As of Sunday 16th November, we have two eight week old Yorkshire Terrier puppies. Some photographs and videos can be found at:

http://gallery.theunissen.cc/?name=pets/chloe_and_tess/20081116

Kirsteen and I were married at St Mary's Church Shenley Church End on 22 August 2008 at 14:00. This was followed by an afternoon reception at Horwood House in Little Horwood and an evening reception with a DJ, which we thoroughly enjoyed, as we could play the music we liked. We will post some photographs on the gallery as soon as we finish post-processing them.

• Decorating on the 11th
• Photographs and movies of Christmas Day
• Finlay on Boxing Day.

It took eight hours to strip everything down, remove the LCD, which doesn't work anyway, run diagnostics to make sure everything was still okay, restore the system partition from a Ghost backup, upgrade Apache and PHP, make a new Ghost backup, try for an hour to restore the backup only for Ghost to tell me there wasn't enough room to restore the image even though I was restoring to the same partition I backed up from! It turns out Ghost won't let you restore a partition that was near capacity, as detailed in "Not enough disk space on the destination drive", so you have to pass it the -OR switch to override its size checking and hope everything fits, which it should, as it is the same partition.

Thankfully it worked, so I was able to spend some time today implementing Last-Modified headers in all documents and the Gallery's image script, which means photographs should now cache correctly on your hard disk.

The problem wasn't obvious, as it manifested itself as failed PHP scripts, thereby leading to many red herrings and downgrades and upgrades of PHP versions.

I originally wrote my website in server-side JavaScript on IIS 5, so rather than rewriting it all in PHP, I still have IIS running on port 8080 and use mod_proxy to forward requests for a particular subfolder to port 8080. That way I can also do .NET development on the same server in the future if I wanted. Disabling mod_proxy has no effect, so it is not a problem.

I tried 100 simultaneous requests to IIS by using "ab -n 100 http://webserver:8080/26kb.jpg" and the same thing happened, but this time it was after 9 requests so it looks like it might not have anything to do with Apache. I thought it might have something to do with Windows 2000 Professional's 10 client restriction but the licence agreement says it doesn't apply to third party products.

I have URLScan installed, but nothing appears in its log files, so that is not a problem.

I thought it might have something to do with ZoneAlarm, so shut it down, but the problem still occurred.

I then remembered that IIS has a 10 user limit so I thought the fact that it is running at the same time, albeit on a separate port might be restricting TCP connection to Apache, but it made not difference when I disabled it.

It was at this point that I decided to uninstall ZoneAlarm completely and the problem has now disappeared! It even works up to 1000 requests and 100 concurrent connections. I guess I should have tried uninstalling the firewall to begin with, but it didn't make any difference when I disabled it and many of the related bug reports said that it didn't make any difference either, so I didn't bother trying it.

I have a hardware firewall on my router, so it should be okay to run the webserver without a software firewall.

I used it's automatic resizing capability to help journal my recent walking holiday in Ambleside, which is available in its new location with photographs at http://theunissen.cc/christopher/holidays/2004/09_30_ambleside_lake_district.

The following pages have been changed to use the automatic resizing capability of the gallery, which will significantly improve the rate at which new photographs appear on this site:

• Holidays > 2004 > 19 March: Lyme Regis
• Holidays > 2003 > 20 June: Ashurst, New Forest
• Holidays > 2002 > 20 - 22 September: Camping in Stottesdon, Near Kidderminster
• Holidays > 2002 > 3 - 7 September: Switzerland
• Holidays > 2002 > 22 - 23 March: Camping and Cycling in the Malvern Valley
• Holidays > 2002 > 24 February - 3 March: Skiing in Courmayeur
• Holidays > 2001 > 19 - 21 October: Climbing Snowdon
• Events > Parties > 30

While I was at it, I added the missing journal of Holidays > 2002 > 7 - 13 September: Frejus, France

Yes, it is 03:51 on a Saturday morning (I got carried away again), so please let me know if you spot any mistakes.

I then had to contend with intermittent lockups, which mainly occurred when doing a backup between hard disks. I tried the following:

• I wondered if the hard disks were overheating, so enabled S.M.A.R.T. support, which allows a monitoring program like the OpenSource S.M.A.R.T. Monitoring Tools to display information about the drive like its current temperature. The Maxtor and Seagate Barracuda are operating 10% below their maximum operating temperatures of 55 and 60 degrees respectively, so this is not a problem.
• I ran diagnostics on the whole system, including a non-destructive read test and everything passed.
• The symptoms led me to believe it had something to do with a known VIA 686B Southbridge chipset problem where buffers would overflow and data would be lost due to the CPU only getting access to the PCI bus after three busmaster cycles when the BIOS setting, "PCI Delay Transaction", was enabled. This was further supported by the fact the problem seemed to go away when I had the second hard disk as a master on the secondary IDE channel rather than the slave of the primary. The following documents:
  • VIA Issues with IDE and SoundBlaster Live
    • Original Report
    • Update
    • More Testing
    • Update
  • George E Breese "PCI Latency" patch for VIA Chipsets
    • This is all very well, but the changes are temporary and only apply in Windows.
    • Details
    • George Breese's Software
  • Crash Test: Problems with VIA's KT133/KT133A chipset 1/2 and Crash Test: Problems with VIA's KT133/KT133A chipset 2/2
    • Aargh! It mentions changing the IDE controller registers, which sounds mad to me, so I won't try this. VIA should supply a patch to solve this problem, which indeed it did.
  • Other:
    • VIA Arena IDE Set Up
    • viahardware.com > 686bfaq
    • viahardware.com > Agp4xfix
    • amdzone.com
  led me to try the following:
  • Update BIOS - I upgraded the BIOS for my motherboard (Jetway 663ASPRO) ages ago and it hasn't changed since, so this is not an option.
  • Disable "PCI Delay Transaction" - This seemed to make things worse, as the event log started displaying corruption errors, so I re-enabled it.
  • Apply version 4.32 or greater of the VIA 4in1 drivers - I installed 4.49 ages ago, so this should not have mattered, but I tried the latest version (4.51, which is actually 4.49v) anyway, as the revision history mentioned a few IDE related fixes. It didn't make any difference.
  • Use Ultra ATA cables and set all the drives to Cable Select - This made no difference as far as lockups were concerned, but it did stop the bluescreens that I had been experiencing with the DVD writer ever since I bought it, so it looks like even UDMA 33 drives benefit from interference reducing Ultra ATA cables.
  all to no avail!!!
• The problem seemed to go away for a day until a certain email was opened, which led me to believe that the hard disk must be corrupted, so I did a disk check, defrag, Ghost image and restore. The restore took 9 hours, as I had to reduce the size of the extended partition so I could increase the size of the primary partion so that Ghost 2003 could restore the partition. Ghost insisted that the partition was too big to fit into the space it had originally occupied. It doesn't take into account the fact that NTFS compression was used on a few directories, so it is looking at the uncompressed space, which is larger than the physical space. Hooray, this seemed to sort out the problem for a day.
• I performed another diagnostics test on all components, which passed.
• The lockups then even happened without any drives in the system and when I entered the IDE section of the BIOS, it only displayed half a page, which meant that something was seriously wrong with the system and it was time to condemn it.
• No, the only other candidate for the server is a PIII 600 which has noisy fans and no way to fit the Zalman Flowercooler to quieten it, so I am left with the choice of either buying a new system, which I can't afford at the moment, or trying one last time to sort out the current one.
• All of a sudden, everything seems to be fine. The system has been running fine for three days now, which leads me to believe that the Southbridge is overheating and taking a while to recover. I have ordered the following to prevent this in future:
  • One round floppy cable.
  • Two round Ultra ATA IDE cables.
  • AcoustiFan Temperature Sensitive 80mm Case Fan from QuietPC
• Watch this space to see what happens when they arrive next Wednesday, 1 September 2004.