According to an advice from a cPanel engineer, the best way to move MySQL data folder to a different folder (e.g. on a different partition with more available disk space) on a cPanel / CentOS environment is to create symbolic link rather than modifying the my.cnf file.
Presuming that the original MySQL data folder is located on /var/lib/mysql and the partition with more available disk space is mounted as /home, these are the steps on how to move the MySQL data folder from /var/lib/mysql to /home/var_mysql/mysql.
1. Backup the whole MySQL database, just in case.
mkdir /home/backup (if it doesn't exist yet) mysqldump --all-databases | gzip > /home/backup/alldatabases.sql.gz
2. Stop MySQL service and verify that it's stopped.
/etc/init.d/mysql stop /etc/init.d/mysql status
3. Create destination folder, move the folder and all the files and subfolders from existing to new destination folder, change permission settings and create symbolic link.
I upgraded Ceph from the old Dumpling version to the latest Jewel version. In addition to the OSDs not able to start up due to some permission settings on /var/lib/ceph (we need to change the permission settings recursively to ceph:ceph), I am also having this HEALTH_WARN messages:
indra@sc-test-nfs-01:~$ ceph status cluster d3dc01a3-c38d-4a85-b040-3015455246e6 health HEALTH_WARN too many PGs per OSD (512 > max 300) crush map has legacy tunables (require bobtail, min is firefly) crush map has straw_calc_version=0 monmap e3: 3 mons at {sc-test-ceph-01=192.168.3.3:6789/0,sc-test-ceph-02=192.168.3.4:6789/0,sc-test-nfs-01=192.168.3.2:6789/0} election epoch 50, quorum 0,1,2 sc-test-nfs-01,sc-test-ceph-01,sc-test-ceph-02 osdmap e100: 3 osds: 3 up, 3 in pgmap v965721: 704 pgs, 6 pools, 188 MB data, 59 objects 61475 MB used, 1221 GB / 1350 GB avail 704 active+clean
To resolve the problem is very simple, use below command:
Today (25 July 2014) is System Administrator Appreciation Day, which is an event to show appreciation for the work of system administrators (or sysadmins) and other IT workers. It is celebrated on the last Friday of July every year, since the year 2000.
As a hardened, 15-year veteran system and network administrator, I
know first hand about the many tasks a system administrator needs to do,
the skill sets and knowledge he needs to learn, and with the daunting
tasks and long hours he has to keep. Yet sometimes, normal users would
not know their system administrators as well as the system
administrators know their users. And that is why System Administrator
Day is an awesome day that everyone should celebrate.
Treat your system administrator today, because 25 July is World System Administrator Appreciation Day
What do system administrators do, and why do we need to appreciate their work? According to Wikipedia‘s
definition, a system administrator is a person who is responsible for
the upkeep, configuration, and reliable operation of computer systems;
especially multi-user computers, such as servers.
In layman’s terms, system administrators manage all the servers,
network equipment and any other IT infrastructure for an organisation.
In many companies, those system administrators are part of the
organisation’s IT team or department. They are the one who setup the
network within the organisation, installing mail servers, file servers
and many other servers required by the organisation, installing all the
required applications to support the organisation’s business, applying
operating system updates, patches and configuration changes, among
others. They are responsible to ensure that all the services are
running.
For example, system administrators are responsible to ensure that
Internet connection in the office is working, the mail server is running
and processing emails tht are sent and received by all staff within the
organisation. Without these basic operations, you will not be able to
do anything which requires Internet connection, such as surfing the web
or checking your emails. And even if your Internet connection is
working, you won’t be able to send/receive emails if your organisation’s
mail server is down.
Sysadmins make managers look good, but managers often misunderstand them (Source: Dilbert.com)
There are different types of system administrators based on their
roles and responsibilities. A bigger company might have different system
administrators having different roles, but for smaller company, most of
the different roles might be shared by just a few system
administrators, or even one single person. Some of the different types
of system administrators are:
Server administrator – maintains the operating system of the
servers, and to some extent, the applications as well, such as the mail
services, the web services, etc. He is also in-charge of troubleshooting
any hardware, operating system or application related problems.
Network administrator – maintains the network infrastructure, such
as the routers and switches, and troubleshoot network-related problems.
Database administrator (DBA) – maintains the database system used by
organisation. In bigger organisation which uses bigger and more complex
databases, there is a DBA which specifically responsible for this role.
In smaller organisation, this role would normally be shared by the
server administrator.
Unlike many other professions like pilots, medical doctors, etc,
there is no single path of training to become a system administrator.
While most system administrators have a degree in computer science,
information technology or any other similar fields, anyone can actually
become a system administrator by self learning and, in most cases,
on-the-job training. There are some training and certifications intended
to specific IT fields such as Microsoft training and certification for
Microsoft-based systems and applications such as Microsoft Windows and
SQL, Cisco training and certification for Cisco network, etc.
Most system administrators are always on-call, since they have system
and network infrastructure which needs to run 24×7. That said, a system
administrator can get paged or called at 3am in the morning when a mail
server goes down, or when the Internet connection suddenly stops
working. But the most important thing is that they are the one who
ensure that all servers are functioning, the network is running and
healthy, all the time.
That’s why good system administrators are often overworked and very
much in demand, and, nowadays, crucial to the success of Internet app,
web application and cloud-based companies.
“It’s not magic, it’s talent and sweat.”
That’s why, way back in the year 2000, a system administrator named
Ted Kekatos suggested a yearly day event when everyone can appreciate
the work of system administrators by – for example – giving them cake
and ice cream and throwing a small party or celebration. This has become
an annual event, celebrated every year on the last Friday of July.
Today marks the 14th year we are celebrating System Administrator
Appreciation Day.
Good system administrators never stop learning, and combine multiple
skillsets to perform many different and unending tasks. I wish all
system administrators everywhere a very happy System Administrator’s
Day.
In the past couple of weeks, we have added some new operating systems
and applications into the OS templates line-up: CloudLinux, SUSE Linux
Enterprise Server and Dokku PaaS template for Ubuntu.
CloudLinux
CloudLinux is a CentOS/RHEL-based operating system which is built and
suitable for shared hosting environment. It provides isolation between
users to avoid the “bad neighbour effect” where one user might be
consuming a lot of the server’s resources such as CPU, memory or I/O,
affecting the performance of other sites hosted on the same server.
This, in turn, will improve the stability of the overall server.
CloudLinux also has some other features, such as CageFS, which
provides virtualised per-user file system that uniquely encapsulates
each user, preventing users from seeing each other and viewing sensitive
information, thus improving security. Some other features of CloudLinux
include MySQL Governor, SecureLinks and PHP Selector.
To select CloudLinux OS template, choose “CloudLinux 6.4 (64-bit)
(excluding license)” from the list of OS templates when you make your
servelet order. CloudLinux is not an open source operating system, you
will need to purchase the license separately. More information about
CloudLinux operating system can be found on their website.
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
SUSE Linux Enterprise server is a Linux-based operating system built
by SUSE, specialised to deliver mission-critical IT services efficiently
and cost effectively. Similar to CloudLinux, SUSE Linux Enterprise
Server is not free, and you would need to purchase the license
separately.
Take note that the vm_initialize script to initialize the data disk
doesn’t work on SUSE Linux, so you would need to initialize the
data-disk manually by following the instruction in our knowledge-base article here.
To select the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server template, please choose
“SUSE Linux ES 11 SP3 (64-bit”) from the list of OS templates when
making your servelet order. More information about SUSE Linux Enterprise
Server operating system can be found on their website.
Dokku PaaS
Dokku is a mini-Heroku powered by Docker and written in less than 100
lines of bash. Once it’s set up on your servelet, you can push
Heroku-compatible applications to it via Git. This is suitable for
developers who like to use Heroku as their PaaS (Platform as a Service),
and this will provide your own, single-host version of Heroku running
on your servelet. We are using Ubuntu 12.04.3 LTS operating system for
the Dokku PaaS template.
To have the Dokku pre-installed on your Ubuntu servelet, please
select “Ubuntu 12.04.3 (64-bit) + Dokku” from the list of OS templates
when ordering your servelet. You would need to configure Dokku after the
servelet is provisioned by following the instructions on our knowledge-base article here.
Wow, it has been quite some time since we updated this blog. Amongst
the things that kept us busy are upgrading our CEPH storage capacity
and unrolling a major upgrade to CloudStack 4.2.
But the biggest thing of all is an important new feature that we’ve worked very hard to bring out – snapshot backups.
A snapshot backup is a way for high-availability systems to avoid
downtime and still enable backup by performing the backup on a
snapshot—a read-only copy of the data set frozen at a point in
time—while allowing applications to continue writing to their data
(definition partly taken from Wikipedia).
This is a major feature crucial to any system administrator’s server
management strategy. And we are pleased to announce that snapshot
backups of our customers’ servelets is now available after this major
upgrade. With this new feature, customers can perform snapshot backups
of both the root-disk and data-disk of their servelets, directly from
our customer’s portal. This feature is chargeable based on the size of the snapshot backup and how long the snapshot is being stored in our storage system.
How do you make a snapshot backup?
To make a backup snapshot of either your root-disk or data-disk (or
both), you can log in to our customer portal, choose Services >
Simple Menu / Power Menu (depends on your servelet’s category). Click on
the hostname of your servelet, then choose Storage > Disks. You will
see the list of your disks (both your data-disk and root-disk).
To make a snapshot of either the data-disk or the root-disk, click on
“Create a new snapshot” next to the disk. There will be a prompt: “Are
you sure you wish to create new backup?”, click “OK”.
The window will then show the snapshot area of the storage section,
showing the list of your existing snapshots, including the one you are
creating. If this is the first time you have created a snapshot, then
you will only see the snapshot which you are creating, with the status
“Pending.”
Snapshots will take some time, depending on the size of your disk.
Once snapshot is completed, the status of the snapshot will change to
“Built” instead of Pending.
How can you restore data from the snapshot backup?
If you want to recover any data from any of your snapshots, you will
need to open a support ticket with us, and let us know which snapshot
you would like to restore data from. Please kindly provide us with two
information:
- The date when the snapshot was created (e.g. 2013-10-12 22:51:17+0800)
- The disk name (e.g. #DATA-2080)
You can find the above two information from your servelet control panel > Storage > Snapshots.
We will then convert the snapshot into a disk volume, and temporarily
attach the disk volume into your existing servelet, so that you can
copy the data over to your servelet. Once you have done with the
copying, we will detach back the temporary volume.
At the moment, the process has to be done manually. However, we are
looking into possibility of making this process automated for the
convenience of all our customers.
More information about our snapshot backup feature can be found on our knowledge base articles at this URL:
Yes, you heard right. CloudFlare’s CDN (Content Delivery Network)
services are now available for all customers in their Servelet control
panel. There are no installation fees, and with this new feature, you
can create, enable and manage your CloudFlare CDN directly through your
Servelet panel so that everything is conveniently centralized.
What is CloudFlare?
CloudFlare is a multi-award winning CDN (Content Delivery Network)
service which helps to accelerate and secure your websites hosted on
your servelets by providing caching and proxying service for your
websites. CloudFlare can help you to protect your websites from
malicious visitors, save your servelet’s bandwidth and reduce the
loading time of your websites.
CloudFlare also has multiple CDN nodes all around the globe, and the
nodes will keep a copy of your website’s cache. All your websites’
visitors will be redirected and served by the nearest CDN node, thus
increasing the speed and reducing the users’ website load time.
Once you have activated the CloudFlare CDN service for any of your
domains hosted in our name servers, our name servers will then make the
necessary changes to point your website’s domain (normally http://www.YOUR-DOMAIN)
to CloudFlare CDN network. At the same time, our control panel will
connect to CloudFlare CDN network’s API to register your account and
domain into the CDN network.
This allows CloudFlare to accelerate your website traffic, since all
requests to your website will be routed through CloudFlare CDN network.
CloudFlare’s advanced CDN technology will help to screen your website’s
traffic from malicious visitors, cache static content of your website
and optimise your web content.
What are the advantages of using CloudFlare CDN?
The advantages of using CloudFlare CDN:
Improve the overall performance of your website.
Protect your website from malicious threats.
Computer infection alert to visitors of your website.
Offline browsing mode of your website when your servelet is down.
Overall lower CPU usage of your servelet.
What are the caveats of CloudFlare CDN I need to take note of?
Some caveats and limitation of enabling CloudFlare CDN service for your website:
Your web statistics might not reflect the actual number of visitors
to your site, because some of the requests are handled by CloudFlare CDN
nodes and not handled by your web server directly.
Because CloudFlare CDN nodes cache static contents from your
website, any changes to your content might not be reflected immediately
when your visitors visit your page.
CloudFlare CDN service will only handle requests going to http://www.YOUR-DOMAIN, while requests going to [YOUR-DOMAIN] would normally still be handled by your web server.
CloudFlare CDN service (the free plan) doesn’t support SSL.
OK, I am very interested in trying the service. How do I sign up?
The CloudFlare CDN service works together with DNS Hosting service,
so you will need to use our DNS Hosting service (which is also free) for
the CloudFlare CDN service to work.
To order the CloudFlare CDN service, login to the customer portal
> Order > CDN Services. Choose “CloudFlare CDN” and then click
“Order Now!”
How do I configure the CloudFlare CDN service?
To manage the CloudFlare CDN service, login to the customer portal
and then go to Services > CDN Services > CloudFlare CDN. You will
see the CloudFlare CDN console panel.
Click on “Managed Websites”. You will see the list of domains which
are hosted in SimplerCloud’s name servers under “DNS Hosting service”.
If you do not subscribe to DNS Hosting service or you haven’t add any
domains under DNS hosting service, you will not see any domains listed
here.
To enable CloudFlare CDN service for a particular domain, just click
the grey cloud next to the domain name. Once the service is activated,
the cloud’s colour will change to orange.
What will happen to my domain once the CloudFlare CDN service is activated?
Once the CloudFlare CDN service is activated for your domain, the DNS
records for your domain will automatically be changed to point to the
CloudFlare CDN service’s IP address rather than the actual IP address of
your servelet.
Your website (e.g. http://www.YOUR-DOMAIN) will be served by CloudFlare CDN service rather than by your servelet directly.
Summary
Our control panel is now integrating our name servers (through our
DNS Hosting service) and CloudFlare CDN services (through CloudFlare
API), allowing you to enable CloudFlare CDN services for your websites
hosted on your servelets with just a click of a button (a cloud image,
to be exact). All the required processes: the creation of CloudFlare
account, registering of your domain names into your CloudFlare account
and enabling your domain name to use CloudFlare CDN services (by
changing the DNS records of the domain hosted in our name servers to
CloudFlare node IP addresses) are being done automatically in the
back-end. And furthermore, the service is provided for free to all our
customers.
So, what are you waiting for? Host your domain names in our name
servers and try the CloudFlare CDN services for your website, for free.
It has been very exciting days (and nights) for all of us here at SimplerCloud
in the past month. Building a top-notch and world-class,
built-from-the-ground cloud infrastructure is not easy, but we are very
happy that we are now coming to this stage that we are ready to roll-out
our services. We built SimplerCloud after realizing that there are no
Asian cloud computing providers who can provide a true automated and
100% self-manageable cloud servers with high-performing, fast SSD
servers and painless, instant deployment and on-the-fly scaling.
The main features of our services are our virtual machines (VM), which we call Servelets.
They are on-demand, scalable virtualized servers accessible over the
Internet. They are set up instantly, very easy to manage, and extremely
reliable. Those Servelets are deployed in real-time and will be ready
for use just minutes upon confirmation of the order. The most important
thing is that they are more affordable than anything found in the market
today.
And when we say it’s affordable, we really mean it. Our smallest XS Servelet plan
only costs US$10 a month, without any contract commitments. This comes
with 1 GB RAM, 20 GB blazing-fast SSD storage, 1 vCPU core and 1 TB of
data transfer. It will be very difficult to get that kind of price for a
cloud server, not only here in Singapore, but also in Asia.
Of course, our ability to bring the price down doesn’t sacrifice on
quality. We want to provide cloud services which are easy, instant and
reliable. All our servelets sit on very fast systems powered by SSD (solid-state) drives
in a distributed and scalable storage system on high performance 10Gbps
links. SSD uses integrated circuit assemblies as memory to store data
persistently, without any moving mechanical components, unlike
traditional hard drives. The result is a blazing fast I/O performance
for your servelets, 3-10 times normal hard drives.
In addition to our Servelets, we also provide additional services such as domain registrations and SSL certificate.
For domain registrations, we are currently providing TLD (top level
domain) registrations for .com, .org, .net, .biz, .info and .name,
starting from US$ 14.95 per month! More TLDs will be added soon,
including country-level ccTLDs such as .SG and .ID. We also provides
free DNS hosting for our customers. As for SSL certificate, we provide
basic and wildcard SSL certificates starting from just US$ 29.90 per
year.
All the above services can be ordered and managed through our simple and easy-to-use, multi-lingual control panel.
At the moment both our website and our control panel are in English and
Bahasa Indonesia, and more languages will be added soon. You can browse
all the services that we provide, order any of the services instantly
and start using those services almost immediately! Payment can be made
using Paypal or credit card. You can also manage all the services that
you have with us, console in to your Servelets, manage your domains and
more.
So, what are you waiting for? Please visit our website, create yourself an account on our customer portal (it’s free) and start jumping into the real cloud bandwagon.
The default libvirt version on Ubuntu 12.04 doesn’t support Ceph RBD as primary storage. I followed this instruction from Wido to get libvirt version 1.0.2, which can support RBD storage pool support. However, I had an issue whereby the libvirt is reporting wrong RBD storage pool’s disk usage / allocation information.
As a result, VM instance creation failed because the RBD storage pool is reported as having insufficient disk space and CloudStack wasn’t able to find a suitable /available storage pool.
2013-07-15 11:15:28,313 DEBUG [cloud.storage.StorageManagerImpl] (Job-Executor-3:job-168) Checking pool: 208 for volume allocation [Vol[227|vm=225|ROOT]], maxSize : 15828044742656, totalAllocatedSize : 1769538048, askingSize : 8589934592, allocated disable threshold: 0.85 2013-07-15 11:15:28,313 DEBUG [storage.allocator.AbstractStoragePoolAllocator] (Job-Executor-3:job-168) Checking if storage pool is suitable, name: sc-image ,poolId: 209 2013-07-15 11:15:28,313 DEBUG [storage.allocator.AbstractStoragePoolAllocator] (Job-Executor-3:job-168) Is localStorageAllocationNeeded? false 2013-07-15 11:15:28,313 DEBUG [storage.allocator.AbstractStoragePoolAllocator] (Job-Executor-3:job-168) Is storage pool shared? true 2013-07-15 11:15:28,317 DEBUG [cloud.storage.StorageManagerImpl] (Job-Executor-3:job-168) Checking pool 209 for storage, totalSize: 6013522722816, usedBytes: 38283921137336466, usedPct: 6366.305226067051, disable threshold: 0.85 2013-07-15 11:15:28,317 DEBUG [cloud.storage.StorageManagerImpl] (Job-Executor-3:job-168) Insufficient space on pool: 209 since its usage percentage: 6366.305226067051 has crossed the pool.storage.capacity.disablethreshold: 0.85 2013-07-15 11:15:28,317 DEBUG [storage.allocator.FirstFitStoragePoolAllocator] (Job-Executor-3:job-168) FirstFitStoragePoolAllocator returning 1 suitable storage pools 2013-07-15 11:15:28,317 DEBUG [cloud.deploy.FirstFitPlanner] (Job-Executor-3:job-168) Checking suitable pools for volume (Id, Type): (228,DATADISK) 2013-07-15 11:15:28,317 DEBUG [cloud.deploy.FirstFitPlanner] (Job-Executor-3:job-168) We need to allocate new storagepool for this volume 2013-07-15 11:15:28,319 DEBUG [cloud.deploy.FirstFitPlanner] (Job-Executor-3:job-168) Calling StoragePoolAllocators to find suitable pools 2013-07-15 11:15:28,319 DEBUG [storage.allocator.FirstFitStoragePoolAllocator] (Job-Executor-3:job-168) Looking for pools in dc: 6 pod:6 cluster:6 having tags:[rbd] 2013-07-15 11:15:28,322 DEBUG [storage.allocator.FirstFitStoragePoolAllocator] (Job-Executor-3:job-168) FirstFitStoragePoolAllocator has 1 pools to check for allocation 2013-07-15 11:15:28,322 DEBUG [storage.allocator.AbstractStoragePoolAllocator] (Job-Executor-3:job-168) Checking if storage pool is suitable, name: sc-image ,poolId: 209 2013-07-15 11:15:28,322 DEBUG [storage.allocator.AbstractStoragePoolAllocator] (Job-Executor-3:job-168) Is localStorageAllocationNeeded? false 2013-07-15 11:15:28,322 DEBUG [storage.allocator.AbstractStoragePoolAllocator] (Job-Executor-3:job-168) Is storage pool shared? true 2013-07-15 11:15:28,326 DEBUG [cloud.storage.StorageManagerImpl] (Job-Executor-3:job-168) Checking pool 209 for storage, totalSize: 6013522722816, usedBytes: 38283921137336466, usedPct: 6366.305226067051, disable threshold: 0.85 2013-07-15 11:15:28,326 DEBUG [cloud.storage.StorageManagerImpl] (Job-Executor-3:job-168) Insufficient space on pool: 209 since its usage percentage: 6366.305226067051 has crossed the pool.storage.capacity.disablethreshold: 0.85 2013-07-15 11:15:28,326 DEBUG [storage.allocator.FirstFitStoragePoolAllocator] (Job-Executor-3:job-168) FirstFitStoragePoolAllocator returning 0 suitable storage pools 2013-07-15 11:15:28,326 DEBUG [cloud.deploy.FirstFitPlanner] (Job-Executor-3:job-168) No suitable pools found for volume: Vol[228|vm=225|DATADISK] under cluster: 6 2013-07-15 11:15:28,326 DEBUG [cloud.deploy.FirstFitPlanner] (Job-Executor-3:job-168) No suitable pools found 2013-07-15 11:15:28,326 DEBUG [cloud.deploy.FirstFitPlanner] (Job-Executor-3:job-168) No suitable storagePools found under this Cluster: 6 2013-07-15 11:15:28,326 DEBUG [cloud.deploy.FirstFitPlanner] (Job-Executor-3:job-168) Could not find suitable Deployment Destination for this VM under any clusters, returning. 2013-07-15 11:15:28,332 DEBUG [cloud.vm.UserVmManagerImpl] (Job-Executor-3:job-168) Destroying vm VM[User|Indra-Test-3] as it failed to create on Host with Id:null 2013-07-15 11:15:28,498 DEBUG [cloud.capacity.CapacityManagerImpl] (Job-Executor-3:job-168) VM state transitted from :Stopped to Error with event: OperationFailedToErrorvm's original host id: null new host id: null host id before state transition: null 2013-07-15 11:15:29,125 INFO [user.vm.DeployVMCmd] (Job-Executor-3:job-168) com.cloud.exception.InsufficientServerCapacityException: Unable to create a deployment for VM[User|Indra-Test-3]Scope=interface com.cloud.dc.DataCenter; id=6
After consulting the CloudStack users’ mailing list and logging a bug report on Apache’s JIRAhere without any success, I managed to resolve the problem by compiling and installing the latest version of libvirt. This is how I did it on my KVM hypervisor hosts running on Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS servers:
1. Download the latest libvirt version (1.1.0) from libvirt’s FTP site, and extract it:
As I have mentioned on my tweet earlier, I have got myself a new phone. And you know what, I got my phone upgraded for free. Really. :)
Since I’m a SingTel’s mio Home user, I am eligible for re-contract every one year. And this month is exactly one year since I re-contracted my line for me to get my SamsungGalaxy S II phone last year. I checked SingTelShop’s website and with my current 3G Flexi Value plan, I can get the new Samsung Galaxy S III phone for $348. Furthermore, with SingTel UOB credit card promotion, I can get $50 off the handset price, so the price of the phone reduces to just $298, or approximately 2.2 million rupiah.
Lastly, I traded-in my old Samsung Galaxy S II phone and fortunately, SingTel’s trade-in value for my old phone is quite high, $300. Therefore, I don’t need to pay a single cent for this upgrade. :)
There are two colours available for Samsung Galaxy S III, and I chose the pebble blue. I’ve checked some stores which sell the phone without contract, and for some reason, the blue Galaxy S III is more expensive than the white one. Not too sure why. I suspect that many people prefers the blue one rather than the white one, causing the demand for the blue one is higher, thus pushing the price slightly higher.
Apologise for the low quality of the picture above, I took it using my Blackberry Bold 9900 phone, which you might have known, its camera is not really that good. Of course, I cannot take a picture of the phone using the phone itself, can I? :)
My verdict after using this new phone for a couple of days: I feel that its CPU processes faster than my older Galaxy S II. Applications such as Seesmic, Facebook and Instagram runs faster on the phone, thanks to its quad-core 1.4 GHz CPU, which is much better than S II’s dual-core 1.2 GHz CPU. I also appreciate its bigger display, it’s a 4.8-inch display compared to S II’s 4.3-inch. Furthermore, the resolution is much better, 720 x 1280 pixels compared to S II’s 480 x 800 pixels.
Compared to my older S II, I think that the S III has a slightly longer battery life. But it could also be because it’s new, so I cannot compare apple-to-apple with my 1-year old S II. Some people have pointed out that the S III might have a software bug draining its battery, but so far I don’t see it happening on my phone.
I also love the bahasa Indonesia dictionary. I can type faster using its swype function with ease in Indonesian. Its notification functions are also much better. And having this new phone allows me to have 50 GB of space in my Dropbox account. There are also many new features which I didn’t have it on the earlier Samsung Galaxy S II.
Basically, upgrading my phone from my older S II to the new S III is a good choice. Especially since I can have it for free. :)
If I’m accessing Koprol via its mobile interface and go to Home, when I click the “Older” hyperlink to see the earlier timeline for the first time (to go to page 2 of the timeline), it’s working properly. But when I click the “older” hyperlink for the second time (to go to page 3 of the timeline), I see very old updates (around 7 days ago) instead of the earlier timeline.
The problem only happens if I use my mobile phone to access the mobile interface. If I use my laptop, I don’t encounter the same problem.
Not too sure why. Is it my mobile phone’s browser issue? I’m using Opera Mobile on my HTC HD2.
Update on 27 June 2010, 10:30hrs SGT: I have performed further troubleshooting last night, upon getting some advice from Daniel Armanto, one of Koprol's bosses. It seems that the problem only happened if I'm using SingTel's 3.5G connection. When I switched to my wi-fi connection at home, I didn't encounter the problem, despite it's connected to the same ISP, SingNet in this case.
Thus, I'm convinced now that the problem is not on Koprol's server nor on my mobile phone's browser, but it's most probably my 3.5G Internet service provider issue. Looks like it's SingTel 3.5G's proxy issue?
After experiencing the annoying keyboard problem on my Xperia X1 for months, I decided to bring the phone back to Sony Ericsson Service Centre at Wisma Atria last week. They confirmed that it was a hardware problem, and they have replaced the keyboard with a new one. I have just collected the phone yesterday, and I am now very happy that I can type normally again on the phone, with ease.
I didn’t have to pay anything for this, since the phone is still under warranty. They even lent me another phone for me to use while my phone is on service, despite it being a very low-end phone which I didn’t use at all, eventually. The only downside is that the phone is being reset to its factory settings, and all my data and applications are gone. The service centre officer has already informed me about this when I send the phone for servicing, so I have prepared to backup all the data and applications on my Outlook and the micro SD card.
My only concern is that it seems that it is really, indeed, a hardware problem, most probably due to wear and tear. Until when before the same problem will start to happen again on this new keyboard? And how if by that time, the warranty is already expired?
After several months using my Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 mobile phone, I have started to encounter some issues with its slide-out keyboard. This problem is specifically annoying since I’m a heavy user of the keyboard (for Internet, e-mail, SMS etc).
Some of the keys especially on the lower part of the keyboard, such as the Fn (blue) key, C key, V key, N key, the spacebar and the . (dot) key are not responsive, and do not register the keys when pressed even though we get the tactile (click) feedback from the keys. And sometimes, if we press harder, it will register double, or sometimes triple, of the keys. Really annoying and irritating
The problem started last month with the spacebar, and then spreads to other keys. This means that the problem seems to get worse over time, since more and more keys are affected eventually. This also means that the problem might be due to a design flaw rather than just a simple mechanical problem. Very disappointing.
I reported this problem last month on the XDA-Developers forum, and at first, there was no reply to the first post I made. However, eventually I found out that many other Xperia X1 users started to experience this problem. I’m not too sure whether the problem will be resolved if I bring the phone to the Sony Ericsson service centre, since it seems to be a design flaw instead of a mechanical malfunction. Any suggestions?
As an alternative, I have temporarily installed FingerKeyboard2, originally developed for HTC Touch HD (Blackstone), for my on-screen keyboard. Quite nice and easy to use. But I still prefer the sliding keyboard, though.
I have temporarily shut down my Planet Indra site. For some unknown reasons, the WordPress-based aggregation blog site refuses to show the contents of the blog and instead it's giving this error message to everyone who tried to access the site:
It doesn't look like you've installed WP yet. Try running install.php
I have Googled around and mostly people would encounter the above message when they tried to upgrade their WordPress installation. This is not the case in my situation. I was not doing anything on the WordPress installation and suddenly the error message appeared. I have other WordPress installations for Minda Indra and Planet Singapura on the same server, running under the same user-id and connecting to the same MySQL database, and they do not encounter the same problem.
Anyone has a clue on what could have happened? Could it be that the database used is corrupted?
I haven't got the time to investigate this issue further. Will look into this problem later when I have the time. Apologise for the inconvenience caused.
Before I had my Multiply site, I used to use Yahoo! Photos to store my photo albums. There were more than twenty albums I stored there before I started to use Multiply, which I think is much better in terms of features and community. Time goes on, and since Flickr was being acquired by them, Yahoo! had two redundant photo sharing services. And now, they have decided to close Yahoo! Photos since they will focus their efforts for the development of Flickr.
Yahoo! will officially close the service on 20 September 2007, and they give the option of moving the photos to another photo sharing service, download the original resolution photos back to our computers, or buy an archive CD containing all the photos. I chose the first option, and considering Flickr is currently also being managed by Yahoo!, I decided to move the photos to my Flickr account, which I have merged with my Yahoo! account quite some time ago.
It's quite easy to migrate, I just needed to login to my Yahoo! Photos site and chose Flickr to transfer my photo albums, and they will do the rest. They estimated that it will take up to a week for them to do so, however I found out that all my albums were being migrated in less my two days. All my Yahoo! Photos albums were conveniently being transformed into sets in Flickr, and being set as private so I can easily mark which albums I want to set public and which ones I want to keep private. Very convenient.
The only problem is that the number of sets for normal (free) Flickr account is limited to three. Because I moved my Yahoo! Photo albums to Flickr, they have generously gave me free 3 months of Pro account, which will expire on 28 September 2007, but I was wondering what will happen to my albums (read: sets) after the Pro account expires. I might need to extend the Pro account, which will cost me US$24.95 a year. Holy smokes! That's cheap! Or, is it? :) Considering that Multiply can give unlimited albums and photos for free? :)
Well, what I am doing now is to create a same tag for all the photos on the same albums, so I can still access my albums using tags. Hopefully this will help me to track the albums even after the Pro account is expired. Or, perhaps later someone might be kindly enough to give me a Flick Pro gift account, for free? Who knows... :) :)
I encountered quite a lot of problems when I used the Blue Horizon theme for Planet Indra. The sidebar.php file is not really easy to modify, making it difficult for me to add some widget scripts there. For example, it's a bit difficult for me to add the scripts to show the Kronologis sideblog and Oggix shoutbox there. Well, I can still add the widgets there, but the whole sidebar layout will become very messy. My friend JaF even told me that he always sees the sidebar dangling (is dangling the correct word for "melorot" in English?), using either Firefox or Internet Explorer.
In view of this, I decided to give a new look for Planet Indra. After searching and testing various WordPress themes, I decided to use the Golden Grey theme, by William Pramana. Well, of course it's not because William is sharing the same last name as I am :) , but because I really like the layout design. And, the most important thing, it's much easier to modify the sidebar.php file to insert the necessary gadgets that I want. The Kronologis box also fits nicely in the sidebar, resolving the dangling problem.
Both JaF and Rani introduced Twitter to me, which has features similar to what Kronologis offers. I have signed up for an account there, but so far I haven't been fully making use of it. At the moment, I'm quite happy to use Kronologis for my sideblog, and so far I haven't had a plan to switch. :) Well, I might want to use Twitter for my sideblog in English, since currently I'm using bahasa Indonesia for my Kronologis sideblog. We'll see. :)
At last, I have managed to find a workaround to the syndication problem on my aggregation sites such as Planet Indra and Planet Singapura, thanks to Alarix and Isman. As reported earlier, the syndication sites, which are actually Wordpress engine using FeedWordPress plugin, were only showing the titles (instead of the full articles) of articles being syndicated from Blogger-based weblogs, especially after the blogs were being upgraded to the new Blogger.
A discussion on a Blogfamforum's thread revealed that one of Blogfam's system administrators, Alarix, encountered the same problem when he's launching Rumah Blogfam, an aggregator site for Blogfam's members, which happens to also use FeedWordPress. Another Blogfam member, Isman, also looked into this matter and he managed to find out that the problem was due to the incompatibility between FeedWordPress and the Atom feed published by the Blogger-based weblogs.
He suggested to use the RSS 2.0 feed published by Blogspot to be used as the feed source, instead of the Atom feed. The URL format of the RSS 2.0 feed in weblogs under Blogspot (after being upgraded to the new Blogger) is:
On top of that, he also suggested to use FeedBurner to burn the feed source, instead of syndicating the feed source directly, similar to what Fatihhas suggested to me earlier.
So, these are the steps of workaround I've performed:
Use FeedBurner to burn the above RSS 2.0 feed (instead of the Atom feed);
Configure my FeedWordPress to syndicate the Feedburner feed address, i.e. http://feeds.feedburner.com/(feed-name); and
And, voila, the above steps resolved the problem. You can see the results on the new posts being syndicated by Planet Indra and Planet Singapura, it's now showing the full articles instead of the titles only.
Again, thanks to Isman, Alarix and Fatih for all the hints and suggestions. Really appreciate it. :)
My blogger friend Tata, who is currently in Switzerland but is having a plan to migrate to Singapore soon with his family, informed me that his computer always hung after viewing the main page of The Journey of Inka and Irza. I tried to replicate the problem, and yes, I also encountered the same problem. My Mozilla Firefox hung after trying to load the page for some time, not too sure why. Many thanks Tata for the feedback. :)
To be frank, firstly I didn't really much bother since the blog itself is already in hiatus mode for quite some time. In the past couple of months, I prefer to write stories about Inka and Irza in the photo section of my Multiply site, together with all the photos, while the Indonesian versions of the stories are usually posted in Rumah Indra. So, I didn't update that blog too often. However, writing articles (with all the hyperlinks etc) on a photo blog is quite inconvenient, especially since you would need to add the hyperlink tags manually. So, I've decided that I would want to use back The Journey of Inka and Irza for me to write stories about my kids and family, in English. Furthermore, I have configured my Multiply site to import all my articles from all my blogs under my Blogger account, including The Journey of Inka and Irza and Rumah Indra.
Before I start using it, I need to fix the problem first. Since I suspect that the problem might be due to the template, a quick and clean way to resolve the problem might be using a new template altogether. So, I backed up my previous template, and then I picked up a new template and at the same time, upgraded the template so I can use Blogger's new template layout tools, since I've already upgraded the blog to the new Blogger.
So, the problem is now fixed. You should not have any issues accessing The Journey of Inka and Irza blog site again, and I'm ready to post future articles about stories of Inka and Irza there again. Stay tuned! :)
I have checked my Blogger settings and it's confirmed that the blogs are being configured with full RSS feeds. I even tried to browse the RSS feed manually to ensure that full feed is shown. I also have checked the syndication options on the FeedWordPress-based syndication sites, and confirmed that it should extract the full article from the feeds. Why only the titles are being shown on the syndication sites?
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