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Migrate Webserver and SQL data from old SATA Hard drive to SSD to boost websites performance / Installing new SSD KINGSTON 120GB hard disk on Linux

Monday, March 28th, 2016

ssd-linux-migrate-webserver-and-mysql-from-old-SATA-to-SSD-Kingston-Hard-drive-to-boost-performance-installing-new-SSD-on-Debian-linux
Blog and websites hosted on a server were giving bad performance lately and the old SATA Hard Disk on the Lenovo Edge server seemed to be overloaded from In/Out operations and thus slowing down the websites opeining time as well as SQL queries (especially the ones from Related Posts WordPress plugin was quite slow. Sometimes my blog site opening times were up to 8-10 seconds.

To deal with the issue I obviously needed a better speed of I/O of hard drive thus as I've never used SSD hard drives so far,  I decided to buy a new SSD (Solid State Drive) KINGSTON SV300S37A120G, 605ABBF2, max UDMA/133  hard disk.
Mounting the hard disk physically on the computer tower case wasn't a big deal as there are no rotating elements of the SSD it doesn't really matter how it is mounted main thing is that it is being hooked up somewhere to the case.

I was not sure whether the SSD HDD is supported by my Debian GNU / Linux so I had see whether Linux Operating System has properly detected your hard disk use dmesg

1. Check if SSD Hard drive is supported in Linux

 

linux:~# dmesg|grep -i kingston
[    1.182734] ata5.00: ATA-8: KINGSTON SV300S37A120G, 605ABBF2, max UDMA/133
[    1.203825] scsi 4:0:0:0: Direct-Access     ATA      KINGSTON SV300S3 605A PQ: 0 ANSI: 5

 

linux:~# dmesg|grep -i sdb
[    1.207819] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] 234441648 512-byte logical blocks: (120 GB/111 GiB)
[    1.207847] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
[    1.207848] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00
[    1.207860] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
[    1.207928]  sdb: unknown partition table
[    1.208319] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI disk

 

Well great news as you see from above output obviously the Kingston SSD HDD was detected by the kernel.
I've also inspected whether the proper dimensions of hard drive (all 120 Gigabytes are being detected by the OS):

 

linux:~# fdisk -l /dev/sdb
Disk /dev/sdb: 120.0 GB, 120034123776 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 14593 cylinders, total 234441648 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

Even better as the proper HDD sizing was detected by Linux kernel.
Next thing to do was of course to create ext4 filesystem on the SSD HDD.
I wanted to give 2 separate partitions for my Webserver Websites DocumentRoot directories which all lay under the standard Apache location inside /var/www as well as MySQL data folder which is also under the standard Debian based Linuces – /var/lib/mysql as the SQL data directory was just 3.3 GB size, I've decided to reserve 20GB gigabytes for the MySQL and another 100 GB for my PHP / CSS / JS / HTML and other data files /var/www.
 

2. Create SSD partitions with cfdisk

Hence I needed to create:

1. SSD partition of 100GB
2. SSD partition of 20GB

I have cfdisk installed and I believe, the easiest way to create the partitions is using interactive partitioner as CFDISK instead of fdisk: so in order to make the proper partitions I've ran

 

linux:~# cfdisk /dev/sdb


I' will skip explainig details on how to use CFDISK as it is pretty standard – display or manipulate disk partition table tool.
Just press on NEW button (moving with arrow keys buttons) and choose the 2 partitions size 100000 and 20000 MB (one thing to note here is that you have to choose between Primary and  Logical creation of partitions, as my SSD is a secondary drive and I already have a ) and then press the WRITE button to save all the partition changes.

!!! Be very careful here as you might break up your other disks data make sure you're really modifying the SSD Hard Drive and not your other /dev/sda or other attached external Hard drive or ATA / SATA disk.
Press the WRITE button only once you're absolutely sure, you do it at your own (always create backup of your other data and don't blame me if something goes wrong) …

Once created the two partitions will look like in the screenshot below:
creating-linux-partitions-with-cfdisk-linux-partitioning-tool.png

 


3. Create ext4 filesystem 100 and 20 GB partitions

Next thing to do before the two partitions are ready to mount under Webserver's files documentroot /var/www and /var/lib/mysql is to create ext4 filesystem, though some might prefer to stick to ext3 or reiserfs partition, I would recommend you use ext4 for the reason ext4 according to my quick research is said to perform much better with SSD Hard Drives.

The tool to create the ext4 filesystems is mkfs4.ext4 it is provided by debian package e2fsprogs I have it already installed on my server, if you don't have it just go on and install it with:
 

linux:~# apt-get install –yes e2fsprogs

 

To create the two ext4 partitions run:
 

linux:~# mkfs4.ext4 /dev/sdb5
…

 

linux:~# mfs4.ext4 /dev/sdb6
…


Here the EXT4 filesystem on partition that is supposed to be 100 Gigabytes will take 2, 3 minutes as the dimensions of partition are a bit bigger, so if you don't want to get boring go grab a coffee, once the partitions are ready you can evaluate whether everyhing is properly created with fdisk you should get output like the one below

 

linux:~# fdisk -l /dev/sdb
Disk /dev/sdb: 120.0 GB, 120034123776 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 14593 cylinders, total 234441648 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1              63   234441647   117220792+   5  Extended
/dev/sdb5             126    39070079    19534977   83  Linux
/dev/sdb6        39070143   234441647    97685752+  83  Linux

 

4. Mount newly created SSD partitions under /var/www and /var/lib/mysql

Before I mounted /var/www and /var/lib/mysql in order to be able to mount under the already existing directories I had to:

1. Stop Apache and MySQL server
2. Move Mysql and Apache Documentroot and Data directories to -bak
3. Create new empty /var/www and /var/lib/mysql direcotries
4. Copy backpups ( /var/www-bak and /var/lib/mysql-bak ) to the newly mounted ext4 SSD partitions

To achieve that I had to issue following commands:
 

linux:~# /etc/init.d/apache2 stop
linux:~# /etc/init.d/mysql stop

linux:~# mv /var/www /var/www-bak
linux:~# mv /var/lib/mysql /var/lib/mysql-bak

linux:~# mkdir /var/www
linux:~# mkdir /var/lib/mysql
linux:~# chown -R mysql:mysql /var/lib/mysql


Then to manually mount the SSD partitions:
 

linux:~# mount  /dev/sdb5 /var/lib/mysql
linux:~# mount /dev/sdb6 /var/www


To check that the folders are mount into the SSD drive, ran mount cmd:

 

linux:~# mount
/dev/sda1 on / type ext3 (rw,errors=remount-ro)
tmpfs on /lib/init/rw type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,mode=0755)
proc on /proc type proc (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)
udev on /dev type tmpfs (rw,mode=0755)
tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,noexec,nosuid,gid=5,mode=620)
fusectl on /sys/fs/fuse/connections type fusectl (rw)
/dev/sdc1 on /backups type ext4 (rw)
/dev/sdb5 on /var/lib/mysql type ext4 (rw,relatime,discard,data=ordered))
/dev/sdb6 on /var/www type ext4 (rw,relatime,discard,data=ordered))

 

That's great now the filesystem mounts fine, however as it an SSD drive and SSD drives are being famous for having a number of limited writes on disk before the drive lifetime is over it is a good idea to increase a bit the lifetime of the SSD by mounting the SSD partitions with noatime and errors=remount-ro (in order to not log file access times to filesystem table and to remount the FS read only in case of some physical errors of the drive).

5. Configure SSD partitions to boot every time Linux reboots

Now great, the filesystems gets mounted fine so next thing to do is to make it automatically mount every time the Linux OS boots up, this on GNU / Linux is done through /etc/fstab, for my 2 ext4 partitions this is the content to add at the end of /etc/fstab:

 

/dev/sdb5               /var/lib/mysql      ext4        noatime,errors=remount-ro       0       1
/dev/sdb6               /var/www        ext4    noatime,errors=remount-ro       0       1

 

quickest way to add it without a text editor is to echo to the end of file:
 

linux:~# cp -rpf /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.bak_25_03_2016
linux:~# echo ' /dev/sdb5               /var/lib/mysql      ext4        noatime,errors=remount-ro,discard       0       1' >> /etc/fstab
linux:~# echo ' /dev/sdb6               /var/www        ext4    noatime,errors=remount-ro,discard       0       1 ' >> /etc/fstab


Then mount again all the filesystems including the 2 new created SSD (100 and 20 GB) partitions:
 

linux:~# umount /var/www
linux:~# umount /var/lib/mysql
linux:~# mount -a


To assure properly mounted with noatime and remount-ro on errors options:


–

linux:~# mount | grep -i sdb
/dev/sdb5 on /var/lib/mysql type ext4 (rw,noatime,errors=remount-ro)
/dev/sdb6 on /var/www type ext4 (rw,noatime,errors=remount-ro)

 

It is also a good idea to check a statistics of disk free command:
 

linux:~# df -h|grep -i sdb
/dev/sdb5         19G  0G    19G  0% /var/lib/mysql
/dev/sdb6         92G   0G    92G  0% /var/www


6. Copy all Webserver and SQL data from backupped directories to new SSD mounted

Last but not least is to copy all original content files from /var/www-bak and /var/lib/mysql-bak to the new freshly  created SSD partitions, though copying the files can be made with normal linux copy command (cp),
I personally prefer rsync because rsync is much quicker and more efficient in copying large amount of files in my case this were 48 Gigabytes.

To copy files from with rsync:

 

linux:~# rsync -av –log-file /var/log/backup.log  /var/www-bak /var/www
linux:~# rsync -av –log-file /var/log/backup.log  /var/lib/mysql-bak /var/lib/mysql


Then ofcourse, finally to restore my websites normal operation I had to bring up the Apache Webservers and MySQL service

 

linux:~# /etc/init.d/apache2 start
linux:~# /etc/init.d/mysql start


7. Optimizing SSD performance with periodic trim (discard of unused blocks on a mounted filesystem)

As I digged deeper into how to even further optimize SSD drive performance I learned about the cleaning action TRIM of the partitions for a long term performance proper operation, to understand it better think about trimming like Windows degrament operatin.
 

NAME
fstrim – discard unused blocks on a mounted filesystem

SYNOPSIS
fstrim [-o offset] [-l length] [-m minimum-free-extent] [-v] mountpoint

DESCRIPTION
fstrim is used on a mounted filesystem to discard (or "trim") blocks which are not in use by the filesystem. This is useful for
solid-state drives (SSDs) and thinly-provisioned storage.

By default, fstrim will discard all unused blocks in the filesystem. Options may be used to modify this behavior based on range or
size, as explained below.


Trimming is really necessery, otherwise SSD become very slow after some time. All modern SSD's support TRIM, but older SSD's from before 2010 usually don't.
Thus for an older SSD you'll want to check this on the website of the manufacturer.

As I mentioned earlier TRIM is not supported by all SSD drives, to check whether TRIM is supported by SSD:

linux:~# hdparm -I /dev/sdb|grep -i -E 'trim|discard'
                  *          Data set Management TRIM supported (limit 1 block)

It's easiest to let the system perform an automatic TRIM. That can be done in several ways.

The quickest way for trimming is to place into /etc/rc.local trim  commands, in my case it was the following commands:

 

fstrim -v /var/lib/mysql
fstrim -v /var/www

To add it I've used my favourite vim text editor.
Adding commands to rc.local will make SSD trimming be executed at boot time so this will reduce a bit the downtime during the trim with some time so perhaps for those like me which are running a crually important websites a better

An alternative way is to schedule a daily cron job to do just place a new job in /etc/cron.daily/trim e.g.:
 

linux:~# vim /etc/cron.daily/trim

 

#!/bin/sh
fstrim -v /var/lib/mysql
fstrim -v /var/www

linux:~# chmod +x /etc/cron.daily/trim

However the best way to enable automatic trimming to SSD  is to just add the discard parameter to /etc/fstab I've already done that earlier in this article.

Not really surprising the increase of websites opening (page load times) were decreased dramatically web page loading waiting time fall down 2 to 2.5 times, so the moral of story for me is always when possible from now on to use SSD in order to have superb websites opening times.

To sum it up what was achieved with moving my data into SSD Drive, before moving websites and SQL data to SSD drive the websites were opening for 6 to 10 seconds now sites open in 2 to 4.5 seconds which is below 5 seconds (the normal waiting time for a user to see your website).
By the way it should be not a news forfor people that are into Search Engine Optimization but might be for some of unexperienced new Admins and Webmasters that, all that all page opening times that  exceeds 5 secs is considered to be a slow website (and therefore perhaps not worthy to read).
The high load page times >5 secs makes the website also less interesting not only for end users but also for search engines (Google / Yahoo / Bing / Baidoo etc.) will is said to crawl it less if website is slow.
Search Engines are said to Index much better and crawl more frequently into more responsive websites.
Hence implementing SSD to a server and decreasing the page load time should bring up my visitors stats a bit too.

Well that's all for today, hope you enjoyed 🙂

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Posted in Everyday Life, Linux, Performance Tuning, System Administration, Various, Web and CMS | No Comments »

Mount remote Linux SSHFS Filesystem harddisk on Windows Explorer SWISH SSHFS file mounter and a short evaluation on what is available to copy files to SSHFS from Windows PC

Monday, February 22nd, 2016

swish-mount-and-copy-files-from-windows-to-linux-via-sshfs-mount

I'm forced to use Windows on my workbook and I found it really irritating, that I can't easily share files in a DropBox, Google Drive, MS OneDrive, Amazon Storage or other cloud-storage free remote service. etc.
I don't want to use DropBox like non self-hosted Data storage because I want to keep my data private and therefore the only and best option for me was to make possible share my Linux harddisk storage
dir remotely to the Windows notebook.

I didn't wanted to setup some complex environment such as Samba Share Server (which used to be often a common option to share file from Linux server to Windows), neither wanted to bother with  installing FTP service and bother with FTP clients, or configuring some other complex stuff such as WebDav – which BTW is an accepted and heavily used solution across corporate clients to access read / write files on a remote Linux servers.
Hence, I made a quick research what else besides could be used to easily share files and data from Windows PC / notebook to a home brew or professional hosting Linux server.

It turned out, there are few of softwares that gives a similar possibility for a home lan small network Linux / Windows hybrid network users such, here is few of the many:

  • SyncThing – Syncthing is an open-source file synchronization client/server application, written in Go, implementing its own, equally free Block Exchange Protocol. The source code's content-management repository is hosted on GitHub

     

     

     

     

     

    syncthing-logo

  • OwnCloud – ownCloud provides universal access to your files via the web, your computer or your mobile devices

     

     

     

     

     

    owncloud-logo

  • Seafile – Seafile is a file hosting software system. Files are stored on a central server and can be synchronized with personal computers and mobile devices via the Seafile client. Files can also be accessed via the server's web interface


seafile-client-in-browser

I've checked all of them and give a quick try of Syncthing which is really easy to start, just download the binary launch it and configure it under https://Localhost:8385 URL from a browser on the Linux server.
Syncthing seemed to be nice and easy to configure solution to be able to Sync files between Server A (Windows) and Server B(Linux) and guess many would enjoy it, if you want to give it a try you can follow this short install syncthing article.
However what I didsliked in both SyncThing and OwnCloud and Seafile and all of the other Sync file solutions was, they only supported synchronization via web and didn't seemed to have a Windows Explorer integration and did required
the server to run more services, posing another security hole in the system as such third party softwares are not easily to update and maintain.

Because of that finally after rethinking about some other ways to copy files to a locally mounted Sync directory from the Linux server, I've decided to give SSHFS a try. Mounting SSHFS between two Linux / UNIX hosts is
quite easy task with SSHFS tool

In Windows however the only way I know to transfer files to Linux via SSHFS was with WinSCP client and other SCP clients as well as the experimental:

As well as few others such as ExpandDrive, Netdrive, Dokan SSHFS (mirrored for download here)
I should say that I first decided to try copying few dozen of Gigabyte movies, text, books etc. using WinSCP direct connection, but after getting a couple of timeouts I was tired of WinSCP and decided to look for better way to copy to remote Linux SSHFS.
However the best solution I found after a bit of extensive turned to be:

SWISH – Easy SFTP for Windows

Swish is very straight forward to configure compared to all of them you download the .exe which as of time of writting is at version 0.8.0 install on the PC and right in My Computer you will get a New Device called Swish next to your local and remote drives C:/ D:/ , USBs etc.

swish-new-device-to-appear-in-my-computer-to-mount-sshfs

As you see in below screenshot two new non-standard buttons will Appear in Windows Explorer that lets you configure SWISH

windows-mount-sshfs-swish-add-sftp-connection-button-screenshot

Next and final step before you have the SSHFS remote Linux filesystem visible on Windows Xp / 7 / 8 / 10 is to fill in remote Linux hostname address (or even better fill in IP to get rid of possible DNS issues), UserName (UserID) and Direcory to mount.

swish-new-fill-in-dialog-to-make-new-linux-sshfs-mount-directory-possible-on-windows

Then you will see the SSHFS moutned:

swish-sshfs-mounted-on-windows

You will be asked to accept the SSH host-key as it used to be unknown so far

swish-mount-sshfs-partition-on-windows-from-remote-linux-accept-key

That's it now you will see straight into Windows Explorer the remote Linux SSHFS mounted:

remote-sshfs-linux-filesystem-mounted-in-windows-explorer-with-swish

Once setupped a Swish connection to copy files directly to it you can use the Send to Embedded Windows dialog, as in below screenshot

swish-send-to-files-windows-screenshot

The only 3 problem with SWISH are:

1. It doesn't support Save password, so on every Windows PC reboot when you want to connect to remote Linux SSHFS, you will have to retype remote login user pass.
Fron security stand point this is not such a bad thing, but it is a bit irritating to everytime type the password without an option to save permanently.
The good thing here is you can use Launch Key Agent as visible in above screenshot and set in Putty Key Agent your remote host SSH key so the passwordless login will work without any authentication at
all however, this might open a security hole if your Win PC gets infected by virus, which might delete something on remote mounted SSHFS filesystem so I personally prefer to retype password on every boot.

2. it is a bit slow so if you're planning to Transfer large amounts of Data as hundreds of megabytes, expect a very slow transfer rate, even in a Local  10Mbit Network to transfer 20 – 30 GB of data, it took me about 2-3 hours or so.
SWISH is not actively supported and it doesn't have new release since 20th of June 2013, but for the general work I need it is just perfect, as I don't tent to be Synchronizing Dozens of Gigabytes all the time between my notebook PC and the Linux server.

3. If you don't use the established mounted connection for a while or your computer goes to sleep mode after recovering your connection to remote Linux HDD if opened in Windows File Explorer will probably be dead and you will have to re-enable it.

For Mac OS X users who want to mount / attach remote directory from a Linux partitions should look in fugu – A Mac OS X SFTP, SCP and SSH Frontend

I'll be glad to hear from people on other good ways to achieve same results as with SWISH but have a better copy speed while using SSHFS.

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Posted in Linux and FreeBSD Desktop, Networking, Remote System Administration, System Administration, Various, Windows | No Comments »

Fix “Secure Connection Failed” – An error occured SSL received a record that exceeded the maximum permissible length howto

Monday, September 14th, 2015

secure-connection-failed-an-error-occured-during-connection-ssl-received-a-record-that-exceeds-the-maximum-permissible-length-fix-howto
When I was trying to establish a new Internal Business SSL certificate on one of the 6 months planned SPLIT projects (e.g. duplicate a range systems environment to another one), I've stumbled a very odd SSL issue. Once I've setup all the virtualhost SSL configurations properly (identical SSL configuration directives and Apache Webserver version to another host and testing in a browser I was getting the following error:
 

Secure Connection Failed

An error occurred during a connection to 10.253.39.93.

SSL received a record that exceeded the maximum permissible length.

(Error code: ssl_error_rx_record_too_long)


Below is a screenshot:

https://www.pc-freak.net/images/secure-connection-failed-an-error-occured-during-connection-ssl-received-a-record-that-exceeds-the-maximum-permissible-length.png

The page you are trying to view can not be shown because the authenticity of the received data could not be verified. Please contact the web site owners to inform them of this problem. Alternatively, use the command found in the help menu to report this broken site.

The first logical thing to do was to check the error.log but there was no any errors there that point me to anything meaningful, besides that the queries I was making to the Domain doesn't show off as requests neither in Apache access.log nor in error.log so this was puzzling.
I thought I might have messed up something during Key file / CSR generation time so I revoked old certificate and reissued it.

 

$ openssl x509 -text -in test-pegasusgas-eon.intranet.eon-vertrieb.com.crt |less ertificate: Data: Version: 3 (0x2) Serial Number:

Shows that all is fine with certificate Then when trying to test remote certificate with SSL command:

 

openssl s_client -CApath test-pegasusgas-eon.intranet.eon-vertrieb.com.crt -connect test-pegasusgas-eon.intranet.eon-vertrieb.com:443


: There was an error After plenty of research in Google I come to conclusion something is either wrong with Listen httpd.conf directive or NameVirtualHost is binded to port 80 or some other port different from 443, however surprisingly I did not used the NameVirtualHost at all in my apache config. After a lot of pondering I finally spot it. The whole certificate isseus were caused by:

< – Less than sign

which I missaw and forget to clean up from template during IP paste (obtained from /sbin/ifconfig |grep -i xx.xx.xx.xx). So finally in order to fix the SSL error I had to just delete <, e.g.:
 

<VirtualHost <10.253.39.35:443>

had to become:

 

<Virtualhost 10.253.39.35:443>

Such a minor thing took me 3 hours of pondering to resolve and thanksfully it is finally fixed! Then of course had to restart Apache to make fixed Vhost settings working:
 

# apachectl stop; sleep 2; apachectl start
…

So now the SSL works again, thanks God!

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Posted in Linux, System Administration, Various, Web and CMS | No Comments »

Sunday of the Blind in Orthodox Church, 6th week after Easter (Passover)

Monday, May 18th, 2015

 


Sunday-of-the-blind-6th-week-after-Passover-Easter

 

 

This Sunday I was to Church and part of our Gospel Reading that occurs on every Holy Liturgy in the Orthodox Church this time we had the following reading:

Gospel of John Jesus Heals the Man Born Blind

1 And as Jesus passed by, he saw a man which was blind from his birth.
2 And his disciples asked him, saying, Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?
3 Jesus answered, Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.
4 I must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day: the night cometh, when no man can work.
5 As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.
6 When he had thus spoken, he spat on the ground, and made clay of the spittle, and he anointed the eyes of the blind man with the clay,
7 And said unto him, Go, wash in the pool of Siloam, (which is by interpretation, Sent.) He went his way therefore, and washed, and came seeing.
8 The neighbours therefore, and they which before had seen him that he was blind, said, Is not this he that sat and begged?
9 Some said, This is he: others said, He is like him: but he said, I am he.
10 Therefore said they unto him, How were thine eyes opened?
11 He answered and said, A man that is called Jesus made clay, and anointed mine eyes, and said unto me, Go to the pool of Siloam, and wash: and I went and washed, and I received sight.
12 Then said they unto him, Where is he? He said, I know not.

The Pharisees Investigate

13 They brought to the Pharisees him that aforetime was blind.
14 And it was the sabbath day when Jesus made the clay, and opened his eyes.
15 Then again the Pharisees also asked him how he had received his sight. He said unto them, He put clay upon mine eyes, and I washed, and do see.
16 Therefore said some of the Pharisees, This man is not of God, because he keepeth not the sabbath day. Others said, How can a man that is a sinner do such miracles? And there was a division among them.
17 They say unto the blind man again, What sayest thou of him, that he hath opened thine eyes? He said, He is a prophet.

18 But the Jews did not believe concerning him, that he had been blind, and received his sight, until they called the parents of him that had received his sight.
19 And they asked them, saying, Is this your son, who ye say was born blind? how then doth he now see?
20 His parents answered them and said, We know that this is our son, and that he was born blind:
21 But by what means he now seeth, we know not; or who hath opened his eyes, we know not: he is of age; ask him: he shall speak for himself.
22 These words spake his parents, because they feared the Jews: for the Jews had agreed already, that if any man did confess that he was Christ, he should be put out of the synagogue.
23 Therefore said his parents, He is of age; ask him.

24 Then again called they the man that was blind, and said unto him, Give God the praise: we know that this man is a sinner.
25 He answered and said, Whether he be a sinner or no, I know not: one thing I know, that, whereas I was blind, now I see.
26 Then said they to him again, What did he to thee? how opened he thine eyes?
27 He answered them, I have told you already, and ye did not hear: wherefore would ye hear it again? will ye also be his disciples?
28 Then they reviled him, and said, Thou art his disciple; but we are Moses' disciples.
29 We know that God spake unto Moses: as for this fellow, we know not from whence he is.
30 The man answered and said unto them, Why herein is a marvellous thing, that ye know not from whence he is, and yet he hath opened mine eyes.
31 Now we know that God heareth not sinners: but if any man be a worshipper of God, and doeth his will, him he heareth.
32 Since the world began was it not heard that any man opened the eyes of one that was born blind.
33 If this man were not of God, he could do nothing.
34 They answered and said unto him, Thou wast altogether born in sins, and dost thou teach us? And they cast him out.

Spiritual Sight and Blindness

35 Jesus heard that they had cast him out; and when he had found him, he said unto him, Dost thou believe on the Son of God?
36 He answered and said, Who is he, Lord, that I might believe on him?
37 And Jesus said unto him, Thou hast both seen him, and it is he that talketh with thee.
38 And he said, Lord, I believe. And he worshipped him.
39 And Jesus said, For judgment I am come into this world, that they which see not might see; and that they which see might be made blind.
40 And some of the Pharisees which were with him heard these words, and said unto him, Are we blind also?
41 Jesus said unto them, If ye were blind, ye should have no sin: but now ye say, We see; therefore your sin remaineth.

As you read above the Lord Jesus Christ healed the blind-born person by which manifesting Himself as a True expectedMessiah The Saviour of the Lord a Prophet and a True and Only Begotten Son of God.

The words of God directly fought the great proudness of Jewish Pharsiee wise people (thinking that know the Law better than the Lord himself). Their selfishness and great self-conceit make their soul which was in a terrible state to suffer because their produness was insulted by the truthful words and they felt wounded. They rejected the Lords words with a question by which Jewish (people) and nowadays often non-believers and even christian manifested wrath, selfishness and even mockery with contempt.

John 9:40 Are we blind also?

Answering the Pharisee's questions, The Lord has depicted there spiritual state, which was the main reason for their question. 
 

41 Jesus said unto them, If ye were blind, ye should have no sin: but now ye say, We see; therefore your sin remaineth.


The Pharisee's considered for spiritual seers,  in a highes level understandanding God, his laws covenant and respectively spiritual realm, so they did not need any further grown in God's knowledge, thus rejecting the true teaching which was taught by God himself.

False doctrines of this blind teachers are fruit of human proud and self-conceit. 
The proud understand himself as a independent, self-sufficient and not like a God dependent creation, the earthly life as something eternal and death and eternity for unexisting.

For this people God's plan was something not existing but God was understood as the Jewish law false teachers understanding of right and wrong in a way they have associated the eternal God with the scriptures, idolizing scriptures and inverting their meaning giving them a completely different meaning to fulfill their own passions.

This people who were to be the jewish intelligentia have recognized the human reason for a world ruler.
All the thoughts of the flesh crawl the land, the human understanding to this carnal men is completely sacrificed to the earth in which he wants to arrange his life to be all time pleasure of sin.
In this empty and unreachable goal was forced all the  fleshly and spiritual powers of both pharisees and sadukees. 

The Lord show them that the humbliness and remembrance of the dead should be the true lifely goal of man and it is  the humble-wisdom that gives an insight to eternity.

Achiving humble-Wisdom contradicts the wordly and strive for virtues and therefore it is not being considered worth for man and society material understanding of good and progress.
The one achiving spiritual knowledge understands himself as a tiny unimportant particle in a huge universe of things (generations, times, paste and future events of human history).

What the Lord Jesus Christ tried to point to this blind teachers is that only the Mind and heart of humble in contrasting to the proudness and high-minded people they were could accept God's Christian teaching and to all the time endeavor in achiving the christian virties.
The non-blind person sees and feels the great failure of (his mainly) and then all surrounding humanity fallen nature and because of this soul-pain and internal and desire for salvation and spiritual resurrection and restoration are ready to joyfully accept the Saviour Lord Jesus Christ.

Let us make from our heart a spiritual altar of God and there through our mind to sacrifice spiritual sacrifices of tenderness, repentance, confession, humble heartness (which God would not despise (Ps. 50:19) Amen 

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Posted in Christianity, Curious Facts, Various | No Comments »

How to completely disable Replication in MySQL server 5.1.61 on Debian GNU / Linux

Monday, July 16th, 2012

Replication_mysql_disable

Some time ago on one of the Database MySQL servers, I've configured replication as it was required to test somethings. Eventually it turned out replication will be not used (for some reason) it was too slow and not fitting our company needs hence we needed to disable it.

It seemed logical to me that, simply removing any replication related directives from my.cnf and a restart of the SQL server will be enough to turn replication off on the Debian Linux host. Therefore I proceeded removed all replication configs from /etc/my/my.cnf and issued MySQL restart i. e.:

sql-server:~# /etc/init.d/mysql restart
....

This however didn't turned off replication,as I thought and in phpmyadminweb frontend interface, replication was still appearing to be active in the replication tab.

Something was still making the SQL server still act as an Replication Slave Host, so after a bit of pondering and trying to remember, the exact steps I took to make the replication work on the host I remembered that actually I issued:

mysql> START SLAVE;

Onwards I run:

mysql> SHOW SLAVE STATUS;
....

and found in the database the server was still running in Slave Replication mode

Hence to turn off the db host run as a Slave, I had to issue in mysql cli:

mysql> STOP SLAVE;
Query OK, 0 rows affected, 1 warning (0.01 sec)
mysql> RESET SLAVE;
Query OK, 0 rows affected, 1 warning (0.01 sec)

Then after a reload of SQL server in memory, the host finally stopped working as a Slave Replication host, e.g.

sql-server:~# /etc/init.d/mysql restart
....

After the restart, to re-assure myself the SQL server is no more set to run as MySQL replication Slave host:

mysql> SHOW SLAVE STATUS;
Empty set (0.00 sec)

Cheers 😉

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Posted in MySQL, System Administration | 1 Comment »

‘host-name’ is blocked because of many connection errors; unblock with ‘mysqladmin flush-hosts’

Sunday, May 20th, 2012

mysql-logo-host-name-blocked-because-of-many-connection-errors
My home run machine MySQL server was suddenly down as I tried to check my blog and other sites today, the error I saw while trying to open, this blog as well as other hosted sites using the MySQL was:

Error establishing a database connection

The topology, where this error occured is simple, I have two hosts:

1. Apache version 2.0.64 compiled support externally PHP scripts interpretation via libphp – the host runs on (FreeBSD)

2. A Debian GNU / Linux squeeze running MySQL server version 5.1.61

The Apache host is assigned a local IP address 192.168.0.1 and the SQL server is running on a host with IP 192.168.0.2

To diagnose the error I've logged in to 192.168.0.2 and weirdly the mysql-server was appearing to run just fine:
 

debian:~# ps ax |grep -i mysql
31781 pts/0 S 0:00 /bin/sh /usr/bin/mysqld_safe
31940 pts/0 Sl 12:08 /usr/sbin/mysqld –basedir=/usr –datadir=/var/lib/mysql –user=mysql –pid-file=/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.pid –socket=/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock –port=3306
31941 pts/0 S 0:00 logger -t mysqld -p daemon.error
32292 pts/0 S+ 0:00 grep -i mysql

Moreover I could connect to the localhost SQL server with mysql -u root -p and it seemed to run fine. The error Error establishing a database connection meant that either something is messed up with the database or 192.168.0.2 Mysql port 3306 is not properly accessible.

My first guess was something is wrong due to some firewall rules, so I tried to connect from 192.168.0.1 to 192.168.0.2 with telnet:
 

freebsd# telnet 192.168.0.2 3306
Trying 192.168.0.2…
Connected to jericho.
Escape character is '^]'.
Host 'webserver' is blocked because of many connection errors; unblock with 'mysqladmin flush-hosts'
Connection closed by foreign host.

Right after the telnet was initiated as I show in the above output the connection was immediately closed with the error:

Host 'webserver' is blocked because of many connection errors; unblock with 'mysqladmin flush-hosts'Connection closed by foreign host.

In the error 'webserver' is my Apache machine set hostname. The error clearly states the problems with the 'webserver' apache host unable to connect to the SQL database are due to 'many connection errors' and a fix i suggested with mysqladmin flush-hosts

To temporary solve the error and restore my normal connectivity between the Apache and the SQL servers I logged I had to issue on the SQL host:

mysqladmin -u root -p flush-hostsEnter password:

Thogh this temporar fix restored accessibility to the databases and hence the websites errors were resolved, this doesn't guarantee that in the future I wouldn't end up in the same situation and therefore I looked for a permanent fix to the issues once and for all.

The permanent fix consists in changing the default value set for max_connect_error in /etc/mysql/my.cnf, which by default is not too high. Therefore to raise up the variable value, added in my.cnf in conf section [mysqld]:

debian:~# vim /etc/mysql/my.cnf
...
max_connect_errors=4294967295

and afterwards restarted MYSQL:

debian:~# /etc/init.d/mysql restart
Stopping MySQL database server: mysqld.
Starting MySQL database server: mysqld.
Checking for corrupt, not cleanly closed and upgrade needing tables..

To make sure the assigned max_connect_errors=4294967295 is never reached due to Apache to SQL connection errors, I've also added as a cronjob.

debian:~# crontab -u root -e
00 03 * * * mysqladmin flush-hosts

In the cron I have omitted the mysqladmin -u root -p (user/pass) input options because for convenience I have already stored the mysql root password in /root/.my.cnf

Here is how /root/.my.cnf looks like:

debian:~# cat /root/.my.cnf
[client]
user=root
password=a_secret_sql_password

Now hopefully, this would permanently solve SQL's 'failure to accept connections' due to too many connection errors for future.

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Posted in MySQL, System Administration, Web and CMS | No Comments »

How to add (.srt , .sub) subtitles to .flv flash movie video on Linux

Friday, April 15th, 2011

how-to-add-srt-subtitles-to-flv-flash-movie-video-on-linux
If you're on Linux the questions like, how can I convert between video and audio formats, how to do photo editing etc. etc. have always been a taugh question as with it's diversity Linux often allows too many ways to do the same things.

In the spirit of questioning I have been recently curious, how can a subtitles be added to a flash video (.flv) video?

After some research online I've come up with the below suggested solution which uses mplayer to do the flash inclusion of the subtitles file.

mplayer your_flash_movie.flv -fs -subfont-text-scale 3

While including the subtitles to the .flv file, it's best to close up all the active browsers and if running something else on the desktop close it up.
Note that above's mplayer example for (.srt and .sub) subtitle files example is only appropriate for a .flv movie files which already has a third party published subtitle files.

What is interesting is that often if you want to make custom subtitles to let's say a video downloaded from Youtube on Linux the mplayer way pointed above will be useless. Why?

Well the Linux programs that allows a user to add custom subtitles to a movie does not support the flv (flash video) file format.

My idea on how to create custom subtitles and embed them into a flv movie file is very simple and it goes like this:

1. Convert the .flv file format to let's say .avi or .mpeg
2. Use gnome-subitles or subtitleeditor to create the subtitles for the .avi or .mpeg file
3. Convert back the .avi/.mpeg file with included subtitles to .flv (flash video format)

This methodology is really long and time consuming, but pitily as far as my understanding goes it's the only way to do that on your Linux until now.

To make the conversations between .flv and .avi format you will need to use the ffmpeg – (FFMpeg command line tool video converter), here is how:

– Convert .flv to .avi

debian:~# /usr/bin/ffmpeg -i input_flvfilename.flv output_avifilename.avi

– Convert .avi file to .flv

debian:~# /usr/bin/ffmpeg -y -i /path/to/your/avi/input_avifilename.avi -acodec mp3 -ar 22050 -f flv
/path/to/your/flv/output_flvfilename.flv

The required overall tools which you will have to have installed on your Debian or Ubuntu Linux are:

1. ffmpeg
2. gnome-subtitles
3. subtitleeditor
4. mplayer

You will also have to spend some time to get to know gnome-subtitles or subtitleeditor, but it won't be that long until you get the idea on how to use them.

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Posted in Linux, Linux and FreeBSD Desktop, Linux Audio & Video | 1 Comment »

Life going nowhere …

Sunday, September 23rd, 2007

Meaningless_life-picture

Seems, My life is going nowhere. Today I drinked half of a bottle of Wine and 1 beer. I was out with Alex. We drinked in the city park. Through the day I started my first bsd jail using a tutorial online. I smoked a lot of cigarettes and I want to stop them again. Most of the people I met are not a good company for me that's what I'm thinking more and more. Also I'm thinking more and more I have to change my living place. If only I could find the love of my life … We moved bookshelf and stuff from our room ( My mother again has decided to make repairs in our room. ). I'm asking myself why shall I live a meaningless life. At least my interest into computers and computing started to appear again (this is cool). My faith is really going away since I pray and pray for something .. and I don't receive it ( Or at least I don't see it). I'm tired of waiting. I need to have this physical healing to continue my normal life. I'm not proud of me I was a little aggressive when we was in the Mino's coffee before an hour or so … Now I intend to watch another episode of stargate SG1. And to go to the DreamLand. If only I could live into a Dreamland all the time. I'm starting to realize I should change the music I listen, I should change a lot of my behaviours If I want to have a new and happy life. Autumn is a beautiful Season 🙂 The autumn rain shall come and restore us :)END—–

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Posted in Everyday Life | No Comments »

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