The Bored Wookie

Back in December 2011 I wrote a high level article comparing a few VPS Providers. After settling on AlienVPS, I decided to pick up a VPS instance from a competitor (Chicago VPS) and track their uptime and performance over time.

It has been over 150,000 minutes since I started tracking uptime and performance on these servers (14-January-2012). I've sifted the data and have a few things to say about each provider.

We made a few tweaks to our QA Automation system to improve test case execution speed. A side effect of the changes made support for OpenSSH Versions lower than 4.4 a real trial to support. As only one machine in our test lab was running an out-dated version of OpenSSH (The HPPA 11.11 machine) it was decided that it should be updated to a more recent edition of OpenSSH.

I was expecting it to take an hour (tops), but my shortcut method didn't work. I ended up using a multi-step process (including compiling OpenSSL) to get the box up to date.

Today we had need of a very specific SSH Configuration: SSH1 with an RSA1 key. After looking online and at books (APress's OpenSSH, specifically) I was able to get a server configured.

This server is used for a very specific, limited & intermittent use. I definitely DO NOT advocate the use of SSH1 / RSA1 for public facing or secure infrastructures.

I just spent about 4 hours troubleshooting an issue I had implementing the PHP mail() function. On the surface it looks fairly straight-forward. You call the method, pass the parameters and email gets sent.

If the stars are aligned, everything will work great for you the first time. If, however, you don't have the dependencies installed things won't go quite as smoothly.

We currently use VMWare solutions (ESX & VMWare workstation) for all of our server virtualization. It has a great API and is fast, efficient and easy to setup. The catch is that you pay through the nose for access to Virtual RAM (vSphere 5).

As we scale our server infrastructure we may hit a point where VMWare licensing just doesn't make sense. In looking at the competition (Microsoft HyperV, Citrix Xen Server) it looks like the Citrix solutions (at this time) would be the best alternative if we ever wanted to switch.

For anyone considering Citrix, you will probably want to evaluate their API / SDK. Here are a few relevant links if want to learn more:

ServerFault thread on Xen API: http://serverfault.com/questions/81586/does-citrix-xenserver-have-a-sdk-or-api
SDK Download: http://community.citrix.com/cdn/xs/sdks
XenServer Doc: http://docs.vmd.citrix.com/XenServer/5.5.0/1.0/en_gb/sdk.html
Convert VMWare Virtual Machines: http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX116603

Brain dump: I recently generated some SSH Keypairs and wanted to document the process. While there are more than 10,000 pages out there that list this, I like knowing I can search my site for the steps that worked for me. :)

This covers how to use PuTTYGen and OpenSSH to generate keypairs

I ran into an issue installing PhoneGap this evening. Here are the symptoms:

• Installer never prompts for my User credentials
• Install fails with the message:
  
  The installation failed.
  The installer encountered an error that caused the installation to fail. Contact the software manufacturer for assistance.

Note: While I love how spacious Apple Trackpads are, I HATE the new gesture system. I just lost 20 minutes work writing this article because Safari thought I wanted to go back a page by swiping... wow, that was annoying.

Update: Apparently another root cause is if you have cocos2d installed. See this thread for details.

In a previous article I mentioned that I'd be Open sourcing a Password recovery app that I had put together to help me remember by Blackberry Codesigning Certificate password. This post is the "Homepage" for the utility and will describe what it is and how to use it.

Read on for details (Download link is at the bottom of the page)

Around 3 days ago I lost the password to my Blackberry Codesiging key. When you set it up @ the CLI, it doesn't ask for confirmation and I fat-fingered it... Fortunately I was able to recover the codesigning certificate password using a Password recovery tool I wrote from scratch over the weekend. With a few assumptions about my password, a few lines of code and a few days I was able to decipher the password to my Blackberry author.p12 keystore.

Have you or a loved one lost a.p12 / .pfx / blackberry code signing password? Read on for details on how I was able to recover my password...

Update: I have posted an article about the Certificate Password Recovery Tool. The source is available under an MIT license.