Coming from a old regular phone and a old Blackberry I was quite surprised how robust and fast these things are. It was also a nice to see the Android platform finally after hearing so much about it – it’s sleek, fast and has an intuitive interface.

.. but I wanted more. Being a self proclaimed geek I wanted to know what can I do with this thing. Inevitably it will be eventually rooted and full blown customizations will make this phone a true delight to own. Until then what could I do with it? Well let’s see!

Chatting

Unfortunately I’ve been disappointed with the selection. It seems primarily people choose the official AIM  client or opt for Meebo IM. There is also a fairly promising Trillian application coming along however it’s still in beta and tends to crash fairly often.

There are two fundamental things that are missing from all of the applications I’ve tried:

1) No OTR implementation / support

2) No proxy configuration

Why are these options missing in every client? These seem like no-brainer features – especially for a device that’s typically out on foreign networks.  Hopefully one exists that encompasses these features – if so let me know!

Meebo IM

AIM Mobile

Trillian for Android

E-Mail

I haven’t looked too hard however one thing I noticed was the lack of IDLE support for the bundled in mail client. It also didn’t have common functionality such as being able to set the time or interval to fetch e-mails from a remote server. Luckily there seems to be a De facto replacement called K-9 Mail. For all intents and purposes it should replace the default mail client and be used exclusively. It has full IDLE support as well as being able to specify when to download mail. It’s simple, fast and does its job perfectly.

K-9 Mail

SSH

One of my primary desires was to have a phone that could offer me a somewhat pleasurable SSH experience if I needed it (ever try to fix a server on a small Blackberry?). One of our customers @bryanwp recommended ConnectBot. After using it for a mere five minutes it became abundantly clear why this was “the” SSH client to use. Aside from a simple and clear interface it provided something that is lacking (at least natively) in a lot of SSH applications: port forwarding. This allows you (amongst other things) to create a way to tunnel network traffic for an application over SSH. Unfortunately a lot of the applications don’t have any options for proxy settings.

Another cool use for port forwarding is it allows me to connect to my desktop computer via SSH. I’m behind a router however there is no need for any fancy routing – using remote forwarding from my desktop allows me to easily setup tunnels that my phone can access. Using this method I’m able to securely SSH into my desktop, use VNC securely, stream music / download files from home,  use my home network (white list approach on servers, etc) and pretty much anything I could do if I was on LAN.

ConnectBot

Google Voice

Finally a phone with good Google Voice implementation (duh). The Google Voice support is simple and perfect. It has a simple inbox for your text messages and a few settings. Aside from that it integrating seamlessly with your phone. Outgoing calls you can direct through Google Voice or your primary number. Text messages is the same allowing you to select which service to go through. One cool perk is Google Voice offers free CA based calling while Verizon doesn’t – this is ideal for a company such as ours where several employees are on the border and travel fairly often.

Google Voice

Android VNC

Yes you can even VNC to remote computer from your phone. Using android-vnc-viewer you can connect to any VNC server. It’s actually a far better experience than I imagined possible and already have had a couple of uses for quick / small tasks that I needed to do while not at home.

android-vnc-viewer

I use this in conjunction with ConnectBot and SSH port forwarding to allow me to use a secure connection to my desktop while on foreign networks – I recommend you do the same.

Launcher Pro

LauncherPro is a home screen replacement for your Droid – think of it as a windows manager. I haven’t tried too many others and the ones I have not nearly long enough to judge how good they are (performance, features, etc) however I’ve been using LP for a few days and feel I’ve come to appreciate some of its features:

• Multiple Docks. – This allows you to have a scrollable dock in addition to desktops. This has proven to be my primary means of launching applications as it doesn’t give me enough space to fill it with junk but just enough for repeated use applications.
• Dock Gestures – This allows you to assign an action to each of the icons in your doc that is activated by a swipe. These are extremely useful. If I swipe my Dialer icon it will open a Add Contact page. If I swipe my Messages icon it will start a new Google Voice text message and so forth.
• Widgets – They look amazing and have amazing reviews. However until I fully explore my home screen replacements I’m not buying the upgrade to the full version until I’m exhaust the alternatives. They however do seem to be worth noting.
• Launcher Pro Shortcuts – These are shortcuts on crack. They allow full custom control over your shortcuts that allow some distinct advantages over normal shortcuts. Succinctly put it allows you to tap into the Intent class of the Android platform to allow you to communicate with applications directly (sending data to them, etc).

Launcher Pro

RunKeeper

There are several applications similar to this however RunKeeper has given me a flawless experience from the beginning so I see no reason to try the others.

RunKeeper allows you to track your runs / jogs / biking via GPS. It shows you some useful statistics such as elevation climb, your pace during the route, mile markers and others. It will also log your route on a Google Map to allow you to easily see what path you took.

There is also an option to sync your activities to the RunKeeper.com website which allows you to break down your activity even further.

RunKeeper

Google Gesture Search

It quickly becomes evident that you may need additional means of searching for things on your phone. I find Google Gesture Search to be a quick way to accurately search your phone in the quickest manner. Simply put you start writing letters out using your finger and it lists matches accordingly.

It also has an option to be triggered by a “Double Flip” however I find this to be unnaturaland a pain to do. I instead place it in one of my docks.

Google Gesture Search

Barcode Scanner

This is a suprisingly useful application. It allows you to scan different types of barcodes and reads the data. It then gives you options to use that data in some way (open a browser, market, contact, etc).

It also seems to be a popular way to distribute application links (as seen through this post). You however can use it to store contact information as well:

Cody Robertson

Barcode Scanner

Astrid Tasks

Out of all of the to-do list applications this one is my favorite. It’s fast and simple but offers small features th at set it apart from the others. One neat feature is if you click on a task you can start a timer, tag support and integration with Remember The Milk for remote syncing / integration.

Astrid Tasks

PayPal

This is a simple application form PayPal to .. well do PayPal based things. It has a simple mobile friendly interface and allows you to perform basic operations such as sending money, withdrawing money, and a few other things.

You can also setup a “mobile PIN” to allow for fast logins via your phone – this is extremely useful for people who have very long passwords.

PayPal Mobile

Beautiful Widgets

This is a paid application however I find it wonderful as it adds a handful of high quality widgets for your phone. The show stopper being the weather widget which is very aesthetically pleasing however the others equally as useful allowing for toggling of ringer modes, WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS and a few others.

Beautiful Widgets

Twonky Server

This application is mind numbingly simple. You start it and it scans your phone for music, pictures and videos. It then can starts a server and shares them using DLNA. This allows you to easily share content from your phone to most media centric devices such as the XBOX or PS3.

Twonky Server

FTPserver

This is a very simple application that allows you to start a FTP server on your phone. This allows you to easily transfer files between your computer and phone using simply a FTP client. It supports basic authentication and simple permission based rules (allow connections from what network(s)).

FTPServer

That wraps up some of my favorite uses / applications for the Android platform. If you have any suggestions please don’t hesitate to make a comment!

New Servers

We’re constantly growing which means we’re always adding new servers and July and early August we added a bunch of machines compared to what we used to add a year ago.  We added Mirage on July 5th which is our first reseller only server and it’s based in Dallas.  We then added yet another reseller server this time Tornado which is in Seattle.  Then finally we added Lightning to increase our shared only fleet in Dallas.  We’ve been working towards having shared and reseller separated rather than being creative like we had in the past.  Due to our increasing size it is now possible to do this as we fill our high end servers much faster than we used to.  Along with these new servers to put customers on we’ve added a second development / test server.  This will allow us to continue to test new features and not slow down development of other features.  We now have a total of two servers for this function with one being for our VPS panel and another being for cPanel testing.  Of course we can change their purposes very fast thanks to Softlayer so it’s quick for us to reload a system to test something else.

New cPanel Theme

We’ve been talking about doing this for quite a while but it’s always been something that is along the lines of we’ll do it eventually.  Well that’s finally over we finally got around to working on it.  Right now it’s more cosmetic changes which you can see right here:

We have other big plans for it though as this was just the start.  Right now it’s a nice fancy new logo up top.  Along with that a bunch of useful links to parts of our web site.  This is by no means the final version of the design it’s just a start.  Along with that more features will be coming to our theme.  Here’s just some sample idea’s we’ve been throwing around: quick mod_security enable / disable, easy way to change php values (register_globals, upload limits etc.), easily switch to using google apps for email.  So look out for new features showing up in your cPanel over the next few months.

As for what machines this theme is on well right now it’s on Mustang, Spitfire, Voodoo and Lightning and any other *.hawkhost.com servers we add.  The theme portion will never show up on any of our legacy servers unfortunately.  There are complications that are only resolved on our shared hosting only servers.  What will show up however is any plugins we add to our cPanel.  So if we add the ability to turn on/off mod_security it will show up on all our servers.

CPU Usage Abuse Solution

As we’ve grown one thing that has grown with us is the CPU abuse we deal with.  Unfortunately as we become more popular more people who think our web hosting can be used as their own personal dedicated server show up.  As it stands we currently act on them as we see them attempting to warn users when possible to get them to reduce usage.  In really bad cases we just disable their account on the spot and email them.  Now the problem with this system is a large majority either do not respond or when they do they don’t ever resolve the problem and they get their account disabled repeatedly.  Also of course depending on their usage they may be causing slow downs of our servers.  Like any web host in our price range we do not have the time to be optimizing user web sites.  In fact I doubt any shared web host would be willing to go through and attempt to optimize user made scripts or figure out which of the 50 plugins installed in wordpress is causing the problem.

On Frog Host we previously had our own system to report CPU usage to the users.  This was great or so we thought we had measured CPU and MySQL usage in units and reported it to the others.  Unfortunately though no users are actually using this data to possibly reduce their usage.  So we finally realized we either were going to need to make our own system more pro active or find software that would.  If we went our own route it would have been a system where a users site shows suspended for a period of time after using X amount of CPU for x amount of minutes.  This just did not seem ideal as we’ve read about providers doing this and all the complaints they received as a result.   So obviously we went looking for a much better solution and we found one.

Cloud Linux ended up being a solution people had started talking about.  We threw it up on our test server checked it out and it was really impressive.  It is now running on Frog Host and it’s been extremely impressive.  It has helped us stop users from abusing CPU while not giving them ugly suspended messages.  The idea is if you’re using a lot of CPU rather than slowing down the entire server you slow down just your site.  This is an excellent solution to CPU abuse we think and greatly reduces the amount of time we currently have to spend working with users on them using to much CPU.  It’s probably a bit away from showing up on Hawk Host servers but it is in the running as our solution for both Hawk Host and Frog Host considering how great it’s doing on Frog Host thus far.

If it does end up being our choice we will of course add useful features for users to help see what their usage is in real time.  So if your web site is slow you’ll be able to login to your cPanel and see how much CPU and memory you’re using.  You’ll also be able to hopefully bring up the process list and see which processes you have that are using all your resources.

New VPS Panel

It’s not vapor ware it’s still being worked on unfortunately never gets the priority it deserves.  We’re not a big VPS company we don’t have thousands of nodes so it’s a little tougher to justify spending a lot of time on it.  That being said I think we’re getting close with a lot of what needed to be done is done.  We’re working on adding some useful features and making it more user friendly.  So maybe later some posts will finally show up with some screen shots who knows.

Misc Things

Well our forum has a new logo that’s always good to have.  I personally got a new car and it’s not Hawk Host themed but instead red.  We added some banners for Hawk Host which can be found in our forums.  We’ve switched the way we do stats processing on servers we now use piped logging.  This should help with having less frequent restarts of the web server even though they’re graceful you’d rather not have them at all!  We’re looking forward to the new version of the support software we use Kayako SupportSuite which is now called Kayako Fusion.  If it does what it promises it should improve how we handle support slightly.  Softlayer our provider was sold to the GI partners but it should not affect us in anyway but it is worth noting.  Then finally we’ve grown exponentially as always which I’ll talk about in September as our corporate year end is August 31st.

Since this part is less of a tutorial and more of a tips / reference I decided a table of contents based layout would be a bit easier to use:

Note: If you have any tips, tricks or pre-made configurations you want to contribute to this post please do so in the comments and I’ll append them to this post.

Note**: You can type the commands into a live tmux session or place them in ~/.tmux.conf file which is automatically loaded when tmux is started.

Modify tmux bindings

• Rebinding the action key (Ctrl-b)
• Bind a key to switch between last active window
• Rebinding pane splitting bindings

Modify tmux looks & style

• Modifying tab color & looks
• Adding information to your session

Misc tips & tricks

• Setting up your tmux environment via shell scripting
• Notify you when a window has activity
• Have tmux rename window automatically on command run

Modify tmux bindings

By default tmux has a decent default layout for hotkeys however there are a few keys that either made my fingers contort into ways they shouldn’t have or keys I simply always forgot. Luckily tmux offers a very simple syntax to rebind any key.

Rebinding the Action Key

Here is how you can rebind the Ctrl-b prefix to be something a bit easier to type. I personally use Ctrl-a similar to screen:

set-option -g prefix C-a

Note: The “-g” switch stands for global so the binding will affect every window. Alternatively the set-option command accepts arguments to specify the session and target of that particular binding if you like.

Now every subsequent command will be prefixed with Ctrl-a instead of Ctrl-b.

Binding a key for “last-window”

One of my favorite screen hotkeys is the last window hotkey which allows you to quickly switch between the current window and last window that was active. By default tmux doesn’t have a binding for this however it can easily be achieved by using the following:

bind-key C-a last-window

What this does is binds Ctrl-a to switch between the last active window. To use this binding you would hit Ctrl-a twice (since the prefix is set to Ctrl-a and the binding Ctrl-a).

Rebinding the pane splitting bindings

One of the most powerful features of tmux is the ability to natively split your windows into several panes. Unfortunately the default bindings to achieve this are simply unintuitive. As a result I’ve rebound the splitting commands to something I could remember:

unbind % # Remove default binding since we’re replacing
bind | split-window -h
bind – split-window -v

At first this may look odd but for me it’s easier to remember that “|” splits the screen vertically while “-” splits the screen horizontally.  To achieve the below window structure you would type the following sequence:

Ctrl-a |
Ctrl-a -
Ctrl-a -

The first Ctrl-a |command splits the current window in half. The active window is the pane on the right so the subsequent Ctrl-a - splits that window into two vertically. Hitting Ctrl-a - once more now splits that active window into two more by splitting it vertically.

Note: Depending on the active layout you’re using the behavior of how the windows split may be different.

Modify tmux look & style

The default colors and style of tmux isn’t awful however it’s somewhat bland for my liking. I personally only have modified tmux slightly however it allows you to do quite a bit. In this section I’ll go over some of tmux’s style features.

Modifying tab color & looks

By default the tab colors are pretty bland and it makes it difficult to distinguish the active window from the other windows. Here is the default tmux tabs vs. the modified ones (snippet below):

As you can see the latter version is much more clear and uses some variable expansions tmux provides (hostname, etc). You can achieve this output with the following:

# Set status bar
set -g status-bg black
set -g status-fg white
set -g status-left ‘#[fg=green]#H’

The first two commands set the background to black and the text to white. The third command is where the magic happens: the status-left command tells tmux to display the following text to the left of the terminal. The [fg=green]#H portion tells tmux to display the hostname of localhost and make it green. The #H portion is part of tmux variable expansion – please refer to the man pages for more information on other ones you can use.

That alone doesn’t account for highlighting the active window. If you want to do that use the following snippet:

# Highlight active window
set-window-option -g window-status-current-bg red

The set-window-option -g window-status-current-bg red command tells tmux to change the background of the current active window to red. The set-window-option command has several other options you can pass to it to achieve similar affects.

Adding information to your session

Sometimes it might be useful to add some information from your local machine to the tmux screen. Earlier we played with the status-left command which sets the left portion of the status bar. Let’s use the status-right command to add some information to the right side:

As you can see I’ve added the amount of users logged in and the current load average for my computer. This was achieved with the following snippet:

set -g status-right ‘#[fg=yellow]#(uptime | cut -d “,” -f 2-)’

Similar to before the #[fg=yellow] portion tells tmux to make the font yellow. The #(uptime | cut -d “,” -f 2-) portion tells tmux to run that cmd and output it on the right of the status bar.

Note: If you’re not familiar with shell scripting this command is very simple. It runs the uptime command and then passes it to the cut command which splits it at the commas (,). The -f 2- portion says to print out everything from the second comma onward.

Note**: By default the status bar is redrawn every 15 seconds however you can modify this by setting the status-interval command.

Misc tips & tricks

Using shell scripting to setup your tmux enviroment

Tmux allows you to easily run commands for your different sessions through the command line without having to ever login to the session. This also allows us to make a simple bootstrap script which will setup your tmux environment and log you into it. Here is an example script I personally use:

#!/bin/sh
tmux new-session -d -s hawkhost

tmux new-window -t hawkhost:1 -n 'Server1' 'ssh root@10.x.x.x'
tmux new-window -t hawkhost:2 -n 'Server2' 'ssh root@10.x.x.x'
tmux new-window -t hawkhost:3 -n 'Server3' 'ssh root@10.x.x.x'
tmux new-window -t hawkhost:4 -n 'Server4' 'ssh root@10.x.x.x'
tmux new-window -t hawkhost:5 -n 'Server5' 'ssh root@10.x.x.x'

tmux select-window -t hawkhost:1
tmux -2 attach-session -t hawkhost

The command new-session -d -s hawkhost creates a new tmux session, detaches it (so it doesn’t open in your current terminal) and names it hawkhost in this case.

The following set of new-window commands create five new windows and executes the command at the end. The arguments are broken down as follows: -t hawkhost :1 tells tmux to “target” the session hawkhost and the window with the id of 1. The -n ‘Server1′ ‘ssh root@10.x.x.x’ portion tells tmux to name the window Server1 and execute the ssh root@10.x.x.x command in it.

The last two commands are pretty straight forward. The select-window -t hawkhost:1 command tells tmux that you want the active window the session to be hawkhost and window 1. The -2 attach-session -t hawkhost tells tmux you want to attach the terminal with 256 colors and attach to the session hawkhost.

Note: This is the command that brings the tmux session to the foreground. If you recall earlier when the script created the session we specified the -d switch which prevents it from loading in your terminal.

Notify you when a window has activity

This quick snippet will have tmux notify you in the status area when a window has activity:

# Set window notifications
setw -g monitor-activity on
set -g visual-activity on

As you can see in the first image it lets me know that there was activity in window 0 (in this case sleep 10 && echo “narwhal” and switching the window).

Automatic window rename

You can have tmux rename the window to the command that is currently running. This is useful when you load up something such as irssi and the window is labeled accordingly:

# Automatically set window title
setw -g automatic-rename

Why TMUX over Screen?

Well according to the FAQ for tmux it has the following advantages over screen:

• A clearly defined cilent/server model (windows are their own clients which allows flexibility on how you handle windows. You can attach and detach different windows in different sessions without any issues)
• Consistent, well-documented command interface. (You can use the same commands interactively as in the .tmux.conf file, more on that later)
• Easily scriptable
• Multiple paste buffers
• Vi & Emacs keybindings
• A more usable status line syntax (which also allows you to embed the output of a shell command, handy indeed.

Default keybindings & Functionality

The default keybindings for tmux are actually pretty intuitive, though if you’re used to screen you’ll likely get a little peeved with the default action binding of C-b, though this is easily changed to mimic screens behavior:

*NOTE* If you’re like me the Ctrl-b binding isn’t horribly intuitive especially if you’re used to screen. You can rebind this by putting the following in ~/.tmux.conf:

set -g prefix Ctrl-a

• Ctrl-b c Create new window
• Ctrl-b d Detach current client
• Ctrl-b l Move to previously selected window
• Ctrl-b n Move to the next window
• Ctrl-b p Move to the previous window
• Ctrl-b & Kill the current window
• Ctrl-b , Rename the current window
• Ctrl-b % Split the current window into two panes
• Ctrl-b q Show pane numbers (used to switch between panes)
• Ctrl-b o Switch to the next pane
• Ctrl-b ? List all keybindings

Now these are pretty self explanatory – the real magic (for me) of tmux is the ease of modifying the default behavior to do what you want, but first things first: let’s explore the default behavior of tmux.

Basic Window Handling

Start up tmux with the tmux command and you should be greeted with a simplistic terminal window that resembles screen – the only difference is it has a default status bar which is nice (easily added to screen as well).

Now let’s create a couple of windows and go through them (we’ll be using the default bindings). Hit Ctrl-b c a few times to create a few windows, you should notice that there are more tabs in the status bar.

Now if you’re like me you like to have descriptive names of which each window is for, so let’s rename them by hitting Ctrl-b ,. It should prompt you to rename the current window – type anything you want and hit enter. Now the current window is renamed to what you specified. Now going forward I’m going to have two windows open respectively named “window1″ and “window2″.

Once you rename your windows lets switch back and forth. We have several different ways of switching windows, so I’ll go over the ones I personally use:

• Ctrl-b n (Move to the next window)
• Ctrl-b p (Move to the previous window)
• Ctrl-b l (Move to the previously selected window)
• Ctrl-b w (List all windows / window numbers)
• Ctrl-b <window number> (Move to the specified window number, the default bindings are from 0 – 9)

Now these ones fairly self explanatory however they don’t really cater to a lot of different windows. What if you have 10+ windows open? It becomes quite tedious to find the window you want – but don’t fret! Tmux has a find-window option & keybinding. Type Ctrl-b f and type in the window name you want (it actually searches for the window so you can type in only part of the name of the window you’re looking for).

You can also get a list of the windows in the current session by executing the list-windows command. To execute commands interactively you type Ctrl-b : which will bring up a text prompt. From there you can execute any command tmux supports interactively (tab completion is supported).

Basic Pane Handling

One of the most powerful features tmux offers is the ability to split up your current window into “panes”. Anyone whose familiar with tiling windows managers will feel quite at home. It’s a bit difficult to explain this in words so a simple screenshot will suffice:

Now here are some basic key bindings and commands to split the terminal window (vertically and horizontally) and to switch between them

• Ctrl-b % (Split the window vertically)
• Ctrl-b : “split-window” (Split window horizontally)
• Ctrl-b o (Goto next pane)
• Ctrl-b q (Show pane numbers, when the numbers show up type the key to goto that pane)
• Ctrl-b { (Move the current pane left)
• Ctrl-b } (Move the current pane right)

Now some obviously the default bindings don’t encompass some of features, such as splitting horizontally. I personally rebind the keys so “|” splits the current window vertically, and “-” splits it horizontally. Not the easiest things to type, though easy to remember.

You can achieve this by putting the following in ~/.tmux.conf or by typing it in the interactive prompt (Ctrl-b :). Keep in mind if you do the latter it will only be in effect for that session:

unbind %
bind | split-window -h
bind – split-window -v

Advanced Window Handling

Now that we went over the basics lets dive a little deeper into some “advanced” features of tmux. This includes moving windows around, linking windows together, switching windows from different sessions and much more. By default tmux doesn’t have key bindings for these features, so we’ll be entering them in the interactive dialog (accessed by typing Ctrl-b :) – keep in mind tmux is very scriptable and you can easily create your own key bindings for all of these.

Moving Windows

Now if you want to move a window you can use the move-window command. The command to do this:

move-window [ −d] [ −s src-window] [ −t dst-window]

swap-window [ -d] [ -s src-window] [ -t dst-window]

Similar to the above command except both windows have to exist – if they both do the window with the ID source and destination windows will be swapped.

Advanced Pane Handling

When you split up a window into multiple smaller windows they’re referred to as panes. Tmux also offers “layouts” for the panes, or the default positioning and behavior when you create a new window. You can switch through the panes by using the key binding Ctrl-b <space> which will toggle through the different layouts. Each one has different behaviors such as main-vertical which means the current active pane will take up more space in the current window, or even-vertical which will split the panes equally. Since this is difficult to describe in text I believe a few screen shots are in order:

Now that you’ve seen the different layouts let’s see what we can do with these panes. As mentioned above in the “Pane Handling” section you can switch through panes by issuing the Ctrl-b o key combination (which is using the down-pane command) or by typing Ctrl-b q which will list the pane ID’s and you select the one you want.

Make your pane into its own window

If you want to take a pane and make it into its own window you do the following:

Ctrl-b : “break-pane”

Simple enough, you should now have the pane in its brand new window. If you don’t want it to automatically make the pane you just broke out as the active window issue the “-d” switch which will simply break the pane to a new window but keep you in the current window.

Resizing Panes

You can also resize panes if you don’t like the layout defaults. I personally rarely need to do this, though it’s handy to know how. Here is the basic syntax to resize panes:

Ctrl-b : resize-pane (By default it resizes the current pane down)
Ctrl-b : resize-pane -U (Resizes the current pane upward)
Ctrl-b : resize-pane -L (Resizes the current pane left)
Ctrl-b : resize-pane -R (Resizes the current pane right)
Ctrl-b : resize-pane 20 (Resizes the current pane down by 20 cells)
Ctrl-b : resize-pane -U 20 (Resizes the current pane upward by 20 cells)
Ctrl-b : resize-pane -L 20 (Resizes the current pane left by 20 cells)
Ctrl-b : resize-pane -R 20 (Resizes the current pane right by 20 cells)
Ctrl-b : resize-pane -t 2 20 (Resizes the pane with the id of 2 down by 20 cells)
Ctrl-b : resize-pane -t -L 20 (Resizes the pane with the id of 2 left by 20 cells)
… etc

Hopefully you get the jist – don’t get confused! Simply load up a tmux session and split the window a couple of times and issue the above commands. It should become fairly evident how it behaves after fiddling with it for a bit.

Utilizing the client / server model

I’ve avoided mentioning that a lot of these commands can actually be applied to numerous tmux sessions which allows quite a bit of flexibility – the reason for avoiding it is it’s too much information all at once! An example of using this functionality is if you have two sessions open you can “link” or “move” windows across different sessions – unfortunately the actual “how-to” will be in Part 2.

Conclusion

Tmux may be a bit confusing however it’s worth putting in a few minutes to check it out and see what it has to offer – quick easy and intuitive.

Upcoming in Part 2

I’ll be going over several tips and tricks for tmux including:

• Custom hotkeys
• Custom window styles & colors
• Scripting with tmux (bash, sh)
• How to use the server / client model further

You have the ability to change the background color very easily which we might do in the future when someone with a sense of design feels like working on that.  So along with the header image you can make a wordpress blog that matches your site relatively easy now.  So for people like us no need at least at this point to even look at using another theme.

For example that header image we’re using right now I just looked at some of our PNG drawing previews for our logo and mascot and uploaded it.  Then on the next page it sent me to an easy to use interface to crop the image.  So anyone could make a decent looking header image for their site with relative ease now.  I’m sure for most it was easy before but for those of us even to lazy to open paint to crop an image it’s great!

Along with all the design aspects I guess there is a new menu creation system as well.  It looks like your typical drag and drop page like you have on widget pages and things like that.  So very easy to build a nice usable menu to fit your site.

Overall I think it’s a great theme for those of us to lazy to find a theme we like to design one around our web site.  So it fits great for us and I’m sure a lot of other users!

I last talked about our servers at the start of March so I figured I’d update on what has happened.  The first one being we do not use SATA disks for our web or VPS servers anymore as our Marlin server was upgraded some time ago.  We’re 100% 300GB SAS 15K RPM drives which means improved reliability across the board.  We have seen a big drop in the number of drive failures and when a drive does fail we’re no longer see raid array problems which we would see in 25% of cases previously.  We added our first shared web hosting only server in February and since then we’ve added 2 additional servers to that fleet to cover all locations.  We’ve also added our first of hopefully many 5600 series CPU’s to our server fleet.  For web servers though CPU is generally not the issue so we may not use them depending on availability.  We just like having the newest hardware so if it’s there we’re going to use it.  I’d say the best news on the server front is the introduction of an upgraded Bosco server (Our backup server).  This machine is a beast being a Dual Xeon 5520, 12GB ram and 24x1TB drives in a Raid-10 with a Adaptec 52445 raid card.  Raid-10 may seem silly seeing as how we lose half the disks in the process but for us we need high performance writes which raid-5 would not be able to provide for us.  Also even if we had used raid-5 and had more space we’d run out of I/O on the disks before we’d ever come close to filling the disks.  So we have about 11TB of space at our disposal for our backup machine and it should handle 35-40 servers for us hopefully so it’s quite a lot.

So on the internal aspects side of things we’ve been working on fixing bugs in our systems.  For example with the introduction of our Xeon servers with hyper threading we had to adjust our monitoring systems for CPU usage and load due to having twice as many CPU’s showing up on the systems.  Unfortunately a mistake was made resulting in older machines without HT (Xeon 5400 servers) not having the warnings on their systems set properly.  They were set to be as high as servers with twice as many CPU’s which in one instance resulted in higher than acceptable usage on a machine.  We promptly fixed it once we were aware but it’s things like this we’re attempting to fix.  We’re also working on expanding the features available to technicians to quickly find systems and identify issues.  While currently only available to our higher level technicians some of this information is valuable to everyone.  So we’re working to have the systems in place to have it available to all technicians in hopes it’ll result in quicker resolutions and less ticket escalations.

We’ve been silently working on our own VPS panel to replace our current one.  It’s work in progress though and we hope to have something substantial near the end of this month.  It totally depends on how testing goes and if we feel it’s ready for actual user use and not strictly as an internal system of ours.

Finally we’ve ended some major coupons as the reason for those promotions have ended.  While they helped us grow at a great rate at the same time we cannot run a coupon forever or it loses it’s meaning.  Our whts50 coupon which was for our sticky topic on webhostingtalk has ended due to the fact the sticky topic is gone.  Near the end it was posted all over the internet and our most popular coupon which was meant at the time to target a specific user base.  We won’t have another 50% coupon like this most likely until we have another sticky topic like it which means probably not until September as that’s when our next sticky topic will start.  Of course it will be a new coupon to in order to avoid the same coupon being used all over again from everywhere.  Along with the shared coupon being gone our long time reseller coupon has expired which was r25percent.  We’re attempting to control the market a bit on our reseller plans right now so discounts for those just do not make sense.  When we’re ready to start pushing reseller accounts I’m sure a new coupon will show up similar to it.

So that’s about it what’s going on so tons of growth as always and lots of things going in the background to improve our services.  We hope things continue to be that way so we can continue to improve our services as we grow as a company.  Also as we grow maybe we’ll get more blog posts in but we’ll see it’s difficult to come up with topics of interest all the time.  As much as we enjoy writing about nothing it tends to not interest many people.

So they released 2.8 recently which added a nice new backup utility as well as adding a search feature.  Although that’s not all though:

1. A Backup utility has been added into Softaculous. Users can now create and download backups from the Softaculous Panel.
2. A cool new Search feature has been added in Softaculous. This search feature is available throughout Softaculous. Users can type in the script name and they will be redirected to the script itself. A suggestion will also be made as you type in the search box!
3. Users will be shown a message on the Softaculous Index if there is any outdated installations.
4. Ability to choose ‘http://’, ‘https://’, ‘http://www’, ‘https://www’ while installing scripts has been added.
5. The CRON jobs will email users if there is any newer version of scripts available.
6. A new feature which will enable the Admin to email users having Outdated Installations has been added.
7. The Fantastico importer at the Admin Level has been improved.
8. The Softaculous CORE has been improved for better perfomance.

So quite a few updates to the core of the system in 2.8 which was released on the 20th.  Though this is not what I wanted to make the post it’s because of the most recent script updates we saw come through the pipeline.  Here’s the list:

Here are all the scripts most recently updated:

Zikula 1.2.2 – Successful
Coppermine 1.4.26 – Successful
TinyWebGallery 1.8 – Successful
b2evolution 3.3.3 – Successful
LifeType 1.2.10 – Successful
Dotclear 2.1.6 – Successful
Textpattern 4.2.0 – Successful
Geeklog 1.6.1 – Successful
Drupal 6.16 – Successful
Mambo 4.6.5 – Successful
PHP-Nuke 8.0 – Successful
Nucleus 3.51 – Successful
XMB 1.9.11 – Successful
Gallery 2.3.1 – Successful
LinPHA 1.3.4 – Successful
MyBB 1.4.13 – Successful
Phorum 5.2.15a – Successful
PunBB 1.3.4 – Successful
Piwigo 2.0.9 – Successful
Pixelpost 1.7.3 – Successful
ZenPhoto 1.2.9 – Successful
PhpWiki 1.2.11 – Successful
PmWiki 2.2.15 – Successful
Serendipity 1.5.2 – Successful
Open Blog 1.2.1 – Successful
Website Baker 2.8.1 – Successful
sNews 1.7 – Successful
UseBB 1.0.10 – Successful
Pligg 1.0.4 – Successful
MODx 1.0.3 – Successful
eggBlog 4.1.2 – Successful
phpAlbum 0.4.1.14.6 – Successful
Shutter 0.1.4 – Successful
Pixie 1.04 – Successful
Xoops 2.4.4 – Successful
FluxBB 1.2.22 – Successful
4images 1.7.7 – Successful
Typo3 4.3.2 – Successful

Now that’s a big list of updates I imagine a few were a little bit out of date but this is still very impressive.  This is pretty close to the total number of scripts Fantastico has in total.  It just shows you if you’re not using Softaculous with us you should be!  Great news is it can take your Fantastico install and manage it so no major time consuming work to get it switched on your part.  Hopefully Softaculous continues to  release quick updates which I’m sure they will as their system just seems better designed than what Fantastico is as far as having updates released.

We have strong reason to believe this started around 2010-02-19 or around then when we updated our cPanel servers to release build 43472.  This build addressed the following problem:

Updated bandwidth algorithms to address an issue calculating the bandwidth total for accounts with high traffic sub domains.

This was a pretty big deal as some users were experiencing this.  We figured an easy quick fix by cPanel no problem we’ll have everyone with proper bandwidth usage again.  It did resolve over calculation of bandwidth for high traffic sub domains it just messed up bandwidth tracking in general for a lot of accounts.

We discovered this problem in early March and to our surprise found a post on the cPanel forums with lots of other users complaining about it: http://forums.cpanel.net/f5/bandwidth-not-calculating-149637.html There was a similar topic when bandwidth was over calculating and a cPanel representative was quick to respond saying they’re working on a fix.  This topic though started March 1st and now into the second page has not received any response from cPanel themselves confirming there is an issue.  Typically with cases like that they would respond back saying yes we’re working on it.

Based on the lack of response from cPanel to the topic itself I gave them the benefit of the doubt and decided to make a support ticket which I tend to avoid doing.  The ticket was opened on March 22nd and eventually on March 23rd they said our issue was load average.  Of course this being an insane excuse for a small percentage of accounts to have broken bandwidth usage.  I said fine we’ll let stats run with a higher load average and see what happens.  I gave it 24 hours and no surprise as I told them at the time it would not solve the problem and we still have sites without bandwidth usage unless we force ran it via /scripts/runweblogs which processes web stats as well as updates a users bandwidth usage.  Typically cPanel does this for you a few times a day for the bandwidth usage which it was not doing.

We had now been passed off to a level3 technician at cPanel suggesting yet another miracle fix late March 23rd.  The fix was the following:

/scripts/autorepair repair_bwsummary
/usr/local/cpanel/bin/repair_bwsummary
/usr/local/cpanel/bin/repair_bwsummary brokenusername

I had some hope for this fix as it was using an autorepair script from cPanel.  We ran the same command across a few servers and their affected users.  We gave it 24 hours to see if bandwidth usage was tracked over that 24 hour period.  Unfortunately it was not the case and once again back to cPanel asking for help.  This time we were told development has been informed and they’d get back to us most likely Monday since it was Friday night already. To our surprise development was a little quicker and the level3 technician helping us said the developer working on the issue had a manual patch fix that may work.  They offered to apply it to the servers at which point we declined.  The reason being we have a lot of servers and having cPanel attempting to repair all these users seemed to not be a wise solution.  This especially true when there was no guarantee and there was an official fix being worked on that would be passed through quality assurance then released.  This news came on March 24th and it’s now and it’s been over a week without this officially being pushed out to all cPanel builds as far as I can tell.

I was surprised at the time people were not complaining more so but then recently topics have started to show up on webhostingtalk as well.  This topic http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=936718 outlines web hosts seeing this and a some opening tickets.  Assuming they’re telling the truth about the tickets cPanel is being slow to admit there is even an issue.

So unfortunately for us we’re going to continue to deal with this problem.  A fix being anywhere in sight?  I doubt it at this point based on how long this has been and the fact you cannot get a response on their forums about it and their support people are taking a long time to admit there is even a problem.  If I was big on conspiracies I’d say it’s some big provider paying cPanel to do this as this provider is probably unlimited bandwidth.  So broken stats for them is not bad but for other hosts it’s a costly matter when they bill for bandwidth.  Although that’s highly unlikely and the more likely cause is just part of the steady decline of the cPanel product.  This is not just my opinion either as far as decline people have been disappointed in the quality of releases as of late with bugs and other problems.  Bug fixes to issues have been slow and simple usability enhancements to make certain sections of the panel as friendly as others have been ignored for years.  Even usability features added in one release have been then removed in newer versions with forum posts and tickets be ignored.  I suppose we should have all seen this coming with the removal of their bug tracker and being forced to file bug reports via ticket and features now having to be requested via forum.  Granted they were not maintaining the bug tracker but maybe they should have done that so they could construct roadmaps of bug fixes and features they were adding as that is typically what’s done.

That story made me think of my blog post today about the developers seemingly always being out of reach of the people who need them the most.  In this case it was the employees of this company having no way to even contact the people in charge of the systems.  It also happens to us when we’re dealing with products we run on our servers or just on our own systems.  It’s pretty frustrating situation to deal with when you report bugs to the support team.

We’ve had long outstanding bugs with several pieces of software we run both of which causing us headaches every once in a while.  In every case we’ve dealt strictly with support people who tell us it’s not yet fixed.  When you hear this for a year it starts to get to a point where you just want to say let me talk to them.  It makes me wonder if the support person is explaining the issue or even reporting it to developers at all.  In every case these vendors have no bug reporting systems at all or shut them down in favor of none.  So it’s make a ticket to support and hope they file a proper bug report.

I did a time as a co-op where I did software development so I can understand the problem of developers talking to users all the time.  There are times though when you need to talk to the end user to figure out how to replicate a bug.  I know some developers would never do that but rather would sit in their little coding cave and never interact with the end users at all to implement fixes that matter or add even very simple features.  Along with that developers getting involved in aspects so they know the product better also goes a long way.  Rather than just developing the product go out there and try to perform the task the end users are doing.  So if it’s in house application go and watch them on their computer or work with them to try to accomplish their tasks for a few hours or a day or whatever.  If it’s an end user piece of software try to create a better test environment or get more active feedback rather than just saying no bugs it works.  When you intend to use a piece of software for what it’s meant for you tend to find a lot of things you wouldn’t if you’re going off a check box system of what needs done.  So for example you have a screen and it works so you’re happy as a developer but as the end user the way it was designed is adding extra work load and one tiny change to the screen say some sort of auto complete instantly increases productivity by 10 fold.

That’s my rant for today just if you’re developing software make so users if necessary can talk to developers to get bugs squashed.  If you’re a developer don’t instantly dismiss end users as being idiots as they may be onto something and maybe it’s worth listening and trying to implement those changes.  The changes may seem small to you but they may be huge for the end users.

Well they say hindsight is 20/20 and we would tend to agree. Suddenly we got a huge surge of traffic from suspended accounts which was to be expected but due to a single oversight we had to skurry before the server decided to go kaput: PHP! We use PHP (Zend Framework, etc) for our website and portal so naturally we carried over some code from our website to our suspension page without thinking about the amount of traffic that would be hitting it. The result was a large amount of PHP processes bogging down the CPU causing our suspension page to almost become suspended itself. Obviously to fix it we simply put up a static page and called it a day.

Oops!

Moral of the story: Even the most trivial of things can cause issues to a server; this is even more true when you’re running robust scripts such as WordPress in a shared environment. Think about caching and scaling in general – not only will you learn you’ll prevent silly mistakes. One common issue we see constantly in our environment is people setup their 404′s to a non-static / heavily dynamic page and as a result if they get any sort of flux of traffic / spiders to the 404 pages their MySQL and CPU usage goes insane.