Technology Tales

Removing the Guest Account Entry from Ubuntu 11.10 and Linux Mint 12 Login Screens

Another feature of Ubuntu 11.10 and Linux Mint 12 is the appearance of a Guest Account entry on their login screens. Windows has had this feature for a while now, but it is easy to turn it off if you know where to look. Somehow, Ubuntu and Linux Mint haven't made it obvious as it could be. In both cases, you have to edit /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf and add the following line to the bottom of the file:

allow-guest=false

That removes the entry in question and could a little more security. On Ubuntu, there are lines in the file controlling the background image that you have for your login screen. In my experience, Linux Mint stores this in the greeter file referenced in lightdm.conf and that's unity-greeter in my case, though, I mostly use GNOME 3 with only the occasional stint using the MATE desktop environment.

A little look at Windows 8

Even if it has been a little while, I have managed to set up a VirtualBox virtual machine to have a look at the Developer Preview of the next version of Windows, something that I and others continue to call Windows 8 though Microsoft has yet to confirm the name. When I tried the installation before, it failed on me, though that may have been due to having an earlier release of VirtualBox on my machine at that time. 4.1.14 has a preset for Windows 8 and I also happened to notice that it can create virtual hard disks that can be used with competitors like VMWare, Parallels and Virtual PC too. It's an interesting development, even if I am left wondering why you'd need to do that when VirtualBox runs on most platforms anyway.

To get back to Windows 8, the installation ran near enough without any intervention apart from stating the language you wanted to use, U.K. English in my case. On startup, the operating system presents you with a lock screen that you need to get out of the way so you can log in. It can be dragged out of your way, or you can double-click on it or use the carriage return key to get rid of it. Quite why someone thinks it's a good extra is a little beyond me, when a log in screen would suffice. Logging in gets you the new start menu or, as I prefer to think of it, screen. By default, there are a good few Metro apps installed, though I decided to rid myself of most of them.

Regarding those apps, one irritation could be that there isn't that obvious a way to switch away from them to something else. Thankfully, ALT+TAB does seem to work and it has the most instantaneous effect. Otherwise, using the Windows key or hovering over the bottom-left corner of the screen to get the menu that brings up the start screen. From the PC user's point of view, I could see this needing a little more thought because it took a little while for me to figure out what to do. Closing Metro apps isn't an option either unless you resort to the Task Manager to do so. Microsoft appears to want to leave them open from the point at which you start them until the PC is shut down. It's a design decision that leaves me unconvinced, though; thoughts of rogue apps running riot on a system come to mind. Then, a stop button could be handy.

There is no start menu as we have come to know it any more with the start screen replacing it. However, it is possible to limit what's on there to the software that you use most often and rearrange panels as you'd like them to be. Apart from hosting shortcuts for starting applications, it also acts as a task switcher like the task bar in Windows 7 and there is one of those in Windows 8 too when you jump to the desktop; handily, there's a panel for that too. Installing Firefox added a panel to the start screen, so a little thought has gone into such a common situation, and that's just as well. Still, there's more work to be done because, currently, there's no way of changing the background colour of the start screen without resorting to a hex editor or third party tools. Still, since you can pick your own picture for the lock screen, things are not all locked down on you.

A preview of IE 10 is included and, apart from the occasional artifact when displaying one of my websites, it seems to work well enough, as does Windows Explorer. However, aside from these and a smattering of Metro apps, the Developer Preview does feel barer than previous versions of Windows. However, it does appear that applications like Notepad, PowerShell and the Command Prompt are on there, yet you need to search for these. That also means that you need to know about them too, so I'd suggest a better way of browsing the applications that are available too. This is one of the weaknesses of Ubuntu's Unity interface, and you need to search in the Dash to find them. Just starting to type in the Metro start screen (and other screens too, it seems) in Windows does trigger the completion of a search box, much like what happens in the GNOME Shell Activities screen on systems with GNOME 3. While it's good to see good ideas being reused from elsewhere, Microsoft might do well to note that you still can browse lists of applications in GNOME 3 too.

Shutting down Windows 8 also is seemingly more convoluted than is the case with Windows 7. Logging off and then powering off from the log in screen is one approach, and that was my early impression of GNOME 3 too. With the latter, I later discovered a status menu plugin that added in the option where it was accessible or that using the ALT key when clicking the status menu when the plugin wouldn't work would do what I needed. Without logging off from Windows 8, you can do a shutdown using the sidebar that appears on selecting Settings from the menu that pops up on hovering near the bottom-left corner of the start screen or the Start button of the task bar of the desktop. Then, look for the power icon and select what you need from the menu that clicking on this icon produces. Of course, you may find that the ALT+F4 key combination when issued while on a clean desktop is the cleanest of all.

All in all, the Developer Preview of the next release of Windows looks fairly usable. That is not to imply that there aren't things that need changing. Aside from this being an early sight of what may be coming to us Windows users, it isn't unknown for Microsoft to roll back on a radical move to make it more palatable to the user community. After all, it has to watch how it treats the corporate market too. The strong possibility of there being alterations is one thought that needs to be shared with those who are inclined to lose their tempers at the moment and I have seen comments with unpleasant language out there on the web (none of that here, please, by the way). As for me, I like to look ahead to be forewarned about what's coming my way in the world of computing. What I have seen so far of the next Windows release is reassuring, though there are rough edges such as PC shutdown and Metro app switching, yet Microsoft cannot commit commercial suicide either, so these have to be fixed. It appears that the world of Microsoft operating systems is in flux, with the company's keeping a firm eye on the world of mobile computing, with tablets being a major concern. While others may disagree, I can see Windows 8 working well on conventional PC's and that's no bad thing.

Sorting out MySQL on Arch Linux

Seeing Arch Linux running so solidly in a VirtualBox virtual box has me contemplating whether I should have it installed on a real PC. Saying that, recent announcements regarding the implementation of GNOME 3 in Linux Mint have caught my interest, even if the idea of using a rolling distribution as my main home operating system still has a lot of appeal for me. Having an upheaval come my way every six months when a new version of Linux Mint is released is the main cause of that.

While remaining undecided, I continue to evaluate the idea of Arch Linux acting as my main OS for day-to-day home computing. Towards that end, I have set up a working web server instance on there using the usual combination of Apache, Perl, PHP and MySQL. Of these, it was MySQL that went the least smoothly of all because the daemon wouldn't start for me.

It was then that I started to turn to Google for inspiration, and a range of actions resulted that combined to give the result that I wanted. One problem was a lack of disk space caused by months of software upgrades. Since tools like it in other Linux distros allow you to clear some disk space of obsolete installation files, I decided to see if it was possible to do the same with pacman, the Arch Linux command line package manager. The following command, executed as root, cleared about 2 GB of cruft for me:

pacman -Sc

The S in the switch tells pacman to perform package database synchronization, while the c instructs it to clear its cache of obsolete packages. In fact, using the following command as root every time an update is performed both updates software and removes redundant or outmoded packages:

pacman -Syuc

So I don't forget the needful housekeeping, this will be what I use from this point forward, with y being the switch for a refresh and u triggering a system upgrade. It's nice to have everything happen together without too much effort.

To do the required debugging that led me to the above along with other things, I issued the following command:

mysqld_safe --datadir=/var/lib/mysql/ &

This starts up the MySQL daemon in safe mode if all is working properly, and it wasn't in my case. Nevertheless, it creates a useful log file called myhost.err in /var/lib/mysql/. This gave me the messages that allowed the debugging of what was happening. It led me to installing net-tools and inettools using pacman; it was the latter of these that put hostname on my system and got the MySQL server startup a little further along. Other actions included unlocking the ibdata1 data file and removing the ib_logfile0 and ib_logfile1 files to gain something of a clean sheet. The kill command was used to shut down any lingering mysqld sessions too. To ensure that the ibdata1 file was unlocked, I executed the following commands:

mv ibdata1 ibdata1.bad
cp -a ibdata1.bad ibdata1

These renamed the original and then crafted a new duplicate of it, with the -a switch on the cp command forcing copying with greater integrity than normal. Along with the various file operations, I also created a link to my.cnf, the MySQL configuration file on Linux systems, in /etc using the following command executed by root:

ln -s /etc/mysql/ my.cnf /etc/my.cnf

While I am unsure if this made a real difference, uncommenting the lines in the same file that pertained to InnoDB tables. What directed me to these were complaints from mysqld_safe in the myhost.err log file. All I did was to uncomment the lines beginning with innodb and these were 116-118, 121-122 and 124-127 in my configuration file, but it may be different in yours.

After all the above, the MySQL daemon ran happily and, more importantly, started when I rebooted the virtual machine. Thinking about it now, I believe that it was a lack of disk space, the locking of a data file and the lack of InnoDB support that was stopping the MySQL service from running. Running commands like mysqld start weren't yielding useful messages, so a lot of digging was needed to get the result that I needed. In fact, that's one of the reasons why I am sharing my experiences here.

In the end, creating databases and loading them with data were all that was needed for me to start to see functioning websites on my (virtual) Arch Linux system. It turned out to be another step on the way to making it workable as a potential replacement for the Linux distributions that I use most often (Linux Mint, Fedora and Ubuntu).

Battery life

In recent times, I have lugged my Toshiba Equium with me while working away from home; I needed a full screen laptop of my own for attending to various things after work hours, so it needs to come with me. It's not the most portable of things with its weight and the lack of battery life. Now that I think of it, I reckon that it's more of a desktop PC replacement machine than a mobile workhorse. After all, it only lasts an hour on its own battery away from a power socket. Virgin Trains' tightness with such things on their Pendolino trains is another matter...

Unless my BlackBerry is discounted, battery life seems to be something with which I haven't had much luck because my Asus Eee PC isn't too brilliant either. Without decent power management, two hours of battery life appears to be as good as I get from it. However, three to four hours become possible with better power management software on board. That makes the netbook even more usable, though there are others out there offering longer battery life. Still, I am not tempted by these because the gadget works well enough for me that I don't need to wonder about how money I am spending on building a mobile computing collection.

While I am not keen on spending too much cash or having a collection of computers, the battery life situation with my Toshiba more than gives me pause for thought. The figures quoted for MacBooks had me looking at them, even if they aren't at all cheap. Curiosity about the world of the Mac may make them attractive to me, only for the prices to forestall that, and the concept was left on the shelf.

Recently, PC Pro ran a remarkably well-timed review of laptops offering long battery life (in issue 205). The minimum lifetime in this collection was over five hours, so the list of reviewed devices is an interesting one for me. In fact, it even may become a shortlist should I decide to spend money on buying a more portable laptop than the Toshiba that I already have. The seventeen-hour battery life for a Sony VAIO SB series sounds intriguing, even if you need to buy an accessory to gain this. That it does over seven hours without the extra battery slice makes it more than attractive anyway. The review was food for thought and should come in handy if I decide that money needs spending.

A useful little device

Last weekend, I ran into quite a lot of bother with my wired broadband service. Eventually, after a few phone calls to my provider, it was traced to my local telephone exchange and took another few days before it finally got sorted. Before that, a new ADSL filter (from a nearby branch of Maplin as it happened) was needed because the old one didn't work with my phone. Without that, it wouldn't have been possible to debug what was happening with the broadband clashing with my phone with the way that I set up things. Resetting the router was next, and then there was a password change before the exchange was blamed. After all that, connectivity returned to allow me to upgrade in the middle of it all. Downloads are faster, and television viewing is a lot, lot smoother as well. Having seen fairly decent customer service throughout all this, I am planning to stick with my provider for a while longer, too.

Of course, this outage could have left me disconnected from the Internet but for the rise of mobile broadband. Working off dongles is all very fine until coverage lets you down, and that seems to be my experience with Vodafone at the moment. Another fly in the ointment was my having a locked down work laptop that didn't entertain such the software installation that is required for running these things, a not unexpected state of affairs, though it is possible to connect over wired and wireless networks using VPN. With my needing to work from home on Monday, I really had to get that computer online. Saturday evening saw me getting my Toshiba laptop online using mobile broadband and then setting up an ad hoc network using Windows 7 to hook up the work laptop. To my relief, that did the trick, but the next day saw me come across another option in Argos (the range of computing kit in there still continues to surprise me) that made life even easier.

While seeing if it was possible to connect a wired or wireless router to mobile broadband, I came across devices that both connected via the 3G network and acted as wireless routers too. Vodafone has an interesting option into which you can plug a standard mobile broadband dongle for the required functionality. For a while now, 3 has had its Mifi with the ability to connect to the mobile network and relay Wi-Fi signals too. Though it pioneered this as far as I know, others are following their lead, with T-Mobile offering something similar: its Wireless Pointer. Unsurprisingly, Vodafone has its own too, though I didn't find any mention of mobile Wi-Fi on the O2 website.

That trip into Argos resulted in a return home to find out more about the latter device before making a purchase. Having had a broadly positive experience of T-Mobile's network coverage, I was willing to go with it as long as it didn't need a dongle. The T-Mobile one that I have seems not to be working properly, so I needed to make sure that wasn't going to be a problem before I spent any money. When I brought home the Wireless Pointer, I swapped the SIM card from the dongle to get going without too much to do. Thankfully, the Wi-Fi is secured using WPA2 and the documentation tells you where to get the entry key. Having things secured like this means that someone cannot fritter away your monthly allowance as well, and that's as important for PAYG customers (like me) as much as those with a contract. Of course, eavesdropping is another possibility that also is made more difficult. So far, I have stuck with using it while plugged in to an electrical socket (USB computer connections are possible as well) but I need to check on the battery life too. Up to five devices can be connected by Wi-Fi, and I can vouch that working with two connected devices is more than a possibility. My main PC has acquired a Belkin Wi-Fi dongle to use the Wireless Pointer too, and that has worked very well too. In fact, I found that connectivity was independent of what operating system I used: Linux Mint, Ubuntu, Windows XP and Windows 7 all connected without any bother. The gadget fits in the palm of my hand too, so it hardly can be called large, yet it does what it sets out to do, and I have been glad to have it so far.

All Change?

Could 2011 be remembered as the year when the desktop computing interface got a major overhaul? One part of this, Windows 8, won't be with us until next year, but there has been enough happening so far this year that has resulted in a lot of comment. With many if not all the changes, it is possible to detect the influence of interfaces used on smartphones. After all, the carry-over from Windows Phone 7 to the new Metro interface is unmistakeable.

Two developments in the Linux world have spawned a hell of an amount of comment: Canonical's decision to develop Unity for Ubuntu and the arrival of GNOME 3. While there have been many complaints about the changes made in both, there must be a fair few folk who are just getting on with using them without complaint. Maybe there are many who even quietly like the new interfaces. While I am not so sure about Unity, I surprised myself by taking to GNOME Shell so much that I installed it on Linux Mint. It remains a work in progress, as does Unity, but it'll be very interesting to see it mature. Perhaps a good number of the growing collection of GNOME Shell plugins could make it into the main codebase. If that were to happen, I could see it being welcomed by a good few folk.

There was little doubt that the changes in GNOME 3 looked daunting, so Ubuntu's taking a different approach is understandable until you come to realise how change that involves anyway. With GNOME 3 working so well for me, I feel disinclined to dally very much with Unity at all. In fact, I am writing these words on a Toshiba laptop running UGR, effectively Ubuntu running GNOME 3, and that could become my main home computing operating system in time.

For those who find these changes not to their taste, there are alternatives. Some Linux distributions are sticking with GNOME 2 as long as they can, and there apparently has been some mention of a fork to keep a GNOME 2 interface available indefinitely. However, there are other possibilities such as LXDE and XFCE out there too. In fact, until GNOME 3 won me over, LXDE was coming to mind as a place of safety until I learned that Linux Mint was retaining its desktop identity. As always, there's KDE too, but I have never warmed to that for some reason.

The latest version of OS X, Lion, also included some changes inspired by iOS, the operating system that powers both the iPhone and iPad. However, while the current edition of PC Pro highlights some disgruntlement in professional circles regarding Apple's direction, this does not seem to have aroused the kind of ire that has been abroad in the world of Linux. Is it because Linux users want to feel that they are in charge and that iMac and MacBook users are content to have decisions made for them so long as everything just works? Speaking for myself, the former description seems to fit me, though having choices means that I can reject decisions that I do not like so much.

At the time of writing, the release of a developer preview of the next version of Windows has been generating a lot of attention. It also appears that changes are headed for Windows users too. However, I get the sense that a more conservative interface option will be retained and that could be essential for avoiding the alienation of corporate users. After all, I cannot see the Metro interface gaining much favour in the working environment when so many of us have so much to do. Nevertheless, I plan to get my hands on the developer preview to have a look (the weekend proved too short for this). It will be very interesting to see how the next version of Windows develops, and I plan to keep an eye on it as it does so.

It now looks as if many will have their work cut out if they are to avoid where desktop computing interfaces are going. Established paradigms are being questioned, particularly as a result of touch interfaces on smartphones and tablets. Wii and Kinect have involved other ways of interacting with computers, too, so there's a lot of mileage in rethinking how we work with computers. So far, I have been able to deal with the changes in the world of Linux, but I am left wondering about the changes that Microsoft is making. After Vista, they need to be careful and they know that. Maybe, they'll be better at getting users through changes in computing interfaces than others, but it'll be very interesting to see what happens. Unlike open source community projects, they have the survival of a massive multinational at stake.

Why the delay?

The time to renew my subscription to .Net magazine came around, and I decided to go for the digital option this time. The main attraction is that new issues come along without their cluttering up my house afterwards. After all, I do get to wondering how much space would be taken up by photos and music if those respective fields hadn't gone down the digital route. Some may decry the non-printing of photos that reside on hard disks or equivalent electronic storage media, but they certainly take up less physical space like that. Of course, ensuring that they are backed up in case of a calamity then becomes an important concern.

As well as the cost of a weekly magazine that I didn't read as much as I should, it was concerns about space that drove me to go the electronic route with New Scientist a few years back. They were early days for digital magazine publishing and felt like it, too. Eventually, I weaned myself from NS and the move to digital helped. Maybe trying to view magazine articles on a 17" screen wasn't as good an experience as seeing them on the 24" one that I possess these days.

That bigger screen has come in very handy for Zinio's Adobe AIR application for viewing issues of .Net and any other magazine that I happen to get from them. There's quite a selection on there, and it's not limited to periodicals from Future Media, either. Other titles include The Economist, Amateur Photographer, Countryfile, What Car and the aforementioned New Scientist as well. That's just a sample of the eclectic selection that is on offer.

For some reason, Future seem to wait a few days for the paper versions of their magazines to arrive in shops before the digital ones become available. To me, this seems odd, given that you'd expect the magazines to exist on computer systems before they come off the presses. Not only that, but subscribers to the print editions get them before they reach the shops at all anyway. This is the sort of behaviour that makes you wonder if someone somewhere is attempting to preserve print media.

In contrast, Scientific American get this right by making PDF's of their magazines available earlier than print editions. Given that it takes time for an American magazine to reach the U.K. and Eire, this is an excellent idea. There was a time when I was a subscriber to this magazine and I found it infuriating to see the latest issues on newsagent shelves, and I am still waiting for mine to arrive in the post. It was enough to make me vow not to become a subscriber to anything that left me in this situation every month.

Some won't pass on any savings with their digital editions. Haymarket Publishing come to mind here for What Car, but they aren't alone. Cicerone, Cumbrian publishers of excellent guidebooks for those seeking to enjoy the outdoors, do much the same with their wares, so you really want to save on space and gain extra convenience when going digital with either of these. In this respect, the publishers of Amateur Photographer have got it right with a great deal for a year's digital subscription. New Scientist did the same in those early days when I dabbled in digital magazines.

Of course, there are some who dislike reading things on a screen, and digital publishing will need to lure those too if it is to succeed. Nevertheless, we now have tablet computers and eBook readers such as Amazon's Kindle are taking hold too. Reading things on these should feel more natural than on a vertical desktop monitor or even a laptop screen.

Nevertheless, there are some magazines that even I would like to enjoy in print as opposed to on a screen. These also are the ones that I like to retain for future consultation, too. Examples include Outdoor Photography and TGO, and it is the content that drives my thinking here. The photographic reproduction in the former probably is best reserved for print, while the latter is more interesting. TGO does do its own digital edition, but the recounting of enjoyment of the outdoors surpassed presentation until a few months ago. It is the quality of the writing that makes me want to have them on a shelf as opposed to being stored on a computer disk.

The above thought makes me wonder why I'd go for digital magazines instead of their print counterparts. Thinking about it now, I am so sure that there is a clear-cut answer. Saving money and not having clutter does a have a lot to do with it, but there is a sense that keeping copies .Net is less essential to me, though I do enjoy seeing what is happening in the world of web design and am open to any new ideas too. Maybe the digital magazine scene is still an experiment for me.

Setting VIEWTABLE to show column names in SAS

The following is the default behaviour in the DMS: Base SAS opens datasets from its Explorer using VIEWTABLE and with variable labels in the column headings and not variable names. Because I have been fortunate to use systems with SAS/FSP both installed and licensed, I have taken to using FSVIEW for browsing SAS datasets as a workaround and, though the interface may look old to some, it proves to be a very flexible tool that still has a few things to teach newer ones. With SAS Enterprise Guide, the dataset viewing functionality is different to both VIEWTABLE and FSVIEW, but I have been to make it work for me. While the SAS EG dataset viewing tool may appear like the former of these, it has a few tricks to teach its forbear.

Now that I find myself working again with the traditional SAS DMS interface and without SAS/FSP, I decided to see if there was a way to get VIEWTABLE to display variable names instead of variable labels by default. As it happened, the answer was found in an internet forum discussion. From the SAS command line, you can achieve the result by issuing a command like the following:

VT SASHELP.VCOLUMN COLHEADING=NAMES

Above VT is the VIEWTABLE shortcut, while it is the COLHEADING=NAMES option on the line that gets variable names shown in column headings. Taking it further, you can set this as the default setting for datasets opened using a mouse from Explorer panes using the following procedure:

• Click in or on the Explorer pane to highlight the Explorer window.
• Select Tools > Options > Explorer in the menus.
• Select the Members tab.
• Double-click on the TABLE icon.
• Double-click on the &Open action.
• Set the Action command to:  VIEWTABLE %8b.'%s'.DATA COLHEADING=NAMES.
• Click on the Set Default button.
• Save changes and close the Explorer Options window.

Because the DMS looks similar across versions 8.0 through to 9.2, the above instructions should be relevant to all of those. While I have yet to get the opportunity to use SAS 9.3, I would be surprised to find that the traditional SAS interface has changed there too, even though much else has changed about SAS. In fact, the latest version of SAS has brought quite a few interesting new features for programmers, so it appears that you can do more through a familiar interface, not entirely a bad thing. It looks as if this VIEWTABLE tweak could be useful for a while yet.

TypeError: unable to create a wrapper for GLib.Variant

A little while ago, I wrote a piece on here telling of how I got GNOME 3 installed and working on Linux Mint. However, I have discovered since that there was an Achilles heel in the approach that I had taken: using the ricotz/testing PPA so that I could gain additional extensions for use with GNOME Shell. If this was just a repository of GNOME Shell extensions, that would be well and good, but the maintainer(s) also has a more cutting edge of GNOME Shell in there too. Occasionally, updates from ricotz/testing have been the cause of introducing rough edges to my desktop environment that have resolved themselves within a few hours or days. However, updates came through in the last few days that broke GNOME Tweak Tool. When I tried running it from the command line, all I got was a load of output that included the message that heads this posting and no window popping up that I could use. Because that made me see sense, I stopped living dangerously by using that testing repository. Apparently, there is a staging variant too, but a forum posting elsewhere on the web has warded me off from that too.

Until I encountered the latter posting, I had not heard of the ppa-purge tool, and it came in handy for ridding my system of all packages from the ricotz repository and replacing with alternatives from more stable ones such as that from the gnome3-team. Since this wasn't installed on my computer, I added it in the usual fashion by issuing the following command:

sudo apt-get install ppa-purge

Once that was complete, I executed the following command with the ricotz/testing repository still active:

sudo ppa-purge testing ricotz

Once that was complete and everything was very nicely automated too, GNOME Tweak Tool was working again as intended and that's the way that I intend to keep things. Another function of ppa-purge is that it has excised any mention of the ricotz/testing repos from my system too, so nothing more can come from there.

While I was in the business of stabilising GNOME Shell on my system, I decided to add in UGR too. First, another repository needed to be added as follows:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntugnometeam/ppa-gen
sudo apt-get update

Because the next steps were to install UGR once that was in place, these commands were issued to do the job:

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
sudo apt-get install ugr-desktop-g3
sudo apt-get upgrade

While that had the less desirable effect of adding games that I didn't need and have since removed, it otherwise worked well, and I now have a new splash screen at starting up and shutting down times for my pains. Hopefully, it will mean that any updates to GNOME Shell that come my way should be a little more polished, too. All that's needed now is for someone to set up a dedicated PPA for GNOME Shell Extensions so I could regain dropdown menus in the top panel for things such as virtual desktops, places and other handy operations that perhaps should have been in GNOME Shell from the beginning. However, that's another discussion, so I'll content myself with what I now have and see if my wish ever gets granted.

A waiting game

Having been away every weekend in July, I was looking forward to a quiet one at home to start August. However, there was a problem with one of my websites hosted by Fasthosts that was set to occupy me for the weekend and a few weekday evenings afterwards.

Since the issue appeared to be slow site response, I followed advice given to me by second line support when this website displayed the same type of behaviour: upgrade from Apache 1.3 to 2.2 using the control panel. Unfortunately for me, that didn't work smoothly at all and there seemed to be serious file loss as a result. Raising a ticket with the support desk only got me the answer that I had to wait for completion, and I now have come to the conclusion that the migration process may have got stuck somewhere along the way. Maybe another ticket is in order.

Several factors contributed to the waiting period referenced in the post title. First, support response times for budget hosting packages are notably slow, which makes me question whether higher-profile websites receive better service. Second, restoring websites via FTP consumes significant time, as does rebuilding and repopulating databases. Third, DNS configuration changes also introduce delays.

In retrospect, these time demands might be reduced through various approaches. Phone support could prove faster than email tickets, unless during major incidents, like the security changeover that left numerous Fasthosts users waiting for hours one night. However, phone support isn't a universal solution, as we've known since those cautionary tales began circulating in the mid-1990's.

Regular backups would streamline restoration processes. While my existing backups were adequate, they weren't comprehensive, necessitating additional work later. As for DNS changes, more frequent PC restarts would help detect propagation sooner, a lesson I will remember despite having no immediate plans to relocate websites. Ultimately, accelerating DNS propagation makes a substantial difference in minimizing downtime.

While awaiting a response from Fasthosts, I began to ponder the idea of using an alternative provider. Perusal of the latest digital edition of .Net (I now subscribe to the non-paper edition to cut down on the clutter caused by having paper copies about the place) ensued before I decided to investigate the option of using Webfusion. Having decided to stick with shared hosting, I gave their Unlimited Linux option a go. For someone accustomed to monthly billing, it was unusual to see annual biannual and triannual payment schemes too. Because the first of these appears to be the default option, a little care and attention is needed if you want something else. Also, Webfusion offers a sliding scale pricing model: the longer your commitment period, the lower your monthly hosting cost becomes; it is a pricing structure designed to encourage longer-term subscriptions.

Once the account was set up, I added a database and set to the long process of uploading files from my local development site using FileZilla. Having got a MySQL backup from the Fasthosts site, I used the provided PhpMyAdmin interface to upload the data in a piecemeal manner without exceeding the 8 MB file size limitation. It isn't possible to connect remotely to the MySQL server using the likes of MySQL Administrator, while SSH is another connection option that isn't available. There were some questions for the support people along the way; the first of these got a timely answer, though later ones took longer before I got an answer. Still, getting advice on the address of the test website was a big help while I was sorting out the DNS changeover.

Regarding domain setup, it required considerable effort and searching through Webfusion's FAQ's before I succeeded. Initially, I attempted to use name servers mentioned in an article, but this approach failed to achieve my goal. The effects might have been noticed sooner had I rebooted my PC earlier, though this didn't occur to me at the time. Ultimately, I reverted to using my domain provider's name servers and configured them with the necessary information. This solution successfully brought my website back online, allowing me to address any remaining issues.

With the site essentially operating again, it was time to iron out the rough edges. The biggest of these was that MOD_REWRITE doesn't seem to work the same on the Webfusion server like it does on the Fasthosts ones. This meant that I needed to use the SCRIPT_URI CGI variable instead of PATH_INFO to keep using clean URL's for a PHP-powered photo gallery that I have. It took me a while to figure that out, and only to feel much better when I managed to get the results that I needed. However, I also took the chance to tidy up site addresses with redirections in my .htaccess file in an attempt to ensure that I lost no regular readers, something that I seem to have achieved with some success because one such visitor later commented on a new entry in the outdoors blog.

Once any remaining missing images were instated or references to them removed, it was then time to do a full backup for the sake of safety. The first of these activities was yet another time consumer, while the second didn't take so long, which is just as well given how important it is to have frequent backups. Hopefully, though, the relocated site's performance continues to be as solid as it is now.

The question as to what to do with the Fasthosts webspace remains outstanding. Currently, they are offering free upgrades to existing hosting packages for an annual commitment. After my recent experience, I cannot say that I'm so sure about going down that route. In fact, the observation leaves me wondering if instating that very extension was the cause of breaking my site. All in all, what happened to that Fasthosts website wasn't the greatest of experiences, while the service offered by Webfusion is rock solid thus far. Although I question whether Fasthosts' service quality has declined from its previous standards, I remain open to reassessing my opinion as I observe their performance over time.