Vancouver Canada

Here are two tips from a reader for making the most of selling on craigslist. Stephen writes:

A lot of people offer free stoves, stackable washer/dryers, and other large appliances simply because they don’t want to move them. If you watch, you’ll notice these from time-to-time in your neighborhood. These can be resold for around $100 to $150 on Craigslist the next day.

Also, if you have something you just want gone, post it in the free section but add “or highest bidder”. We’ve found that people will offer payment for an item we just wanted gone.  We had a very large shed in our backyard we just wanted to get rid of, and when a guy said “I’ll give you 100 for it” we bumped him 20 spaces and said come get it.  He did, that day.

System maintenance is a headache. But It’s imperative to have a maintenance plan for your servers.

Someday an accident will happen; a disk will crash, someone will accidentally crash their car into the server room or a server will catch on fire.

When it happens, you need to have your back-ups in place.

Here are some routine things I do for system maintenance:

1. Backup the entire server on to the backup file server.
2. Back up the entire server /var tree (save the static pages for all the sites)
3. Back up the SQL databases (save the dynamic pages for all the sites)
4. Review the server logs for any unusual activity
5. Check the amout of free disk space on the disks
6. Do a hardware test on the disks to see if their are any problem signs
7. Check the average load on the CPU, memory and network utilization.

You’ve probably noticed that Audacious doesn’t come with any Equalizer presets. But, importing the Winamp equalizer presets is possible with the following lines (note that this will wipe your own equalizer settings):

wget http://xmms.org/misc/winamp_presets.gz
gunzip ~/.audacious/eq.preset.gz

I’m trying to import these settings into Audacious. If anyone has had any luck with this, I’d like to hear from you.

My favorite bit torrent client is utorrent.

You can run  it under Windows or Ubuntu Linux using wine. (I’m running running utorrent 1.7.7 unser Ubuntu 8.04).

I’m getting download speeds as high as 565 kB/s.

To get a good download rate you need to log into your router and port forward the utorrent port to the IP address of your torrent machine.  Or write a rule for your firewall to open the torrent port for all to all the machines on your subnet.

One problem with utorrent is that the default configuration is set to consume all your upload bandwidth for seeding torrents. This is bad news because all your other network applications will be strangled for bandwidth. Let me explain.

Telus ADSL and Shaw high-speed cable broadband both provide an asymetrical connection. The upload speed is much higher than the download speed. Shaw cable for example is nominally 5 Mbps download but only 512 Kbps upload. You only have 1/10 the upload bandwidth as download bandwidth.

This works great for most internet applications which are based on a client server model. The client makes a short request and gets a long response from the server. A client needs a lot of download bandwidth, but not nearly as much upload bandwidth. The server needs to have a balanced connection with symetrical upload and download speeds.

Now in a peer-to-peer architecture your machine is not only a client, but also a server. You are both downloading files from your peers and serving files to them. The default configuration of utorrent is set to use as much of the upload bandwidth as possible. Since all the upload bandwidth is used up, none of the requests from your other internet applications can get through resulting in dismal performance for all your other internet applications.

Solution: What works well for me is to limit the maximum upload speed in the utorrent preferences to 20 kbps.