SgtMuffin

In early 2020 I was thinking about finally moving into more of a ‘forever’ home versus the very small place I was living before. There were some perks to moving now versus later… the big one being the housing market is crazy.

The final decision to move was triggered by the realtor telling me just how much my little home was worth. I almost doubled by investment, combined with the fact that my home had very little left on the loan.

The house had 18 total showings in under 4 days, and had 4 offers. Crazy. The part I did not think through clearly is that same issue would hit me on the other side.

I started looking at listings that I liked and put together some to go look at. 100% of them had active offers but the site I used (zillow) did not state that. Unfortunately Zillow, a site that I really love does not always get updated by the listing agent with up-to-date information.

After getting all disappointed in the lack of good options available I was able to scrape together about 4-5 to look at. We went on a day of looking at homes, and most were “meh”, except for 2 of them. One was under such a demand there was no way I was going to get it, so I gave up. I decided that the house I really loved was on a rather large plot with wetlands.

The house was a little overpriced (I thought) but after realizing everything I am getting, the assessment came back right where it should have been I was very happy putting in an offer. I had the only offer and it was mine.

After fun COVID related failures from the bank, we had some fun closing issues, but they did everything they could and I was only delayed by one day. Thank goodness the seller of the home let me move in but not sleep there until closing.

I closed in the middle of August. The house is ~3700 sqft (including basement), and I went all out to make this feel like a great house with all new furniture. Even a month and a half later, still waiting on all the living room furniture but it should be in by next month.

Once all the stuff is loaded in I’ll be updating the Muffin Lair page with new pictures. The basement is completely open right now. Pinballs are lined up, along with VR down there. Once lumber prices drop out I plan to get the basement finished for a server room, storage, theater, game room, etc.

With Never Not Funny going independent again, and rolling out an outstanding website, I wanted to adapt their new logo into a nice wallpaper. Here is the 1920 x 1080 wallpaper.

At our contractor business we have been very frustrated with the fact that the company we purchase our GPS fleet tracking through has been bought out TWICE in the past 4-6 years, and now are forcing their users to their new “enhanced interface”.

Normally you would think, “Oh, yes… this makes sense.” They would definitely benefit from only having to maintain one interface… but what if that interface is so abhorrently bad, and lacking of features you just want to cancel.

This is exactly what happened to us. We definitely benefited from their older interface. It supported us overlaying additional information on the map, for which I built a feed generator to do that. Their map was easy to read and zoom in on. You could hover on vehicles to see more details. There wasn’t much white space, each area was not wasted… Then as of July 31st the old panel was retired.

The new interface lacked RSS overlay support, lacked additional information being shown on the vehicles, had a gigantic halo around the vehicles without any idea why nor a way to disable it. It had so much wasted white space in what feels like a “I want this to look modern” type of interface.

Fortunately I did still have access to the legacy API which they did not discontinue yet, so in (1) one single day I built a live map interface with support for our overlays. It performs better than their new interface by a mile, and loads very quick (because I don’t use frameworks).

We’re not going to wait and see how much longer the old API is going to stay active, we just ordered new devices with a competing company which has a properly documented API system. We will be able to still utilize my new live map to show vehicle locations and for other functions we can use their interface because it’s designed very intelligently.

The real frustration: Ass-Backwards Design!

I understand sometimes new interfaces have growing pains. Take for example the new reddit… but this design forced on paying customers was so backwards, it makes me wonder who the hell thought this was a good idea.

I have seen this with new websites, and honestly, this site is one of them because I do not want to spend the time to do a custom theme. You can still build a functional design and not waste space.

A older uglier style will win me over any day over a new style that loads slow with pointless overload of scripts and framework files required to use the site. Efficiency MATTERS.

TL;DR

GPS company got bought out, forced us to use their interface. UI is utter garbage, every employee absolutely hated it. We are switching companies. Really frustrated with current “design” standards that waste space, and UI designers who have no idea how to think like a novice. I won’t name the businesses, because this is America and we are voting with our money, they lost a good income annually from us.

TL;DR: Upgrade took a while but went really smooth. Ran into several small events but it all worked out and now on a more stable platform that supports even more failures without a hiccup.

Over the past few weeks I was tasked with rebuilding our internal IT infrastructure, as our old server originally built in 2008-2009 was showing it’s age. Although at the end it was a beastly system featuring dual X5460 processors it started struggling with our automation tasks that keep all of our internal systems running. cronjob and task scheduler (windows) are your friend!

I was telling our owners and managers that we needed to upgrade our main server really soon as it was getting to the point of it being unreliable… and wouldn’t you know it… PROBLEMS!

The existing machine was a HP Proliant ML350 G5 and it featured a very nice Raid system (HP E200i Smart Array). It has helped us out of a lot of jams because old hard drives like to bite the dust considering they are worked non-stop 24/7. Unfortunately this error message was something I haven’t seen before. It stated it was ready for rebuild but no matter what I would do it would refuse to start.

Fighting with it during boot up to force it to start recovery it would fail after a minute and go back to operating poorly and locking up.

What route do we take?

There are a lot of routes to take going forward. I never want to buy new servers because we do not need necessarily cutting edge servers (plus you pay way too much for nothing when it comes to new servers!)

After looking at options I placed two options in front of the company… We buy a newer (used) server again, or we build our own mini rack. After thinking it through I went with the custom market.

I know darn well that current generation hardware is pretty reliable, and considering I replaced my lan party room with new 2600 Ryzen computers, thought it could be adapted to a server environment.

Instead of one server for $1,600 (used), I went with building two exactly identical systems with AMD Ryzen 2600 processors, and 32GB of DDR4 ram. There are two RAID 1 arrays in each, one for SSDs and one for HDDs. I was able to build two of those systems and a nice wall enclosure for the systems for the same price!

Virtualization!

The one thing I wanted to do on the new system versus the old was build it all on top of Virtualization. I haven’t had to work with any other Virtualized environment than VirtualBox, but for a server environment I wanted something a bit more reliable and robust (at least from the looks of it), so I went Hyper-V 2016 Server (Core) for both. I did have 2019 lined up but they had issues with supporting our Raid Controller on both machines and 2016 worked out just fine!

For those who do not know, there are big benefits to building servers on top of a virtualized platform… While you may lose a bit of performance to the ’emulation’ layers of things like network cards, and other I/O devices, you have easy recovery and other nice features.

For example, if our old server died, I had other hardware to load our snapshots/backups onto, but if the hardware is different enough, windows will not easily be able to boot up properly without a lot of fighting and configuring. In a virtualized environment you can easily drop and build a matched system and it will boot and operate without a hitch! This is what I wanted, and since both servers are identical it makes that that much easier allowing one server to take over for the other in case of a hardware failure.

Splitting the Work

It made sense to split the work up a bit. Our old machine was a domain controller, file server, web server, database server, quickbooks server and more! Everything was on one point of failure. I hate that.

The new set up had one machine handle the web server and algorithms, and one handled file server, domain controller, and quickbooks. It was a good divide.

Improving IIS

Upon initial set up of the IIS web server I noticed scripts were taking longer to computer than our old server. I was baffled as the drives were much quicker, the ram was much faster (DDR4 VS DDR2) and each server had 12 threads @ 3.6ghz. Reading up on everything I went through and tweaked PHP, MariaDB, and IIS. And after much work got things running lightning quick. The important improvement being adjusting how many instances of the FastCGI PHP module were allowed. Moving it from 0 (unlimited) to 24 helped tremendously. For some reason it would never make more than 1 instance no matter what. (IIS 10)

We have room to grow!

With the new machines running smoothly for a week now I finally took some ‘free’ vacation due to all the extra hours I pulled. This is the type of stuff I live for. We have more power than any of our competitors, and we are soon going to be adding and adding more AI experiences for our customers, having our system analyze our customers and tailor options to them they may want.

I am excited for what the future brings for these beautiful machines. Not to mention they are named after the HBO show, “Silicon Valley”.

Oh yeah, and we do backups!

For those thinking “Wow you’re stupid for trusting residential components”, we do three levels of backups. Snapshot backups handled locally, also file level backup done locally AND offsite. Yes, backups are checked and tested.

I had to create a script that generated rainbow between 2 to 768 colors in the rainbow. It returns an array that can be referenced. It’s ideal for 5 to 700 results.

<?PHP
// Generate Rainbow Points.
function generatecolorcodes($numberofcolor)
{
	// Find numbers to pick.
	if ($numberofcolor > 0 && $numberofcolor <= 768)
	{
		$divis = round(768 / $numberofcolor);
		$s = 0;
		while ($s < $numberofcolor)
		{
			$cwheel = $s * $divis;
			if ($cwheel >= 0 && $cwheel < 256)
			{
				$red = 255 - $cwheel;
				$green = 0 + $cwheel;
				$blue = 0;
			}
			if ($cwheel >= 256 && $cwheel < 513)
			{
				$red = 0;
				$green = 255 - ($cwheel - 255);
				$blue = 0 + ($cwheel - 255);
			}
			if ($cwheel >= 513 && $cwheel < 768)
			{
				$red = 0 + ($cwheel - 512);
				$green = 0;
				$blue = 255 - ($cwheel - 512);
			}
			$red = dechex($red);
			$green = dechex($green);
			$blue = dechex($blue);
			if (strlen($blue)<2) {$blue = '0'.$blue;}
			if (strlen($green)<2){$green = '0'.$green;}
			if (strlen($red)<2){$red = '0'.$red;}
			$outarray[$s] = "#" . $red . $green . $blue;
			$s++;
		}
	}
	return $outarray;
}
?>

Just heard a horror story of a company who decided to change hosts to their new IT guys and it backfired. It’s not best to trust a small business web hosting company who does not handle web hosting primarily. They may have servers that work but they may not have reliable services like Backups, Backup Power, etc.

Websites are important and many use the hosting account to run their emails too. They did in this case and lost them all. I had them on a service that had backups. The hosts I recommend at this point in time is Dreamhost or Hostgator. I prefer Dreamhost for their free SSL certs (using Let’s Encrypt) plus user isolation incase of security incidents on just one of your sites. If you’re used to using cpanel go with hostgator. Neither will give you 100% uptime but they do their best (much like others I didn’t name) to make sure things are fixed quickly.

It’s a shame this is where we are. The FCC is going to be voting to strip Net Neutrality rights. This is not good, and speaking as a person who has set up and manage TONS of servers on different carriers I can tell you this breaks rules that helps keep everyone honest.

While I don’t believe ISPs will be doing tiers in the way people over-react to, I do see legitimate throttling like so…

(These are examples, they are not doing this currently, only theoretical)

Spectrum has their own voice service, to encourage people to use their service they will intentionally starve connections to that service to make their service look better. They could do anything from providing poor routing, not upgrading where needed to handle the load or just having a lot of packet loss making the phone call sound terrible.

AT&T offers DirecTV Now and U-Verse service. They could slow down or not give proper bandwidth to services like Sling TV, PlayStation Vue, Hulu TV, etc. This would make their services look better by giving the illusion that a service is worse when it really wasn’t the producing company’s fault.

Verizon has a NFL deal and if you were trying to watch NFL on their network from a different legit source they could slow you down or just not provide reliable service so you would get a bad feeling about what you’re paying for and dump it for verizon’s.

In the past things like this has happened, and it would make a triumphant return if their lobbyists get their way.

This should not be a divided issue. There is literally no benefit to the customers, only the freedom for the companies to do what they do best… Try to get all the money they can from us pathetic chumps. From what I have seen our current government is not remotely listening to the people at this time, they are setting up their friends and other wealthy donors with the bonuses that they really want. We have to do what we can, call your politicians… It’s pretty much all we can do.

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