jan for all area’s]

Affected clients are not able to access all of our servers from their location.
Jing An, and Putuo area seem unaffected – no issues reported from those area’s.

People in affected area’s will have to wait until Shanghai Telecom resolves their core router issues.

How to get a Motorbike licence in Shanghai (from Scratch)

Go to the motorbike test place, and get the application forms. (see graphic below with address and chinese instructions).

They will charge +-200RMB and send you to do the paperwork trail around Shanghai (mostly Minhang, with bits of Pudong depending on where you are living)

Go to the driving licence office –
Shanghai Drivers License Building:
Gate 3, 179 Qing Chun Road , Xin Zhuang (Near Chun Shen Road / Hu Min Road ). The tel. no. is 021-64987070 x 54280 or 54279

Take Passport, Drivers licence (I have a Chinese Car drivers licence), proof of Address. Residence/Work Permit (Z Visa), Photo’s
Have multiple photocopies of everything with you.  Tell them you are applying for a motorbike licence, they will give you a piece of paper with your name address, and chop it.  Off to the medical (close by).

If its more than 1 year since you did your last driving licence test, you’ll need to redo it.  This will need to be booked.
The only place in Shanghai that conducts tests in english is in Minhang.  I did my first test in Chinese, as they didn’t have foreign tests back then!

Questions / Answers are in the graphic below.

Get a medical checkup.  They will give you a chopped piece of paper, don’t lose it, or neglect to get it.
Medical Checkup is done on the 3rd floor of the Dong Ming lu / Minhang
1st floor, application – 60RMB
2nd floor – photo’s and fill in the forms. (photo’s included in the price)
3rd floor – get the medical (takes about 2 minutes for all the windows, the ladies are very nice and helpful).

Back to the motorbike test place with all the paperwork, and give them the forms so far, and your passport.  They will go do the rest of the application, and give you a call in a few days to collect passport.  They will keep the rest of the forms until the licence is completed.
Currently its 750RMB to apply for motorbike lessons/ licence.   If you need to rent a motorbike at the test centre, that will cost an additional 450RMB

You’ll need at least 5 hours of lessons at the motorbike test place, possibly less if you know how to drive a motorbike already.

Once lessons are completed, you will book a road test, hopefully pass, then back to the Drivers Licence Building for a reissue of your new E licence!

My Bike is below

As there doesn’t seem to be any Biltong available in China, I’m creating my own here in South Africa, so I can bring back for friends.

This makes about about 3-3.5kg of biltong once dry.
Our model for the day – my cousin Joel.

Instructions below:

Creating our Biltong Drying Box

First, go buy a plastic storage box, this needs to be fairly deep, as we will be hanging meat vertically.  Recommend buy something with an easily removable lid thats transparent for easier checking on biltong production.

We procured our box at Plastics Warehouse opposite Kenilworth Centre in Cape Town.  Carrefour in Shanghai has suitable boxes for those in China.

We prepared the box for usage, by drilling lots of small airholes in the side, and lid, swiss cheese style.  Recommend use a drill with a 1mm bit or similar.  The idea is that air can go in, but nothing else.

Once the airholes have been created, we drilled holes for dowels that the meat is going to hang on.
Dowels should be near the top of the box, and spaced appropriately.  Note that the meat cannot touch the sides of the box, so make sure to leave enough space on the left/right of the dowels for the thickest cuts of meat.  Our efforts are below:

Biltong Box

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As I’m currently in South Africa visiting my family, I bought a DVD player as a prezzie for mom.

LG DV340 Region free hack for the model I bought at Game is below:

1, power on the player with no disk in the drive
2, pres pause on the remote
3, enter “314159” on the remote
4, enter “0” on the remote (0 = all regions, 1 = region 1 etc)
5, press pause on the remote
6, power the player off and then back.

Hopefully this helps someone else!

Apparently it also works for most other LG players, eg the DV440 DNU889 (as confirmed in the comments)

(Info from http://forums.dvd-swaps.co.uk/archive/index.php?t-2327.html)

One of my clients called asking why all his image attachments were suddenly postage stamp sized.
We both use Mac’s, and to be honest I had no idea, until I tried to send an image attachment myself.

Turns out that in Apple Mail, the simple stuff eludes us “smart” IT types by being obscure.

After attaching an image in Mail, Apple sneaks a new menu at the bottom of the page where you can choose the image size.

See below for an example:

Once we had that changed back to a more reasonable default (Medium in this case), all was well in the land, and we both learned something new!

Notes for Apple (just in case someone’s listening):

I like the idea, but I think the implementation leaves something to be desired.  The UI for this is very non-intuitive, some kind of hinting wouldn’t go amiss here, or dare I say it, a total relocation of this to the top of the window with the other icons and menu options.

As people know, I do the odd bit of iPhone support.  Less so, since the 3G came out, as those aren’t really as good as the older 2G model for China purposes.

Today I had a query about SMS issues – a client couldn’t reliably send SMS’s.

As the iPhone is a standard GSM device, the usual not so publicised GSM commands work.
Dialing *#5005*7672# from the iPhone will tell you what the carrier prefers for their SMSC number.

Shanghai Telecom’s SMSC for my phone – an ancient 15 year old 139 number is +8613800210500

To set the SMSC, do:

**5005*7672*[number]#

eg

Dial

**5005*7672*+8613800210500#  to set the SMSC to the preferred number.
(To dial plus hold zero for a few seconds)

Hit Call.

Try send an SMS again, and voila, happiness.

Note that different providers here will probably use different SMSC’s – so those on China Unicom, or China Telecom will need to run the appropriate actions, and put in the appropriate relevant numbers.

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While I personally feel that a lot of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is hogwash, there are basic tenets to building well indexed sites.

The usual common sense ones apply –

• Making sure Page Titles are clear.
  Don’t forget to add relevant page descriptions to each page.
• Making sure that content is relevant.
  Lack of content is the number one issue most clients have.  They want to score highly in search engines, but they don’t have any relevant content.  This one is easy to solve, although it takes some time. Identify keywords that you want to be found by, and create content that includes those words.

  I also advise clients to take a look at their competition, and see who scores highly for the words that they want to be found under. Read more »