Category: Website

There is little to nothing currently to write about in Iceland when it comes to activity in geology. What little activity is currently taking place in Iceland, I am going to write about after few moments.

Update on my local server

I now have a new server computer. I had a unused computer in Iceland and it was sent to me with the post. It was at my parents place where I had left it. It is now running FreeBSD-9.1 64-bit. I have set-up most of it, what is going to be completed later this evening is to set-up mrtg counters and properly configure it. It is a newer computer and it supports SATA har drives, the older computer was from the year 2003 (yes, I use really old hardware) and did not support SATA drives.

Thanks to a donation, I can buy a small Uninterruptible power supply for my earthquake monitoring computer and the ethernet hardware that I use. It is not meant to keep the computer up for a long time if the power goes out in a thunderstorm. Rather just to keep the computer running during the short period of power issues during a thunderstorm. The UPS that I am buying only costs 78,95€ so it is rather cheap. But as it stands, I am broke so buying hardware like this becomes expensive for me. I need at least three more, two for my computers (Desktop + server) and one for my ethernet hardware ( switch + router/wan box).

Hardware donations

I have been asked if I can take hardware donations. Since I am living in Denmark I can do so, but you have to email me first in order to see if the hardware you have is something that I can use. I cannot use everything out there and that is just the way it is. So if you want to donate a hardware for me, please let me know. I can accept hardware from other EU countries. I might be able to accept hardware from the U.S if it runs on 230V/50Hz (and there is no customs duties on it during import). Since that is the voltage standard in Europe.

As always I am looking for donation since I need to make living somehow. I get something from advertisements, but when things are quiet in Iceland traffic drops as expected and I get less advertising income from Google Adsense.

Website

In order to get more comments. I have removed the register requirement for people commenting, it might increase spam. But I have also added new spam protection in order to keep spam down. There is also the risk of comments being falsely identified as spam, if you think that has happened. Just let me know. I have comment moderation on, that increases the work for me a little bit. But it helps in keeping the spam down.

I am also going to add infolinks back as a advertiser. This also applies to my other blogs in English (with the exception of my stories web site). I need to increase my income and this is my only way to do so without constantly asking for donations. I am going to try and have the advertisements as convenient as possible on my blog sites.

Today there has been a large thunderstorm in Denmark, the largest one yet that I have seen so far since I started living here. Currently over 10.000 lightnings have been recorded from all over Denmark when this is written.

My server computer is important, it handles my earthquake counter, traffic monitoring, IPv6 gateway, dns server, local web server that I use to test and learn on web sites and more. So losing it is rather bad for me, this computer is from the year 2003 so it does not have any SATA ports and I cannot just replace the hard drive.

Replacing this computer with a new one is going to cost me at least 298€ (euro). This is the lowest price I have found in Flensburg, Germany in this store. But since I am poor, I do not have money for this computer (in fact, I do not have money for anything at the moment). I at least cannot buy a new computer at the moment.

I am not sure if I am going to get the computer to work, since the problem is that the hard drive is not detected properly. This same hard drive works on my desktop computer without any issue, so I know it is not that. One option that I have is to get a spare computer sent to me that I have in Iceland, but that is going to take some time to get that computer. That however might be my best option if I cannot buy a new computer any time soon.

Because my server is down, I have to delay few projects that I was going to start soon after some basic testing (I do not know how to properly set-up Wikimedia web site yet). I am also not able to track earthquake swarms in Iceland or El Hierro, Canary Islands while my server is down.

After this, I am going start buying backup power units to deal with this type of power issues. I am not sure when I can do so, since I do not really have a lot of money to buy backup power at the moment. I need 3 for my computers and 1 for my television and 1 for other hardware, in total 5 backup power units to keep everything working in order when a large thunderstorm is taking place in Denmark.

Update 1: I am going for the option of having my spare computer sent to me from Iceland. It is the cheapest option and I am not using that computer for anything at the moment.

Update 2: Here is the thunderstorm that broke my server. Along with the thunderstorm that took place this evening, I did thankfully was out of that thunderstorm way, at least for now.

Thunderstorm over Denmark. Copyright of this image belongs to DMI.

Updated map of thunderstorm and lightning in Denmark can be found here on DMI web site.

Blog post updated at 17:49 UTC at 19-June-2013.
Blog post updated at 22:46 UTC at 19-June-2013.

I want to remind people that I am turning off my email post-list due to cost. The cost of having the email post-list has been going up, since the more member it has the price goes up for me. Sadly, my income of this web site has not been increasing enough to support this expense. So I have have just cut it off my cost list. If people know of cheaper alternative to my current email list, please let me know so I can set it up.

I was told to get a job

I got a donation earlier this month. I was checking my invoice for it in the bank, on the comment I did see the message that I should enjoy the donation and I should also get a job. While I am thankful for the donation, I do not like the message a lot, since it implies that I am not doing any work. Nothing is future from the truth, the reason is simple. Writing is a job, granted that I am not working for big international company and I do not get any regular income from this. It is however a job and has always remained as such, many people due handle writing as just a hobby. That is fine with me, I do however handle writing as a job, even if it pays me little at the moment. That can change, I hope.

Now, I do not waste my time doing nothing when nothing is happening in Iceland. I am currently preparing to write a number of short stories, three large books (more then 300 pages) and more short stories that I hope to publish on Tor.com (if they accept me to start with). I hope that all this work, is in the end going to increase my income so that I can properly pay my bills without a issue. For the moment, I am mostly just surviving on my social welfare from Iceland, that is not easy due to my income – debt ratio. That ratio is improving and thanks to the donation I got earlier this month (the one who told me to get a job) I was able to pay down my glasses for good. There is some debt left to pay for me, but things are getting more manageable now from few months ago. I still have problems, but what is important is the fact things are getting better for me money wise. Donation however help me keep things working and I am continuing cutting down cost where I can afford it, since I need to and I just cannot afford to have everything for this blog while my income is at such low levels as it is now.

I just hope that my e-book publishing is going to fix this in the future, but I won’t believe it until I see it. So until then, I am making the best of what I have at the moment.

I need some technical help, for the reason that I am not a programmer and I never have. I guess that I never am going to be one, since I lack the talent of doing numerical math (I possibly have dyscalculia).

I problem is this, I run a internal counter on my local server. This counter helps me by telling me the total number of earthquakes during the day, week, month and a year in Iceland, it is really useful when large earthquake swarm takes place.

I used Gentoo Linux on my server, but I have now moved over to FreeBSD for technical and practical reasons. The move to FreeBSD did work as I expected, with the exception of this counter, it does not work in FreeBSD, I do not get any reading to mrtg (the counter software). The script I have been testing work when run from command line, but when I run the cron job on them. Nothing more happens and no data is handed over to mrtg.

Here are the scripts,

#!/usr/local/bin/bash

#earthquake count shell V0.0.6

URL=”http://hraun.vedur.is/ja/englishweb/eqlist.html”
TODAYSDATE=`date +%Y-%m-%d`
#TODAYSDATE=`date +%Y/%m/%d`
#TODAYSDATE=`date +%Y-%m-%d`

COUNT=`lynx -dump ${URL} | grep ${TODAYSDATE} | grep -vi updated | wc -l`
#COUNT=`wget -O ${URL} | grep ${TODAYSDATE} | grep -vi updated | wc -l`
echo ${COUNT}
echo ${COUNT}
#echo ${COUNT}
#echo “uptime”
#echo “hostname”

exit 0

This script does not give me any error, but no data is handed over to mrtg as it did in Gentoo Linux. I do not know why that it and I have been unable to resolve this issue.

The second script I was testing is this one here, more details and discussions can be found here on FreeBSD forum.

#!/usr/local/bin/bash

#earthquake count shell V0.0.7

URL=”http://hraun.vedur.is/ja/englishweb/eqlist.html”
TODAY=`date +%Y-%m-%d`
HOURS=`date +%H`
MINUTES=`date +%M`
OUT=”$TODAY.txt”

NOW=`echo “($HOURS * 60) + $MINUTES” | bc`
EARTHNUM=`wget –quiet -O – $URL | grep $TODAY | grep -vci updated`

if [ $OUT ]; then
touch $OUT
fi

echo “$NOW $EARTHNUM” >> $OUT

exit 0

When run in mrtg, I get this error here. The script runs without a issue when run it from command line.

2013-05-20 22:46:09: WARNING: Could not get any data from external command ‘/usr/local/etc/mrtg/eq.imo.sh’
Maybe the external command did not even start. (Illegal seek)

2013-05-20 22:46:09: WARNING: Problem with External get ‘/usr/local/etc/mrtg/eq.imo.sh’:
Expected a Number for ‘in’ but nothing’

2013-05-20 22:46:09: WARNING: Problem with External get ‘/usr/local/etc/mrtg/eq.imo.sh’:
Expected a Number for ‘out’ but nothing’

2013-05-20 22:46:09: ERROR: Target[localhost_eq][_IN_] ‘ $target->[0]{$mode} ‘ did not eval into defined data
2013-05-20 22:46:09: ERROR: Target[localhost_eq][_OUT_] ‘ $target->[0]{$mode} ‘ did not eval into defined data

I am bit lost what is the issue here, since the script works from command line. If anyone out there has any idea what this might be. A help is most welcomed in this matter, since I am no programmer at all and I have little understanding on how to deal with this problem.

I guess that being broke has finally cached up with me. I have a failed power supply in my main server computer that I run locally. It handles several important jobs. One of the being a counter for earthquake activity in Iceland and Canary Islands (El Hierro volcano). This allows me to see if anything is taking place, estimating number of earthquakes if anything happens. A earthquake swarm is a good sample of what this helps me with. So my server computer is close to being mission critical for me in what I am doing.

What is failing is the power supply as I did say before. The part that is failing in the power supply it self is the main fan. It is making noise and not spinning properly, suggesting it is almost dead. I also am seeing that my current motherboard suffers from the capacitor plague. It still works. But it is going to end its life span once the capacitors finally blow or just plain out die.

What do I need. A power supply that looks like this. Sadly I cannot afford it. I am going to check with my bank and see what they say, but I might be able to work something out. I do not know yet if I am going to get a deal with my bank. Buf I do it is going to increase my current money issues, since it is going to increase my payments back to the bank and therefor lower my already almost non-existent money once I have paid all my bills and debt. It is clear that my money issue are going to continue for a good while longer it seems.

The price is, EUR 41.19 or 307.10DKK, or something like this on lower price. This is the price if anyone wants to donate towards me so that I can buy this.

I cannot turn on the server computer at the moment. Since I am afraid the power supply might damage the already weakened motherboard (due to bad capacitor on it) . I am going to keep my server computer off until I can replace the power supply. Regardless if that is going to take a short or a long time. If I manage to buy a new power supply, it is going to take a few days until I can get it. The future plan for the sever computer is to get it compact and without any fans and such things if possible. Since it is not under heavy load and is only serving my internal network in several ways, including handing out local IP numbers and my IPv6 connection to the internet.

Thanks for the help.

Update 1: There is little help to get from my bank. Because I am really, really broke. This is going to be pain for me.

Blog post updated at 11:29 UTC on 30.04.2013.

Please note that I have left Facebook for good. I can be contacted by email, Google+ or Twitter. The reason why I left Facebook can be found here and here.

I do not expect to be returning to Facebook anytime soon. Or return at all for that matter. Since I find the negative effects of it too high when I started to think about it.

I was made aware of login issue today. But I had to install a anti-spam bot system due to the volume of spam bots that where registering on my web site. This created unknown to me issue for already registered users. I have fixed that issue now. So login in should work for everyone without a issue now. If it does not. Please email me and I am going to do my best to resolve the issue.

This is a sticky blog post. Please look at the newest one below this one.

I have put up rather heavy spam protection when users are registering. The reason is simple. This blog is getting flooded by spam registration and I cannot have that. Just in the past 24 hours that spam system has stopped 678 spam bots from registering (multiple tries). I am not saying this is going to stop all of the spam bots (I delete spam bots when I see comments from them). But it is going to stop many of them.

If you are going to register please follow the on screen guide. Do not register multiple times if your first attempt fails. Contact me or just wait 10 days and then try again. It might take some time for the email to arrive in some cases. This is not always the case and you should get your registration email right away.

If you are having problems with this new system please let me know so I can attempt to solve it for you.